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What are their developmental needs when they get to certain points in their career?”
“This is really why I want to do a survey on what EFDSS has been doing to support artists, and what are the things that artists would like us to do. Because, relatively speaking, it’s quite easy to do things for the new and emerging but as you become more experienced your needs become much more bespoke. That’s certainly an area of pushing forward with artist devel- opment: not just doing the same things every year but really keeping it as relevant to the sector as we possibly can.”
EFDSS have been involved in various projects that have turned into a show and an album. How well does she judge those have gone?
“I think, overall, good. They’ve all come about for different reasons. There’s a couple of cases where we were approached by a festival who wanted to do something. The Sweet Liberties project came about because of contacts within the House of Commons. The Cecil Sharp Pro- ject was the first one, with Shrewsbury, and then the Elizabethan Sessions with Folk By The Oak. The Full English came about in a slightly different way: we’d got some funding from the PRS For Music Foundation through their Women In Music fund and offered it to Fay Hield to look at the collections and see what took her fancy, and it mushroomed into this idea of the band. But actually we just started off with planting that little seed. And then in 2016 I was thinking we’re always going out to artists and saying we’ve got this project idea, this theme for a commission, and I thought it’s about time we put out an open call for a commission idea. The Theatre Ballads project came out of that.
W
ould she accept the criti- cism that some of them have ended up a little bit safe and middle-of-the- road? “Definitely, yes, I
do agree with you, which is why I then wanted to do this open call. There were parameters, that whatever they did was rooted in English folk music, but it could be cross-genre, cross-arts etc. It was a co-com- mission with the Colston Hall, Bristol and the Bury Met, so there had to be an end product that could be performed publicly.”
“What was interesting is that although I think we had about thirty-five, maybe forty applications for it, it came down to two which were the most differ- ent, coming at it from a much more inter- esting angle. But actually I was slightly dis- appointed in the creative ideas that came forward, outside of those two and maybe another couple that didn’t quite make the grade for other reasons. I wonder some- times if artists are perhaps the safest peo- ple. Sometimes when you’re not the artist you can think outside the box but you want to be presented with ideas that make you go ‘wow, really?!’”
“One of the other key areas, and this is across a lot of what we do, not just around artist development, is what can EFDSS do to diversify both the scene and therefore the audiences? If you just think on a purely pragmatic basis of the popula-
Cecil Sharp House
tion demographic of the British Isles, and how it’s constantly changing, we don’t have the luxury to say, ‘It doesn’t really matter if that sector of the population doesn’t engage with us.’ We’re looking at small projects to dip toes in the water. Education engages with a huge variety of young people and children, because they go into areas of the country where popu- lations are completely different from one place to another. But it’s how then to translate that – to keep that going from working with a fantastically mixed bunch, racially, socio-economic etc within a school. How do you then keep some of that going, either as would-be profession- als, but also as audiences, the participants, the supporters of those in ten, fifteen, twenty years’ time?”
“The bill here, and audiences, and who comes to what, is endlessly fascinat- ing because you can never predict it. In the early part of last year we had Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita, the first time they’d performed here. And we did well over three hundred, coming up to a sell-out. I stood there in the hall just before the concert started, talking to [their manag- er] Dilwyn, and he asked, ‘Who are all these people?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know! I’m looking around and I don’t know who these people are!’”
“I can try and diversify the program- ming a bit more, but the challenge is not to just diversify it by having a ‘world music’ strand in there, for want of a bet- ter phrase, but it’s how you can diversify the artists that are performing folk from the British Isles, folk that is here. It’s a challenge, but it’s one that we’ve got to play our part in and find different ways to chip away at.”
“I think we still have a lot to do around our own PR and status in that wider arts context, and I’ve always felt that if EFDSS can raise its profile then with it goes folk and vice versa, they’re going two in hand.”
Does she feel that she can claim credit for all this recent success?
“It was in dire straits when I arrived,
but it’s definitely been a team effort. The key people along the way have been Mal- colm Taylor, Rachel Elliot definitely – she’s been here nearly as long as I have and has completely driven that education depart- ment to be what it is; it was completely her vision to have a national youth folk ensem- ble. Laura Smyth, who’s taken over now as Library Director and taken it to another level, particularly trying to push it back into academia so that we’ve got that continua- tion. And then the unsung heroes like my Operations Director, Rosie; she’s the woman to whom I’ve gone, ‘Right, over to you,’ and she’s seen through those things.”
A
nd does she consider herself a Proper Folkie now? “I think I’m getting there! I don’t stay here under some sort of suf- ferance, wishing I could go
and work with another art form at all. It was an art form that was there in the background, though not one that was particularly prominent – I had only dipped in now and then. Like with everything – you can be a classical music fan but it doesn’t mean you like everything from Mozart to Harrison Birtwistle.”
“I think one of the things that has made the organisation really move for- ward over the last few years is that, in the majority of cases, people who have worked here and been part and parcel of these developments have actually not been folk mad enthusiasts; they’ve come with their professional skills and they’ve engaged with the art forms and they’ve learnt about them as they’ve done their job in order to do their job. All those back- room people, like Jamie coming in and building a team of sound engineers who do such a good job here, it has absolutely been a team effort.”
efdss.org F
Photo: Tomoko Kinoshita
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