A MISSED OPPORTUNITY

"It is a warm summer's day. In a park in Bradford the singing and drumming is reaching a climax. After a solo of virtuoso tabla playing by a renowned artist, Shabaz Hussain, the women dancers weave patterns on the stage and open up a space in the centre. Three young men come onto the stage and steal the show with spectacular break dancing. The massed choirs of 80 adults and 80 children, accompanied by a plethora of drummers, sing the show to its conclusion with Let the Daylight In." (from The Prompt Autumn 2005)

The above was one of last summer's performances of Bradford the Musical. It was originally conceived as a large scale event that would tell Bradford's history through linked musical events. It would provide a public space in which the different communities in Bradford, particularly the white and Asian could come together. I had previously been commissioned to look at what could be done in one of the Northern towns, Burnley, in the aftermath of the race riots there. One of the conclusions was that small scale interventions in the most deprived communities, usually Asian dominated, created ill feeling in the surrounding communities, often white.

One way out of this was to have a large scale project in which all communities could participate. This would be part of what Cantle in his report talked about when he referred to the need for community cohesion, a topic that Ruth Kelly stresses the importance of, in her role as Minister for Communities and Local Government. Similarly Lord Ouseley in his report on Bradford wrote "What is now desperately needed is a powerful, unifying vision for the District ... the District needs a people programme that creates social harmony, rejects racial hatred, brings communities together and shows them how to value people of all backgrounds."

The Musical then had three aims. The first was community cohesion; the second was to put on an event which would promote a positive image of the city. The city has too often been defined recently by the riots as in the recent T.V. play. The third was to develop people's involvement in the cultural life of the city. Bradford had had a strong community led cultural life which had dissipated over the past years primarily due to the difficulty that artists had in getting ongoing support from the Council.

There was no shortage of money coming into the city. Bradford is going through a physical regeneration, along with most of the towns and cities in the North with its own Will Alsop visionary idea of a flooded city centre. However little of this money is trickling down into a cultural re-awakening. This is despite a lot of research showing that physical regeneration on its own isn't sufficient to revitalise a city. There needs to be a buzz about the place which keeps its bright young talent and attracts new ones in.

The Musical went through a number of phases. There was a feasibility study, which led to a successful pilot project. This led to a dance performance at the 2004 Bradford Festival. Increased funding, primarily from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, enabled the 2005 project to be put together. This led to performances which opened both the Bradford Festival and Mela and involved 240 participants, singing, dancing and drumming to music from 4 local composers, playing to a combined audience of over 1,400 to critical acclaim. Each part of the project was delivered on time and to budget.

The project, a charity and a company limited by guarantee, had a small Board led by the then President of the Chamber of Commerce. Underneath it were the producer and the artistic directors who worked with a multi-ethnic delivery committee.

The plan was then to deliver in 2007 a much larger event which had a longer lead in time. This was essential so we could build in some community development work in order to ensure that we had more involvement at a local level from different communities, especially the Asian one. The whole community development side of the work was made more difficult because the Council had closed its own community development department and the voluntary sector Community Work Training Company had also had to fold because of financial difficulties. We were working to a budget of £105,000 and as of May 2006 we had raised 2/3rds of this. This included a large grant again from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, part of a substantial commitment it was making to Bradford, and a smaller one from the J. Paul Getty Jr. Charitable Trust. We made applications to the Arts Council and other Foundations to see if they would make up the difference.

However we ran out of time. The Foundations said you can't start until the majority of the money is in place and the Board were unhappy about authorising any expenditure that there wasn't money in the bank to cover. We had calculated that we needed to start the community development work and the commissioning of new composers, including an Asian one by June 2006 if we were to deliver the community cohesion part of the agenda and be ready to perform next summer.

In all of this, one of the main problems was getting commitment from the Council. This was despite the then Chief Executive saying at the end of the 2005 effort: "this project must not be allowed to die." The Council had provided some limited support, mainly in help with stage management but in terms of future commitments it wasn't prepared to go beyond issuing a letter of support. This was despite the project fitting into all of the Council's various plans for the cultural and community future of the District. We were told that the Council wouldn't be taking bids for 2007 until November 2006 and people wouldn't hear until about March 2007 - much too late. This wasn't only affecting the Musical - it was a problem for the whole local arts community. The City lost out to the Spice project because of its inability to see that community arts initiatives had an important role to play in Bradford's renaissance. The Musical is another project that is disappearing off its radar and another public space in which the two communities could have co-existed will have gone.

At a time when the Cantle report on Oldham is talking about separate communities still existing, when there is talk at a Government level of the importance of the voluntary sector, and when commentators write about the need for increasing 'social and cultural capital', it is ironic that a project which ticked nearly all the boxes in what was needed at a national, regional and local level has collapsed. It shows up the difference between the rhetoric and the lack of a sustained infrastructure, economic and political, which facilitates action on the ground.

Ron Wiener
October 2006.
Producer
Email: ron@ronwiener.co.uk
Website: www.ronwiener.co.uk