Ageism Rife in the UK and in Performance Art in Particular

I’ve been considering the particular difficulties I’m finding in obtaining financial support for this project.  Aside from the considerations that this kind of project usually needs a great deal of lead up time, time which I didn’t have, I believe a lot of my problems stem from societal and institutional ageism.

I approached my own University’s Widening Participation office to see if they would support the project and was offered some help ‘in kind’ – no money.  What this project needs is some financial support to ensure that the professional women, who will facilitate the workshops and thereby facilitate the exploration of new methods in creating opera and other sung dramatic narrative, can be paid.  This is an experimental and groundbreaking approach to creating new Opera on my part.  I happen to be a third year undergraduate student.  Other participants will use the workshops for their own creative purposes and some may share my objectives.  Women around the globe and here in the UK have shown considerable interested in it.  To find 10 women to fill every workshop is a difficult task when the work, the concept, is so new.  If the project was aimed at a lot of young people, it’s my belief that funding would be forthcoming from many sources but then it wouldn’t be groundbreaking to the same extent.  There is no funding support for older people in general and certainly none for older women in particular from The Arts Council except in circumstances promoting health.  Here’s an extract from The Baring Foundation – at 25 August, 2011 – on Ageing Artfully -  Older People and Professional Participatory Arts in the UK which explains the situation:-

http://www.baringfoundation.org.uk/AgeingArtfully.pdf

‘Arts and Cultural Policy

There is no explicit national policy framework for arts and older people. So, for instance, although Arts Council England has a specific policy for children and young people there is no

comparable policy for older people. The Arts Council England does though have a policy on the Arts and Health, which has considerable relevance to some parts of this work. Similarly, the Welsh Assembly Government and Arts Council Wales have jointly published Arts in Health and Wellbeing: An Action Plan for Wales. The principles for a national policy can be inferred from anti-age discrimination legislation combined with Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that ‘everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts’.

Funding

It is not surprising then that nor is there any specific funding programme for arts work with older people. Therefore, arts organisations need to obtain funding under other guises which can be used for these purposes. Arts Council England has a single funding stream called Grants for the Arts. This would not necessarily be a problem but it was very evident in the process of writing this report that many practitioners said that this was an area where it was especially difficult to find funding (in comparison to say arts work with young people). Many of the organisations studied are small and run on a knife edge of slender resources.  

So if there is no dedicated funding in this area, how are resources found by more than 100 organisations? Sources of funding included revenue and project funding from the Arts Council, a number of more generalist foundations such as the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Tudor

Trust as well as ones focusing on older people, such as Atlantic Philanthropies, City Bridge Trust, the Rayne Foundation and the Balance Trust which has now closed. Funding came from central government from a number of channels, such as urban regeneration. The Department for Communities and Local Government has recently created a welcome new fund for intergenerational work which should see a number of bids using the arts. Some earned income is derived through the delivery of contracts with the Primary Care or Health Trusts.

It is an interesting question as to whether the increasing personalisation of budgets for vulnerable people, theoretically allowing them great freedom to purchase the type of support

they wish rather than the sort supplied by suppliers such as local authorities, will be a positive factor allowing older people to purchase provision that includes the arts.’

I believe it is fundamentally wrong to have to dress up a project as health promoting, (even though it is), when the whole object is creation of art works in performance and by a group of people who need support to find their own way.  If the material isn’t ‘out there’ to be performed, written by others, then we can and will devise it ourselves, but we do need some financial facilitation.  Eventually we will have a methodology and a product.  Now’s the time for some bold investment in us OLDER WOMEN!