Special feature - Arts development
Talking Arts DevelopmentFebruary 2007 HI~Arts is contracted by HIE as the ‘arts development agency for the Highlands and Islands’. But what does an ‘arts development agency’ actually do? HI~Arts Director Robert Livingston aims to explain. When someone at a party asks me the standard question ‘And what exactly does HI~Arts do?’ my usual answer ‘Well, it’s an arts development agency’, used to result in an awkward silence while my questioner thought desperately what to ask next! Now I just say ‘We manage two cinemas and promote rock gigs’, and the conversation flows smoothly. And it’s true as far as it goes, but it’s only a small part of the real answer. For the full version, read on. |
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Back in 1990 the Highlands and Islands Development Board was about to celebrate its 25th anniversary in style with a year-long festival of the arts called ‘HI-Light’. In the event, HIDB was transmuted into Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and ‘HI-Light’ became, instead of a celebration, more of a statement of intent for the new Enterprise Network. As part of delivering this Year of the Arts, HIE created a small, charitable company which it called, logically enough, HI~Arts. That company’s remit was to develop and maintain a comprehensive database of arts events and organisations for the year, and also to be a conduit by which some forms of external funding could reach those organising events for the Year. |
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One of the legacies of HI-Light was an agreement between HIE and the Scottish Arts Council to collaborate in funding a dedicated arts officer to work with the Enterprise Network. I was the lucky guy who got the job, and when I started work in January 2004 it made sense that my employer should be, not HIE itself, but that convenient little ‘not for profit’ company, HI~Arts. HIE had not been idle in the intervening years. As part of setting out its stall as a new Network, HIE produced an extensive range of strategies, including one covering the arts, and based solidly on all the knowledge acquired through delivering HI-Light. That strategy became my bible. All of those planning documents have done their job, and have long since been retired to the archives, but it’s salutary to go back to that 1994 arts strategy and see, first of all how much has been achieved, and also how many of the principal objectives are still relevant in 2007. As well as implementing that strategy, my post had another specific aim—to increase the overall percentage of Scottish Arts Council funds coming into the HIE area. At that time, depending on how you looked at it, the Highlands and Islands were receiving perhaps as little as 50% per capita of the SAC funds going to the rest of the country. Now it’s a very different matter. In its recent strategic review, the SAC identified a group of 48 ‘Foundation’ organisations which would form the core of its funding packages for the coming years. Eleven of those organisations—almost a quarter of the total—are based in the Highlands and Islands (and I’m glad to say that HI~Arts is one of them). It only needed one other factor to set HI~Arts on the road for growth, and that was the arrival of the National Lottery. Now it became imperative, not only to help to draw as much of the arts share of Lottery funding into the area as possible, but also HI~Arts had the option of developing Lottery-funded projects of its own. The first of these was the Screen Machine mobile cinema, developed at the request of HIE and a consortium of Local Authorities. Despite initial problems, the Screen Machine service has become an indispensable part of West Coast and island life, so much so that a second, state of the art Machine came into service in 2005, and the first, prototype, Machine went off to stand in for the Eden Court Theatre’s cinema during its two-year closure. |
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So, that explains the cinemas. What about the rock gigs? The HIE arts strategy recognised that music was, of course, one of the great assets of the Highlands and Islands, but in the mid-90s even some of the best known bands were having great difficulty in breaking through to a level of success where they could be fulltime musicians. This led HI~Arts to launch the MIDAS programme (Music Industry Development and Support), again with both HIE and SAC National Lottery funding, to establish a viable long term structure for a music industry in the area. Ten years later, and that work is still being carried on by our sister company Go Events, and with festivals like Rock Ness, Belladrum and Loopallu, and bands like Jyrojets and Crash my Model Car making it big on the international scene, no one can ignore that the Highlands and Islands now have a significant and successful music business. But HI~Arts started out seventeen years ago as a source of information, and that’s still our most central activity. Our website www.hi-arts.co.uk hosts a vast wealth of information on the arts and heritage of the Highlands and Islands. There’s the award-winning Northings Internet Arts Journal, the Events database that is powering the calendar for the Highland 2007 programme, dedicated guides to the galleries, festivals and heritage sectors, and a huge repository of reports, features, reviews and tipsheets on every aspect of the arts. Another part of my initial remit, back in 1994, was to provide support to the Local Enterprise Companies that make up the HIE Network, and we still ensure that our pan-HIE remit is balanced by work on the ground with individual LECs and with groups based in a given LEC area. This breadth of coverage is helped by the fact that two key members of staff are based in Stornoway and Lochgilphead. At the same time we’re also a means of keeping national agencies such as the SAC informed about developments in the Highlands and Islands, while ensuring that national priorities are understood and acted on locally, and that’s also helped by having a senior member of staff based in Edinburgh! One crucial ongoing activity is to help to nurture a sustainable infrastructure for the arts, with development programmes devoted to theatre, writing, crafts and the visual arts, as well as to music, and also a major focus on audience development, which has led to another of our major projects, thebooth online box office. This allows any promoter or event organiser, no matter how small or remote, to sell tickets online 24 hours a day, seven days a week, anywhere in the world. |
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HIE itself has of course a very wide remit in the linked fields of economic and community development, and so our work on HIE’s behalf has included concerted efforts to link the arts, and the arts community of the Highlands and Islands, into the wider social and commercial environment. Our three year project Artsplay built lasting bridges between working artists and the child care sector. Our guidance documents ‘Creative Routes to Health’, produced in partnership with the Highland Health Board, provide guidance on how to develop arts projects in the health sector. HI~Arts is a member of the Scottish Tourism Innovation Group, and of course our website and online box office are major assets to the tourism industry. So, in truth, HI~Arts is the sum of its parts, and the best way to explain the organisation is therefore to describe what we do. What then, lies ahead for HI~Arts? This current year that Scotland celebrates Highland Culture is in some ways another, grander version of HI-Light, and so a good opportunity to take stock and see what has been achieved in the intervening seventeen years. Under the terms of the Draft Culture Bill, which is likely to be made law by 2008, the Scottish Arts Council will mutate into Creative Scotland, as once before HIDB became HIE. The Scottish Executive plans to require Local Authorities to deliver ‘cultural entitlements’. Homecoming 2009 will provide another year-long opportunity to emphasis the merits and the strengths of the Highlands and Islands. |
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Ultimately, the role of an arts development agency must be to ensure that it is sufficiently well-informed, resourced, and flexible to be able to meet the new challenges which an ever-changing environment will present to the arts sector. HI~Arts’ annual contract with HIE, and its status as a Foundation client of SAC, enable us to continue to offer a wide range of services to everyone from individual artists to national companies, to ensure that 2007 is as solid a foundation for the future as HI-Light proved to be, all those years ago. Robert Livingston |
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