Thanks Ruth Archer. That's a very cogent synopsis of the pertinent issues. (note to self: Hope I get an un-dictionary for Christmas).

Dick,

To answer your queries, I think the grant from Sport England is in the region of £15,000 but I haven't the time to find the published yearly report with the accounts as I'm trying to pack my bags for a trip to Australia on Monday.

I'm not quite sure why you think the figure to be relevant. I don't think it helps you very much as it's just an input into the education budget and doesn't necessarily map directly onto the Society's investment in promoting dance.

Likewise, if you look at the accounts, there is no budget line for 'dance' and similarly no budget line for 'song'. There's no reason why they would be broken down in that way. So it's difficult to give you a meaningful answer.

If you remember my previous post, I stated that over the past two years we had published five song books and a song CD as opposed to one dance book and two dance CDs. Logic would dictate that we had invested more in song than in dance in that period. There will be other comparisons buried in our activities but it would be very time consuming to extract them. So that's the best answer I can give you.

With regard to the idea of promoting song, I'll add to Ms Ruth Archer's comments and say that a concert at C#H doesn't constitute 'promoting song'. It entertains a limited number of people who are able to attend a London concert. It doesn't improve their singing skills and although it might give them some songs to copy it doesn't really add to their repertoire.

The same could be said of dances which is how you started this thread.

When _I_ think about promoting song I think about a number of resourcing initiatives like providing singers with books of raw material, CDs of performers who illustrate style and technique, enabling workshops, preferably nationwide, where people can address things like voice development, style, repertoire, performance, recording techniques, etc etc. Similar thing with dance.

In this, it is important to not just assist people directly, but to also 'train the trainers' so that the skills permeate further into the culture. It's the old adage, "give them wheat and you feed then today, teach them to grow wheat and you feed them for a lifetime' - corny (forgive the pun) but true.

This is where I personally want the Society to concentrate its efforts and at all levels from school children to pensioners. To be honest, this is the sort of issue I expected you to raise, rather than a quantitative analysis of how much we are spending on one or the other.

J