What Next for The Royal Academy of Dance? An Opinion Piece, by John Byrne – Part 1
The Royal Academy of Dance (RAD) is a UK-based international organisation which offers training, qualifications and examinations for teachers and students of classical ballet and related forms of dance. Like all organisations of its kind, it has to keep a close eye on the bottom line.
In 1990, the Academy faced impending bankruptcy and decided to appoint a “fixer,” in the form of a CEO, to turn the organisation around. Once the financial position was stabilised, the position of CEO became a permanent one and following the very recent resignation of its last CEO, after a relatively short tenure, a search has begun for his replacement.
In this essay, John Byrne, who was there in 1990, looks at how the Academy has changed since the appointment of its first CEO, over thirty years ago, and asks whether it is now time to consider an alternative model of management.
PART ONE
Keeping the books in the black is always a challenge for organisations which provide education and training in the performing arts. Some receive recurrent government funding, which helps, but even with this form of assistance the financial pathway for a great many of them is not a smooth one. The challenges are even greater for independent organisations like the RAD which do not receive government support, or significant commercial sponsorship, and who basically have to make their own way. Inevitably, in this situation, there will be some fiscal ups and downs and to its credit, the RAD has survived for over 100 years as virtually a self-funded organisation. Its status as a registered charity has certainly helped and the availability of an enormous amount of unpaid volunteer work, given generously by many of its members throughout the world, has also been of crucial importance.
In 1990, the Academy was faced with an existential crisis in the form of imminent bankruptcy. To address this threat the Board of Trustees decided to recruit a business “fixer” and give him the powers of a CEO to change things as he saw fit. It seemed of little concern that the incoming CEO knew nothing about the Academy’s history or ethos and lacked any kind of personal culture or knowledge of the arts and their management. This was basically all about money. This was about business. And restructuring the organisation to yield more of both.
I recall that one of the first acts of the new CEO was to raise the status of the Head of the Accounts Department to that of Director of Finance and Administration, an unremarkable promotion on the face of it, but in effect this promotion changed the composition of the leadership team and therefore the balance of power at the top of the organisation. Small changes can have big consequences. Under this new arrangement, there would be two Administrative Directors, including the all-powerful CEO, and one Artistic Director. This put the Artistic Director into a minority position and had an almost immediate effect on the dynamics of management. I vividly remember that soon after this new appointment was made, I was called into the CEO’s office to be told that he and the new Director of Finance and Administration had been discussing a particular matter and had decided on a course of action which they then conveyed to me. My input was obviously not of interest to them. This kind of episode turned out to be emblematic of what would continue to occur, from time to time, in the future. It seemed to indicate that artistic types needed to be carefully watched in case they made decisions which could potentially cost the organisation money and the best way of dealing with that was to head them off at the pass! This later became more apparent when administrative directors started regularly attending meetings of the Artistic Committee.
Hierarchical structures of management which place the CEO at the very top and give him power to oversee the operations of the entire organisation provide an opportunity for anybody who wants to put something forward to make their way to the CEO’s office, regardless of the nature of their submission. They go to the top because they know that this is where the real power resides and where decisions are made. In my time at the RAD, visitors to the CEO’s office included people who brought along artistic ideas or suggestions to discuss with him and rather than being re-directed to the Artistic Director’s office, they were usually welcomed and heard by the CEO. Sometimes I would be invited to join these discussions but at other times I had no input at all and sometimes didn’t even know that they had occurred until I got a recommendation from him that I should follow up on the idea or proposal which had been presented to him. This inappropriate behaviour, which shows little if any understanding of how the relationship between a CEO and an Artistic Director should work, is not typical of the behaviour of all CEOs. However, in the CEO model of management the opportunity for it to occur is always present. It is far less likely to occur in an alternative model of management in which the Artistic Director was on an equal footing with an Executive Director and where there was no CEO placed above either of them.
In my experience, claims by CEOs that they do not seek to have any influence over artistic matters have to be taken with a great deal of scepticism. Certainly, I observed it many times at the RAD. It was sometimes overt, at other times less apparent but it was nearly always there in the background. It was not usually based on direct interference in artistic matters – power usually works in more subtle ways than that – but when someone holds the purse strings, they are effectively in control of what goes ahead or doesn’t. Money makes decisions. Money almost always wins the argument. Teacher’s Courses at Headquarters, for example, had to be cost effective otherwise they risked being cancelled, or reduced in size. Sometimes there is no alternative, but decisions to cancel courses or to reduce the resources devoted to them should really be taken as a last resort, and should be based not only on cost effectiveness but on the value of the course itself and how important it is to the work of the organisation.
Teachers throughout the world constantly face the problem of cost effectiveness in the classes they provide. If they based all of their decisions on the number of class enrolments they had and whether the classes were cost effective, they would lose whole sections of their schools. They know that the income from one part of their school subsidises another part and the majority of teachers facing this situation are happy to cross subsidise and preserve both parts. If that is good enough for the majority of the Academy’s teachers, then why is it not good enough for the Academy itself? The Professional Dancer’s Teaching Diploma, which trains ex-professional dancers to be teachers – a vitally important service to the profession -was set to be cancelled some years ago, based on considerations of cost effectiveness, and was only saved by the efforts of the examiner who was in charge of it. Reluctantly, she restructured it, knowing that the only way to keep it going was to reduce it from a whole academic year to little more than a couple of months. To have something, she reasoned, was better than nothing at all. Thanks to her, and certainly not to the short-sighted outlook of those in charge at the time, that same course, which was due to be discontinued all those years ago, now continues to be rolled out, not only in London, but in several other cities in the world as well.
