State of the Arts 2012: Artists shaping the world

On Tuesday 14 February, over 500 people from the arts community came together at The Lowry in Salford to discuss The State of the Arts. Miriam O'Keeffe, Director of the BBC Performing Arts Fund was one of the delegates.

The Lowry Arts Centre has been a hub of arts activity in Salford since long before Media City was a twinkle in Peter Salmon's eye. Sitting across the quay and overlooking the new buildings, the Lowry was a great venue to host the first annual State of the Arts conference outside of London, hosted in conjunction with the BBC. As the BBC Performing Arts Fund will be making the move to Salford in October of this year, we got to try out our new office for a couple of hours as well.

The Lowry, Salford Quays

The theme of the conference was 'Artists Shaping the World' and this year 50 artists were awarded free bursaries to attend by the Arts Council, ensuring that artists and the arts were represented as talk about process and funding were centre stage. As everyone faces an uncertain future, the conversations kept coming back to the cuts and the choices that organisations and artists have to make with fewer resources. And the eternal question of 'what value the arts?'

Following the opening speeches I went to a session on Artists Shaping Communities. I was really inspired by the testimonies of other delegates working with arts in their local communities and the benefits of directly participating in the arts. We heard from choreographer Rosie Kay and Dan Thompson who orchestrated the riot clean up via Twitter as well as Liz Pugh from Walk the Plank on how working directly with communities, developing ideas together at a local level and how allowing local communities to have a say led to truly amazing work with long lasting impact. One of the pleas made in the sessions was that funders look at the amount of time required of organisations and artists to develop funding and project proposals.

Alan Davey, Chief Executive, Arts Council England

As the BBC Performing Arts Fund, we give directly to community groups such as choirs, dance groups and drama groups, so we have taken this on board. We are currently developing our grant schemes for 2012 which will focus on music groups and organisations and will endeavour to make the application process as straightforward and concise as possible. I was delighted to meet two people in the room who had received grants from us Zion Arts and Shilal Dance) and hear about the impact our grant had made.

Next week, the BBC and the Arts Council will announce the successful commissions for The Space.

Miriam O'Keeffe is Director, BBC Performing Arts Fund.

• State of the Arts was hosted by Arts Council England in conjunction with the BBC, Salford City Council, Manchester City Council and the British Council.
• Arts Council has archived all of the live-blogs curated during the State Of The Arts conference on Tuesday 14 February. The hashtag search SOTA12 includes comments from delegates. Hannah Nicklin has published a Flickr set of pictures from the event.
• Follow the BBC Performing Arts Fund on Twitter. The website and blog showcases previous winners and provides updates on their progress in the performing world.
• With the exception of the picture at the top of this post taken by Hannah Nicklin, all photographs in this post were shot by Richard Eaton.