Michael Reckord, Sunday Gleaner Writer

Jamaica's enormous cultural power is to be further enhanced locally and internationally through a Visual and Performing Arts Jamaica project now on stream.

Cofunded by the Government and the European Union, the project encompasses approximately 100 organisations, institutions and individuals working as a "cluster" to "encourage the establishment, growth and competitiveness" of cultural enterprises.

According to cluster facilitator, Trevor Fearon, a recent study indicates that seven per cent of the island's gross domestic product flows from our creative industries, primarily music.

Speaking at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts' General Assembly at the start of the Easter semester, Mr Fearon said that the figure showed that culture brought the country more financially than agriculture.

Aim of cluster projects

He told the gathering - college administrators, lecturers and students from the schools of dance, drama, art and music - that the visual and performing arts cluster catered to those in theatre, dance, film and television and the visual arts. The 'mighty music industry', he said, had its own cluster.

He stressed that the cluster project's aim is not to directly stimulate or advance the growth of the arts and culture, except in a broad sense. It was specifically to promote the culture's business component.

The cluster asks, for example, how creative producers could be assisted nationally and internationally to optimise their earnings, given the "opportunities for leverage provided by Brand Jamaica?"

"As a marketing person, I ask: Are our creative producers taking advantage of the strong brand that exists? The truth is in most of the segments - dance, the visual arts and theatre - perhaps less so in film and TV, many of the creative producers consider what they do to be a part-time undertaking. They're not looking at what they do as feasible professional options," Fearon said.

"That causes a problem in leveraging their business professionally using Brand Jamaica. If they work part-time, they are perhaps being driven by love for the art, and in terms of being an economic force, that doesn't take us far."

Influencing competitiveness

Fearon said that in trying to influence the competitiveness of those persons and institutions that desire to be more business like, the cluster had organised itself into work groups to try and "influence both policy and the creation of wider economic opportunities".

The work groups are marketing and research, finance and fund-raising, training, lobbying and advocacy and website and database development. He briefly described the aims of each group.

Marketing and research aims at getting detailed information on the marketing opportunities that exist for the island's creative producers. Persons in filmmaking, he said, have found it difficult to get financing for their products because they've been unable to tell potential financiers what the prospective markets are for their films - who the audiences are and where they are, for example.

The same is true of practitioners of theatre, the visual arts and dance, Mr Fearon said, revealing that data would be collected from communities of the Diaspora in the first place, but also from other related communities that might have an affinity towards such products.

Finance and fund-raising will try to access funds, Mr Fearon said, stating that in recent years funding for creative projects has become more available than might have been the case before. Some of these funds have originated from the agreements between the countries of the European Union (EU) and the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries.

Primary beneficiaries

However, Fearon said that in his view, the primary beneficiaries of these funds have been African, because "Africans are more tapped into the system".

It was his hope that this would change.

Mr Fearon pointed out a problem: most of the funding sources require that beneficiaries be "formal enterprises", which, he said, "immediately rules out most dancers, most artists, most theatre persons", as they are not in formal businesses.

Lobbying and advocacy is involved in working on agreements with other countries, including trade agreements, for the benefit of our artists.

Mr Fearon pointed out that member countries of the EU might have different definitions of the term "musician", and one might refer to someone who has trained for three or four years in an educational institution. That would limit the ability of many good Jamaican musicians to perform in some of these countries, he pointed out.

He suggested that the recent Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) negotiations did not adequately address the creative industries, and hinted that the creative community in Jamaica was partly to blame.

Trade agreements are negotiated between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade (or the Regional Negotiating Machinery where regionwide trade is concerned) and the different foreign countries, he said, and creative producers must let the ministry know what they want to be put into an agreement.

Negotiating with Canada

"We're now negotiating an agreement with Canada, the successor to Caribcan," he said, "and we now have the opportunity to influence what goes into the agreement about how the Canadian authorities treat our artists and artistic products."

Training aims at "bringing a level of professionalism to the products," Mr Fearon said. In the project, work is being done with professionals "to get the best of our creative people learning from the best and trying to disseminate that within the cultural community".

He mentioned that after working with a scriptwriter from the US, "a writer's group has been able to secure a commitment from a local production house to take a collaboratively written product on to the screen in the near future."

In two months, a team of television producers will be going "to the world's biggest market place for television products", he said. The aim is to see if there are Jamaican features (including documentaries) that can gain access to that large market.

Another plan is to develop a trade expo of the visual and performing arts. Among those to be invited to that expo, he said, would be hoteliers, some of whom, though they are reluctant to employ Jamaican dancers, bring in foreign ones for shows.

Answering a question from the audience after his talk, Mr Fearon acknowledged that the process for applying for foreign funding, especially from the EU, is complex and arduous, but help is available through the project.

He said that creative producers in the four main sub-groupings were welcome to contact him at Jamaica Trade and Invest for information or to make an input.