English National Ballet has been awarded a grant of £3 million through the Government's Culture Recovery Fund, announced today.
Tamara Rojo, Artistic Director of English National Ballet said,
I am thrilled and so grateful that English National Ballet has been granted support through the Government's Culture Recovery Fund, and we offer our sincere thanks to HM Treasury, the Culture Secretary, DCMS, and Arts Council England.
With this grant we can ensure ENB's survival for the immediate future, helping us to retain talent and protect as many jobs as possible, and allowing us to create, to collaborate and to support and enrich the lives of our local, national and global communities through our artform.
English National Ballet is one of 35 major cultural organisations receiving the first of the larger grants – between £1 and £3 million – through the Culture Recovery Fund – with £75 million of investment announced today.
This follows £334 million awarded earlier in the month to nearly 2,000 organisations, also from the Culture Recovery Fund grants programme being administered by Arts Council England. Further rounds of funding in the cultural and heritage sector are due to be announced over the coming weeks.
English National Ballet has continued to create and to serve its audiences under the difficult circumstances of the coronavirus crisis and soon it will be launching a video on demand platform, ENB at Home, which will include recorded performances and ballet-based exercise classes for people to enjoy at home. It is also working to strengthen and increase the digital distribution of its work, including engagement with local communities, youth programmes, and Dance for Parkinson's programmes.
ENB will also be releasing a series of world premieres as part of a Digital Season and will perform to socially distanced audiences at Sadler's Wells and the London Coliseum this Winter. The company will finish the creation of Creature, a new full-length ballet by choreographer Akram Khan, the premiere for which has been postponed until 2021.
Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.
His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.
