Dance Mapping - Arts Council England

failure, good models of feedback that inspire you to go further and try again, identifying
weakness and building on failure. She felt that excellence was not unplanned and that it was
important to risk failure and then move on.
The DCMS and Arts Council England have taken the McMaster report seriously and are
looking at how the UK can foster an infrastructure of world-class arts. There are many views
as to how organisations might get there, but less clarity about how you know when you have
arrived. However, it may include peer review, touring demand, particularly by international
promoters and audience response.
This discussion of ‘world class’ should be debated by the dance profession to avoid
imposition by funders of particular notions of aesthetic and quality. How does the profession
build world class dance for the future and what models should we adopt to ensure they are
sustainable for the future?
The Arts Council England published its measures for quality applied to all arts some time ago.
It says:
‘Our approach is to consider three dimensions of artistic work’: 101
• idea – the concept or artistic impetus behind the work
• practice – the effectiveness of how the work is put into practice and the impact it has on
those experiencing it
• development – the contribution the work makes to the development of the artist, the
artform and the arts more widely
‘This approach gives us a framework for describing artistic quality and we use it, described in
different ways, when assessing regularly funded organisations and all applications for Grants
for the Arts’. Arts Council England (2006)
4. Making funding and support work more effectively
During this research it has been difficult to engage opinion about the bigger issues for dance
with groups of practitioners. This has in part been due to timescale and resources. From
individual discussions with artists, agencies, venues and the feedback from the workforce and
venue surveys, there are issues about how funding works to support the development of
dance in the publicly funded sector. There are also issues about and how the dance field can
speak with a common voice about different aspects of dance and dancing. It was felt that
there was a tendency to look down on popular dance forms, such as theatre dance and
Strictly Come Dancing that are popular with audiences, but not seen to be connected to the
101 Arts Council England 2006 – Information sheet - Assessing Artistic Quality
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