I have also observed that CEOs have more than a passing interest in who is appointed to, or relieved of artistic positions and in that way they can exercise an indirect but nonetheless huge influence on the artistic life of the organisations they lead. When they exercise a strong influence over who is appointed as Artistic Director, they can affect the way the Academy develops artistically for the whole tenure of that new director, which may last as long as twenty years. The last three appointments to the role of Artistic Director at the Academy have all been based on markedly different criteria – the first was appointed on a job description that fitted her like a glove; the second on the basis that the previous job description had never existed because he did not fulfil most of its criteria, and the third fulfilled none of it at all. These three very different appointments in less than 10 years indicates to me that there is a state of confusion about who the Academy wants to lead the organisation artistically or where they want it to go in the future. It may also reflect the fact that they don’t value the job as much as they should and therefore don’t place enough importance on finding the best possible fit for it. An artistic review of the Academy’s operations and future plans would seem to be something that should be undertaken as a matter of priority. How is it possible to construct a long-term artistic plan for the Academy when every few years there is a new artistic point of view?
The second CEO to be appointed to the Academy did have an interest and experience in the arts, albeit unrelated to dance, and decided fairly soon into his tenure that the Academy needed a different kind of culture. It was, he believed too rooted in its past (which initially he knew very little about) and had to be given a makeover, incorporating a brand new image and outlook more suited to the 21st century. In short, this new CEO had quite a major transformation of the Academy in mind. The business mindset continued. There was an attempt, for example, to grow the business and broaden the Academy’s horizons by looking outwards and forming an alliance with another large dance organisation based in the UK. This initiative, which was subsequently abandoned, would not, I am sure, have been supported by the majority of those involved in the artistic life of the Academy. They would have recognised that the proposed partnership was not a suitable one and there was little, if anything, to be gained by forming such an alliance. It was basically a business decision based on a desire to swim in a bigger pond. In my experience, when one organisation forms an association with another of a similar kind, there is a risk that it will lose a part of its own identity. Some of its individual strength may also be lost as there are usually compromises involved in forming associations of this kind. And surely the challenges of running one large organisation are considerable enough. Why add a layer of further complexity when there is so little to be gained?
In another attempt to open the doors and grow, and in a decision which again I doubt would have had widespread artistic support, particularly among examiners, the results of other organisations were deemed to be equivalent to RAD examination results and were therefore accepted for entry into the Academy’s own student examination system and teacher training programmes. What was to be gained by this other open-door policy? All examining boards have different syllabi, some of which are more difficult than others; they have different ideas about what is regarded as good, bad, and indifferent work, and different ideas about how examination work should be marked. Yet underlying this decision was the assumption that they were all the same and therefore interchangeable. Not so. The RAD has always prided itself on having the best standards of all the UK-based providers of examinations in classical ballet and on this basis, giving equivalent status to the examination results of other organisations does not make a great deal of sense. It says, in effect, that we are just like you, so come join us. This is not the way to go if you wish to be the premier provider of examinations with the best standards in terms of results. It does not strengthen the Academy. On the contrary, it could very well weaken it. It just adds to the numbers.
Underlying this issue, in common with most other issues in the management of the arts, is the debate about how much weight should be given to quantitative considerations, and how much to qualitative ones. There is always tension between these two matters and finding a resolution to that tension is always difficult. There is a real question in my mind about whether a CEO at the head of the RAD is the best way to deal with this problem. Typically, CEOs tend to evaluate proposals on the basis of quantitative rather than qualitative considerations and while they may give a hearing to the voices on both sides of the argument, once there is a determination on the part of a CEO to take a certain course of action, qualitative concerns can quite easily fade into the background. Sometimes, when major policy issues are being debated there are not enough people involved in the discussion who really know, with any depth, the artistic and educational implications of the issues involved let alone their historical context and significance. I have never thought, for instance, that there are enough artistic representatives on the Board of Trustees and when artistic matters are being considered they can be outvoted by other Trustees and Directors of the Academy who do not have the same level of knowledge or expertise about artistic matters. This situation is not an optimal one in terms of decision making in an organisation like the RAD.
Meanwhile, the number of administrative staff in senior positions continued to increase. Many of these – or even most of them – were appointed at the level of Director or Associate Directors. The most recent appointment carries the job title of Associate Director of Global Business Development, which says a lot about prevailing priorities. One has to wonder why a charity devoted to education and training in dance has to use the corporate language of big business when describing jobs in this way. This Director’s job is to promote more growth and expansion in an organisation which already has 36 offices and a presence in 85 countries around the world and which doesn’t have the resources, financial or otherwise, to properly service what they already have! And yet there is this perceived need to grow even more – as if bigger is always best – rather than first making an improvement on what already exists before moving on to any further development. The title of Head of Department, or something similar, was apparently not good enough to define the importance of these jobs to the organisation which, despite its charitable status and financial problems in the past, could apparently now afford all of these higher salaries. In the context of this proliferation of new Directors, the position of Artistic Director seemed to lose some of its pre-eminence being almost regarded as only one of the many other Directors in the lineup. He or she just had different duties, that’s all.
Read Part Two of this three-part essay.
John Byrne is a graduate of the University of Sydney (BA), the University of Westminster,(Postgraduate Diploma in Arts Administration) and the Professional Dancer’s Teaching Diploma, ARAD (RAD London) He worked at RAD headquarters in London from 1990 – 1994, for most of that time as Artistic Director and Chair of the Examining Board. He has had an extensive international career in teaching and examining classical ballet and is regarded as an elder of the classical dance community in Australia and one of its leading teachers and pedagogues.
In 1997 he established and was the founding director for 8 years of the Redlands Ballet and Dance Academy in Sydney now in its 28th year and under the direction of former Royal Ballet dancer, Gilly Revie.
He has created ballet syllabi for the RAD and for Classical Dance Australia, which he established in 2015. He has also written occasional dance criticism, feature articles and commentary on dance for many years.
