Over on Created in Birmingham, Danny Smith has, in best Danny tradition, written a provocative piece in which he questions the value and merit of community arts projects.
Like all things, there is good community arts, & there is crap community arts – but if ‘community arts’ has become synonymous with crap, then the community arts, erm, community only has itself to blame.
Back in the 1990s I was for a time joint-co-ordinator of the Conservatoire’s Music in the Community programme, and our main activity was putting on concerts in unusual venues – hospitals, special schools, homeless centres, etc. It still stands as one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my whole life the occasion when my folk band did a concert in the school for autistic children near Harborne, where we were briefed as to what to expect from the children – that it would be unlikely that they would respond, and would most likely completely ignore us, get up and walk around, and be generally disruptive. Instead they all sat there transfixed through the whole concert, and at the end came & gave us the biggest group hug ever! I still actually feel quite emotional when I tell this story to people in real life!
Another thing I did during that period was take part in an activity called Project Soundbeam, where groups around the city were lent an EMS Soundbeam for a couple of weeks to see what they could do with it, with everybody coming together for a big concert in Symphony Hall. There were lots of the usual community arts demographics performing, and another of my bands got a slot too – but for the video of the event which was circulated afterwards for some reason our contribution was edited out; although we were doing freeform jazz we didn’t think we were that unlistenable to, so we could only assume were weren’t considered ‘community enough’ to be shared, which as well as being patronising to the wheelchair dancers in the concert made us somewhat angry.
Never forget that one of Birmingham’s best success stories – the Birmingham Opera Company, grew out of the community arts project of the City of Birmingham Touring Opera, and continues to put on productions of excellence in unusual venues with a cast drawn from the general public as well as professionals.
But on the flipside, there are too many instances such as the utterly dreadful Paradise Dreaming, by Hamfisted, which ticked just about every box of why community arts and experimental arts gets a bad name.
