One silly season has given way to another. Election campaigns have begun. I know it’s silly, but in case any party out there recognises that artists have interests too, that they vote and that they have influence among voters, perhaps they would like to consider promising (at least) the following:
1. To create 1 000 jobs in the arts, for example, by supporting 15 contemporary dance and 15 theatre companies (average of 10 members in each), nine jazz ensembles (six members each), three opera companies and three orchestras (80 members each), and two ballet companies and two traditional dance companies (45 members each). If these artists were paid the average costs of R100 000 for a staff member in the Department of Arts and Culture, that would require a budget of a mere R100-million a year, or a fifth of the costs of a presidential jet.
2. To provide funding and incentives to produce a quantifiable number of excellent creative works in each discipline every year, for example, 10 novels, 15 choreographic works, five feature films, 10 solo and 10 group exhibitions, two musicals, 10 plays, two operas and five new jazz compositions, each to be premiered at one of the country’s top jazz festivals.
3. To create a national circuit of 18 venues (including multi-functional community arts centres) — two per province — that would be adequately equipped and staffed in order to facilitate national tours by theatre, music and dance groups, film and visual art exhibitions, thereby creating ongoing work for artists and providing access to the arts for people throughout the country.
4. To establish a national circuit of existing festivals to co-produce and distribute work around the country, and to institute the concept of a ”cultural capital” where every two years a smaller town or city would bid for and host a national arts festival.
This would help to create infrastructure in cities and towns that don’t have such cultural infrastructure, develop or attract skilled human resources, develop new markets for the arts nationally, and promote cultural tourism in less-resourced provinces.
5. To use trained actors, dancers, musicians and visual artists to help teach the arts and culture components of the schools curriculum while teachers are being adequately trained to teach these. Employ actors, musicians and dancers to work with schools on a weekly basis to produce school plays and dance and music programmes that would form part of annual schools arts festivals in each province.
6. To establish an institute to conduct ongoing research into arts and culture, document developments in these areas, provide information to support artistic practice, and to encourage debate and the exchange of ideas through regular journals, lectures, conferences and seminars.
7. To provide a regime of social benefits for artists that would include minimum wages, medical care, pension schemes and unemployment insurance.
8. To ensure the development of much-needed leadership and management within the cultural sector by offering five to 10 bursaries for MBAs each year, with graduates contracted to work within the sector for at least three years afterwards.
They would identify 25 to 30 potential arts administrators and link them with some of the country’s top festival, theatre, museum and arts managers in order to mentor them over a period of at least one year, emphasising hands-on experience.
They would establish agreements with nine countries — such as Sweden, The Netherlands, France, Britain, Switzerland, et cetera — to link with one of the nine provinces (over and above their national programmes) to develop and train the cultural civil service, the governing bodies and managements of major cultural institutions and NGOs, and to link the province’s tertiary institutions with a similar institution abroad to develop and provide arts administration training programmes.
9. To establish a mechanism specifically to market, tour and export South African creative works (craft, film, books, plays, dance, fine art) abroad in order to build new markets for South African artists and to generate foreign income for them.
10. To coordinate the country’s funding mechanisms so that there is no duplication and wastage, to ensure that each provincial arts council has at least R1 for every person living in the province to spend on the arts each year, and to ensure that no applicant for funding has to wait longer than three months for a decision about their application.
Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ”everyone shall have the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community and to enjoy the arts”. I know it’s a silly question, because they’ll all say they do, but I wonder how many parties are really serious about promoting human rights.