Talking Point - November
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Talking point for November 2009:
Below is an article by Michael Kaiser, President of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. We want to collect and collate as many responses to this article as we can, and at the end of the month we will let you know what people had to say and give you another talking point. (Don't forget to click the 'read more' button)
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"I have been spending a great deal of time thinking about the issue of diversity in the arts, specifically, the drive to diversify the programming and constituents of all arts organizations.
The more I consider this thorny issue, the less I am convinced that the arts world has worked hard enough to dissect the true costs, benefits and implications of recent diversity efforts.
Over the past 30 years, we were encouraged, primarily by foundation and government agencies, to become more diverse in every respect: we were asked to do works by minority artists, to bring diverse audiences to our theaters, and to diversify our staffs and boards. To justify funding, the argument went, we had to demonstrate our commitment to our entire community.
Having spent a great deal of my career working with arts organizations of color, I am as committed as anyone to the diversity of our arts ecology. I do not believe that we can have a truly great artistic community if all segments of our society are not represented well.
But I do not think I believe anymore in forcing Eurocentric arts organizations to do diverse works or to put one minority on a board.
When large, white organizations produce minority works they typically select the "low hanging fruit," the most popular works by diverse artists featuring the most famous minority performers and directors. This almost invariably hurts the minority arts organizations in the neighborhood, most of which are small and underfunded, and cannot afford to match the marketing clout or the casting glamour of their larger white counterparts. How else to explain the reduced strength of American black theater companies over the past twenty years?
Last Updated (Monday, 02 November 2009 16:33)
Hover and Dis-cover | |
Hover and Dis-cover
As all good homepages do, the Intercultural Arts homepage contains access to all the other main parts of the site. The News Feeds section will take you to a list of RSS feeds that will change daily. The Artists database will change as we get more and more members signed up.
2 parts of the site in particular however will be changing much more than others – our bulletin board and our events page. Our bulletin board is where we share all of the interesting things we hear about via email, web alerts etc.
Similarly, our events pages are where we add any events we hear about – be they at The Sage Gateshead, The Theatre Royal, Northern Stage or West Moor Community Centre (and any other community centre for that matter). Look to the left of this page and you will see a small calendar. Hover over any day that you are free and fancy going to see something a bit different and you will see what’s on across the region. You can also search via venue, location, and date – how good is that!
Remember, any queries questions or suggestions you can contact us via This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Cheers,
Richard Neville Project Coordinator Last Updated (Saturday, 17 October 2009 08:41) Welcome to Intercultural Arts Thursday, 03 September 2009 16:54 |  Written by Richard Neville
Welcome to Intercultural Arts.
To our returning visitors we would like to say thank you for your patience as we have developed this new website. To our new visitors we would like to say welcome to what we consider to be the premier site for Intercultural discussion and information exchange in the North East of England. You are joining 500+ regular users per month, and you will soon have open access to a wide range of diverse artists, musicians and performers.
NECDAF = Intercultural ArtsWednesday, 19 August 2009 12:45 | Written by Richard Neville | | |
First we were the North East Cultural Diversity Arts Forum (or NECDAF for short) - but of course that was far too long, people confused us with NORDAF, thought we were called NECTAR etc etc. It was time for a change. Those of you that have worked with us recently will have seen we have been calling ourselves NECDAF Intercultural Arts. There were 2 motives behind this; firstly we did have a core group of users that knew us as NECDAF, knew what we did, what it stood for, and we didn't want to alienate them; secondly we fell in love with the concept of INTERculturalism, and thought it really represented what kind of work we want to be doing. We want to work TOGETHER to bring new shows and new collaborations to new audiences. At a marketing seminar I told one of the lecturers the name of our organisation, and quick as a flash she said "drop the NECDAF - it's not what you do!" After some debate around the board room table, we are now Intercultural Arts - the North East Cultural Diversity Arts Forum. (First part big, second part little) We have a new website, created entirely with open source software - which means it is all free, we'd be happy to tell you where to get all bits from! - and we will be launching a contest in the coming months for a new logo - open to anyone who can put pencil to paper (or images on a pc!). How best to display all of our information on the website has been a bit problematic - especially as we didn't want any 'downtime', but we think we've come up with a pretty good, and USABLE site. As ever, we are open to comments and suggestions.
Richard Neville Project Coordinator
Last Updated (Wednesday, 09 December 2009 15:25) |
