f66 Society Hostess
Against all the odds, the EFDSS is thriving and its headquarters at Cecil Sharp House is abuzz. Ian Anderson talks to the person in charge for the past decade, CEO Katy Spicer.
A
nybody from the second half of the 20th century with access to a working Tardis would be astounded if it did that churny grindy noise thing and materialised down the bottom end of Camden’s Regent’s Park Road in 2018. They might remember that run-down place called Cecil Sharp House where well-meaning, often hard-working ama- teurs attempted to run the ageing, decay- ing English Folk Dance & Song Society on shoestring budgets, and real heroes did their very best to guard the nation’s folk heritage in a cramped, dusty and dis- gracefully under-resourced library. They’d probably imagine that by now the build- ing would have fallen down or been turned into more luxury flats, the con- tents of the library flogged off to an American university, and its ageing mem- bership turned to the dust of old bones. Well, would you just look at it now?!
The whole place, much of it gleaming- ly refurbished, positively throbs with activi- ty. There’s a top-class events programme, a spectacular set of resources on their web- site, all sorts of mentoring and educational schemes spreading out across the country, and a real sense of confidence and pride in what they do. And it’s often full of – shock, horror – energetic young people.
She absolutely refuses to take credit for its remarkable rejuvenation, saying that it’s all been down to a great team of col- leagues, without whom, but anybody who ignored the arrival a decade ago of current CEO Katy Spicer as a factor in all this would be very foolish indeed. Which is funny, real- ly, as when she was first appointed the blusterings of outrage on Mudcat – the Mail Online of the folk world – from the kind of myopic Folkistanis who couldn’t themselves organise the proverbial piss-up in a brewery, were all along the lines of “But she’s not a proper folkie: why on earth has she got the job?”
So when we retreated from the bustling basement café (yep, Cecil Sharp House even has a great little café now) to her penthouse office suite – I jest – for a quiet natter, one of the first things I asked her was whether she was aware of the grumblings in the ranks back then?
“Oh yes, I was indeed! One of my then board members, just after I’d taken up the post, decided to show me what all these people were saying: ‘Who is this woman? She’s got no folk background.’ But amongst them there were also people who were counteracting that, saying ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, the poor woman has- n’t started yet, give her a chance!”
So what was her background?
“Aha, life before! Katy Spicer before EFDSS was an arts manager working pri- marily with dance and theatre companies, so immediately prior to EFDSS I was Gener- al Manager at Rambert Dance Company, and before that, over the too many previ- ous decades, I’d worked with theatre com- panies, touring companies, ran a dance company, and had a stint at the Arts Coun- cil many moons ago in the training depart- ment where companies and individuals could apply for funding for training in arts or arts management, creative, technical.”
“Going quite a way back, in the first theatre I ever worked in, Westcliff-on-Sea, somebody in the organisation thought he would like to try a weekend folk festival for two successive years. As I was press and publicity person at the theatre, I not only ended up doing marketing and local press for it, as part and parcel of the year’s activi- ties for the theatre, but I do remember somehow getting landed with doing all the contracts for the artists. That was, on a professional level, the only time I had a link to folk. My parents were quite into folk music and dance actually. At the time, they used to go to local dances, barn dances, ceilidh dances and a folk dance club. And we used to do, as it was called then, coun- try dancing at school, part of the curricu- lum. So that was all around in my early years, but then it sort of fizzled out.”
“The EFDSS needed somebody with arts management experience and experi- ence of running an arts organisation and everything that goes with that: creative development, fundraising, managing the building and all the rest of it. And from what I can remember, the folk knowledge was desirable but not an essential. I remember that there were three of us that were interviewed for the post, and I
found out much later that I actually knew the other two people! But interestingly we all had very similar backgrounds pro- fessionally, we’d all come up through arts management.”
Looking from the outside (though I had my spell in purgatory on the National Executive Committee in the DEAFASS days of the ’80s), the problem with the Society for a long time was it being run by well- meaning amateurs. And the internal poli- tics – the eternal clashes between ‘Song’ and ‘Dance’, older members and the younger ones and so on. It must have been very difficult for anybody to negotiate.
title or something similar, who had lasted very, very short periods of time. Obviously I don’t know the ins and outs because I was- n’t here. But what I had on my side that some of my predecessors hadn’t got was – at the point where they advertised my post – there was a whole reorganisation going on, and a whole realisation from the majority of the people on the board at the time, that it had got to the point where we change or die. The building wasn’t really being used: EFDSS itself was running only a few courses and classes, adults primarily, and there were a number of organisations hiring in order to do dances, like Knees Up Cecil Sharp who have all been here for a long time. So there were things happening in the building, but actually very little of it was being generated by EFDSS, and there certainly wasn’t any performance pro- gramme coming in.”
“Y
“The year I started, in the autumn of 2008, there were plans for two anniversary concerts – the 50th anniversary of the death of Vaughan Williams and the cente- nary of the birth of A L Lloyd. The Vaugh- an Williams concert was being organised by a member of the board and the Lloyd concert by the library staff. They were great events but it was apparent that the only time that there was ever any concert going on in the building, there had to be an anniversary, and somebody had to step forward and go ‘I’ll organise it’.”
es, I’m afraid it certainly was that. There had been a long run of peo- ple in my sort of posi- tion, either with my job
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148
