English

The Barbican Centre is one of the major concert venues in London. It launched a new educational division, Barbican/Guildhall School Creative Learning, in collaboration with the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in autumn 2009. What has the new alliance brought to the Barbican?

The Barbican Centre in London is Europe's largest multi-arts venue, which comprises the 1949-seat Barbican Hall, the 1166-seat Barbican Theatre, the 200-seat Pit Theatre, a cinema, two art galleries, seven conference rooms, two exhibition spaces, a public library, restaurants and cafes. It is the home of the resident orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and also welcomes many top class orchestras and artists from all over the world. About 860,000 people attend about 3700 events per year, and far more people visit the venue to spend time in its open space, restaurants and library.

As you can see from the composition of the building, the activities of the Barbican range from music, theatre, film, and the visual arts to cross-artistic contemporary art. Numbers of events and attendance, and the proportion of the income from each genre is as follows (from the Barbican annual report: 2009-2010):

from the Barbican annual report: 2009-2010
	events	attendance
Music	261	351,217
Theatre	333	134,296
Art	5	169,928
Cinema	2,860	191,051
Creative Learning	220	16,453
Total	3,679	862,945

The idea of the centre arose in the 1950s from the ashes caused by the bombing during WWII, to revive the city of London. It opened on the 3rd of March 1982, almost 30 years ago. The space for the venue is provided by the City of London Corporation, along with funding of over 50% of its income every year. The rest of the income comes from direct arts income, fundraising from the Arts Council England, other trusts and foundations, and donations by companies and individuals.

Barbican/Guildhall School Creative Learning was formed by uniting the former, 12-year-old Barbican Education with Guildhall Connect next door. Mr Sean Gregory of the Guildhall School stepped up as Director of Creative Learning, and 17 staff members in the team work on both the Barbican and the Guildhall education programmes.

Having a long-term goal 'to create the model of tomorrow's international arts and learning centre', Creative Learning aims to 'develop a range of world-class creative learning programmes, involving music, theatre, visual arts, cinema, dance, literature', and to 'reach out to new audiences and demonstrate the power creative learning has to add value to our experience of all the arts'.

The people in which it aims to 'inspire a deep and life-long relationship with the arts' is everyone, including the artists, enthusiasts, practitioners, audience members, and anyone who has the potential to be one of them. It is impressive that the attitude of the Barbican as a whole towards Creative Learning is that it is not merely a division of the art programmes at the Barbican, but something that 'underpins every aspect of' its programmes.

Report: Chigusa Futako