Keeping tango alive

If the city of Buenos Aires had a soundtrack, it would no doubt be filled with tango music. The emotionally-charged music and dance style, which emerged from a mixing of European, African, and indigenous cultures in the 19th century, has become the Buenos Aires’ trademark (at least for outsiders like me), lending form to a sense of nostalgia often associated with porteño culture. When I had the opportunity to spend a few months working in Buenos Aires in 2007, I made a point of visiting a few of the city’s established milongas and even took a few dance lessons. Yet, in my conversations with young artists, writers, and musicians, most expressed little interest in the tango tradition—that was their grandparents’ music.

In 2009, the cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo joined forces to nominate the tradition of tango to the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The list comes out of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage, a UNESCO instrument designed to protect and revitalize culture traditions or living cultural expressions such as oral traditions, performing arts, and festive events. As signatories to the 2003 Convention, States Parties are committed to safeguarding and revitalizing identified intangible heritage in their territories.

So, how does one safeguard and promote the intangible cultural heritage? The Convention itself does not provide specifics, but does state that Parties should report on legislative, regulatory and other measures taken every six years. Last week, at an event hosted by the Americas Society, I had the opportunity to ask Buenos Aires’ Minister of Culture, Hernán Lombardi, what steps Argentina was taking to promote the tango.  He outlined a four-pronged strategy: ensure the existence the traditional tango ensemble, the Orquesta Típica, through festivals and competitions; preserve and disseminate tango scores; promote the production of the bandoneón, the instrument that lends the tango its signature sound; and spark young people’s interest in tango by integrating tango music and dance into school curricula. He added that the best way to interest young people in tango was to link it to the possibility of romance. Lombardi’s office also supports a major annual festival dedicated to tango in both its traditional and contemporary expressions, Tango Buenos Aires.

Have these policy efforts paid off in breathing new life into the tango tradition? I couldn’t find any details of the the Ministry's strategy online, or how much it costs to implement, but will be looking for Argentina’s UNESCO report in 2015.

Portugal and the creative economy

I wanted to share this article from Der Spiegel Online on the struggles of Portugal's contemporary artists. It was written by my friend, Caille Millner, and discusses Portugal's lacking public support for culture and the ways in which local artists are responding to this reality. In the article, Portugal's former Minister of Culture, Jorge Xavier Barreto, is quoted as saying that most governments regard culture as an expense instead of an investment. In many European nations, however, this is no longer the case.

The cultural policy discourse I picked up on this year in Europe was about the arts as an investment, and an economically viable one. This discussion falls under the rubric of the creative and cultural economy or the creative industries. Not only are the creative industries increasingly a priority for domestic cultural policy (in Germany, the Federal Initiative on the Cultural and Creative Economy) and EU-wide cultural initiatives (the European Commission's recently unveiled Creative Europe program), support for the creative industries is a focus of many European countries' foreign cultural policy and development assistance (see GIZ's Kultur und Entwicklung or the British Council's Creative and Cultural Economy program).

In a recent report from the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, Cultural and Creative Industries in Germany 2009, which charts the economic impact of the creative industries, these are identified as a growth industry that out-weathered several other major sectors during the financial crisis.

Such is the excitement around the creative economy as the new frame for cultural policymaking that artists and policy experts are sounding the alarm over the over-economization or instrumentation of the arts. That said, by closing its Ministry and dismissing the arts as an expense, Portugal could be missing out on some real opportunities to invest in its creative sector and even benefit from new EU funding programs.

Thanks, Caille, for bringing us the story from Portugal.

Re-thinking ‘World Music’

Singer Mariana Sadovka Photo by Kluczenko

Last Friday I was in Cologne to hear a panel discussion on the topic of world music sponsored by the regional public radio station WDR 3. The speakers, key players in Cologne’s performing arts and cultural policy scene, traded comments about the changes taking place in the field of contemporary music and the need to provide training and exposure to young musicians that would build their global music sensitivity and fluency. At the forefront of the discussion was a proposed Center for World Music envisioned for Cologne. The initiative is being spearheaded by Alba Kultur, a Cologne-based nonprofit devoted to promoting global music productions whose founder spoke passionately about the project. Though some questions were raised about the feasibility of such a center, there was a general consensus among the panelists that the project was a worthy one.


The panel was made up of senior-level professionals presenting expert opinions framed within the context of their respective institutions (UNESCO National Commission, contemporary music and dance schools, nonprofit organization, radio station). Though interesting, the discussion lacked the voice of a professional musician, particularly one that plays the non-western music in question. This shortcoming was somewhat remedied by a lively Q&A session during which several musicians spoke up about their personal experiences. One musician insisted that cross-cultural and international music was happening on its own, without the help of formal institutions and cited his experience getting involved in klezmer music. Another musician, from Argentina but having lived and worked in Germany for much of his career, made a similar point, stressing the need for spaces to perform and reach audiences over the need for research, theories and institutions dedicated to world music.

Exploring art’s radius

“The participation in an act of creativity enables people to think and feel outside of their realities.” These words from Basma El Husseiny, an arts manager and cultural activist in Egypt, set the tone for the Radius of Art conference hosted by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin in February.

Participants at the Radius of Art conference in Berlin

Attended by over 250 artists, policy makers, researchers, educators and funders from around the world, the conference sought to open an international dialogue on the effects of art and culture on social transformation. Panel discussions, workshops, and artist presentations addressed four themes—Art for Social Transformation, Public Art, Art toward Cultures of Sustainability, and Cultural Policy Strategies and Funding Structures.

I was fortunate to be able to attend with my colleagues from the German Commission for UNESCO and to present on a panel on artists at risk with my former colleague from freeDimensional, Todd Lester.

Several key questions emerged over the course of the two-day conference: What power relationships precondition the funding and support of socially-engaged art, particularly when dealing with North to South development and cooperation policy? How can we talk about arts in the public and political sphere in a language that is understandable by all its agents and stakeholders? In a time of urgent ecological and social problems, what role does creativity play? How can policies and funding structures be supportive without risking limiting art’s existence to a prescribed set of functions? At times, the questions in the air and the diversity of both perspectives and positions of the attendees, resulted in (for me) disorienting cacophony.