Going with the flow on arts funding

IT'S ten o’clock on a cold November morning and I should be talking to a broken man. The two-year battle to save Darlington Arts Centre – a fight that ranged from the Vane project eventually failing to secure Arts Council funding, to public demonstrations outside the town hall – would have scuppered lesser individuals.

Instead, I’ve been chatting for more than an hour in the café at Darlington College with one of the toughest men – and the most resilient teams – I’ve ever met. It’s an upbeat conversation that cuts across the past four years as though they had been plain sailing, years that saw Darlington for Culture’s (DfC) campaign to save the arts centre founder – then reinvent itself as a nurturing hub for artisans across the borough.

Battle-hardened John Dean, chairman of DfC, talks positively about the group’s role in shaping the town’s arts scene of the future:

“We feel confident now. We’re four years in and we’re stable. Out of the blue, we’ll have a committee meeting and somebody will suggest a new idea and we’ll all say, ‘What a great idea’. Things will happen that we haven’t even thought of yet.”

Yvonne Preston, director of Scrap Studioarts on Borough Road – a centre creating recycled artwork with children and the disadvantaged – and a fellow DfC board member, is also with us.

“We look at what we did last year and we think, how can we better that, how can we learn our lessons?” she says.

Tentatively, I ask if the arts centre’s closure was – in a backhanded way – a good thing, expecting a barrage of abuse.

Joanne Land, another board member and co-ordinator of the literary events within the DfC’s annual Arts Festival that takes place each May, says: “It’s got people working together who maybe wouldn’t have known about each other.”

“These are exciting times,” says Dean. “We’ve been approached by a national organisation about the arts festival that wants to do a major event. If that comes off, big names are going to come.”

There’s a nervousness and an excitement about what lies ahead. But there’s also nostalgia for the hey-day of the arts centre that doesn’t go unnoticed. For Dean, one of the main disappointments was the loss of the centre's small theatre. But even here he’s apt to think positively:

“We’re going to get that back with Hullaballoon, the children’s theatre because it won’t be used exclusively as a children’s venue all the time.”

The team sees the council’s purchase of a building for Theatre Hullabaloo adjacent to the Civic Theatre, along with the opening of The Bridge Centre for Visual Arts on Hundens Lane, as evidence of an improving relationship with Darlington Borough Council.

“We’re getting on better with the council now,” Land says. Dean nods, increasingly confident the council will keep its promises that funding from the forthcoming sale of the arts centre will be spent exclusively on the arts.

Dean does bemoan the loss of the arts community that followed the arts centre’s closure. People would meet informally at the arts centre, get talking and new creative projects would emerge. He is quick to point out that even this loss has been re-born in the form of the First Wednesday events at the Forum Music Centre, in Borough Road, a networking meeting of artists, writers and musicians that’s held between 6 and 8pm each month.

Asked to look back at the loss of the arts centre, Preston says: “At first it was like closing the doors on the old and opening a whole new world. There was quite a buzz around. We thought, we could do this and this…”

Apart from the inevitable tears at the 12-hour concert on the day the centre closed, Dean remembers the weeks following July 2012 with similar optimism:

“There had become an over-reliance on the council. In those days it was a big, strong council with a big budget. Initially people felt lost. What’s happened gradually is that it’s given people a sense of independence.”

This does mean that artists, writers and musicians in the town have to find their own venues to perform or run classes, but can then ask for support from DfC’s volunteers, who offer a range of services from delivering leaflets to providing contacts.

The major success is the arts festival with the third annual event due next year.

“It started from Jo’s idea of running a literary festival,” says Dean. “We expanded it into an arts festival. The idea was to give a sense of energy, enthusiasm and excitement. Every year it’s different. Lots of big names but lots of community stuff too.”

Surprisingly, building a new arts centre is no longer part of the group's immediate plans.

“I don’t think it’s our aim anymore,” Preston says. “A lot of good places have come out of the closure. The Voodoo Café has expanded and The Forum attracts more people. If the council said it's got money for a new arts centre, these venues may suffer from it.”

Dean underlines the fact that a lot of the groups who had a home at the arts centre now have new venues: “The folk club found a home at The Copper Beach on Borough Road. That boosts business for The Copper Beach.”

He's is proud of the fact that a national report (On With the Show – Supporting LocalArts and Culture by Dr Claire Mansfield for the New Local Government Network) recently labelled DfC pragmatic, believing that the closure of the arts centre was always a wrong decision, but recognised this particular battle has been fought and lost.

“If someone came forward and said we’d like to build an arts centre, we would support them. But not at the expense of everything else. We can’t go back,” Dean says.

He chuckles, only half-believing it could happen, a pragmatist who campaigned and lost – then evolved to meet the needs of a more austere, but perhaps more vibrant, environment to the one he reluctantly left behind.

•  If you are an artist, writer or musician and you’d like to find out more about what help’s on offer from Darlington for Culture, contact: darlingtonforculture.org