Arts centre is saved (From Worcester News)

Arts centre is saved

7:10am Saturday 9th May 2009 in

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A COMMUNITY arts centre which many groups feared would close after funding cuts will now stay open.

The future of Worcester Arts Workshop in Sansome Street looked bleak after the Arts Council axed its £25,000 annual grant and Worcester City Council dropped its £27,000-a-year funding.

But, supported by centre users, determined Arts Workshop manager John Denton has said it will keep running, albeit on a smaller scale.

He said: “We’ve had to have a big rethink about what we do and how we do it and we’ve decided to go back to basics. For the past 10 or 12 years we’ve been operating in two ways – as an arts venue, but also doing outreach work, which was really our main business. “Now we’re going back to concentrate on the centre.

“We’re putting the outreach work on hold for the foreseeable future and focus ing on what we do here at the venue.”

Worcestershire County Council has given the centre £7,000. That money, along with other small grants, will help safeguard the venue for the next year.

The workshop stages everything from music and theatrical performances, exhibitions to children’s arts and arts classes.

Mr Denton is positive about the future.

He said: “We already have a good number of classes and workshops running at the centre and we’re looking for other opportunities and talking to potential partners about expanding that. There is some positive stuff going on.

“We’ve had brilliant support and a lot of people wrote letters. Worcestershire County Council has been key as our landlord. They have continued to give us revenue, they’ve been supportive and stuck with us.

“We’ve had to lose staff to balance the budget, but now we’ve got what we feel is a realistic budget to keep us going forward.”

The outreach programme involved putting on art exhibitions and community performances across Worcestershire.

The step to stay open has been welcomed by Shindig, the organisation that promotes professional touring artists in rural areas.

Shindig coordinator Sue Roberts said: “Over the past five years, John Denton has successfully built new audiences for a range of Shindig performances attracting people to see theatre, music, storytelling, cultural diversity work and perhaps most notably international music and dance.

“This has established the Workshop as a vital Shindig venue in the city, boasting sell-out promotions with a genuine following in, and around, the local community.”

The celebratory sentiments were echoed by Worcester-based blues musician Bob Jones, who said: “The most important thing about the arts workshop is that it’s almost the only forum for off-the-wall non mainstream artistes.

“If Worcester Arts Workshop had not continued there would have been nothing to replace it.”

The workshop was set up 35 years ago and now receives less than half of its funding through grants and self-generates the rest.