The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, announced on Monday the creation of a new general direction within his department that will assume part of the current competences of the National Institute of Performing Arts and Music (INAEM). It is “the first stone” of the integral reform of INAEM, long demanded by the sector. “Today is an important day. We finally launch this expected and necessary reform with a specific measure, ”said Urtasun, remembering frustrated attempts in previous legislatures to modernize an agency created just four decades ago and whose regulation has not only been obsolete, but often it is often Incompatible with artistic activity.
According to this regulation, INAEM powers are divided into two large areas. On the one hand, the promotion of performing and musical arts through subsidies for the sector, festivals, dissemination and internationalization activities, among other functions. The other great area is the production and exhibition of shows through institutions such as the National Dramatic Center, the National Classical Theater Company, the National Dance Company, the National Ballet of Spain or the National Orchestra and Choir of Spain. The new General Directorate of Performing Arts and Music, which already has the approval of the Ministry of Finance and Public Function, will assume all promotion competences, while the INAEM will be dedicated only to the management of the production and exhibition centers.
The new General Directorate will be created by Royal Decree and this semester will be operated, as the minister said. In parallel, work centers, unions and technicians for the elaboration of a new legal status for the INAEM that expedite management and facilitate tours, something that is very complicated with the current system is continued. The current director of the INAEM, Paz Santa Cecilia, will continue to direct the agency and will also be at the head of the new general direction to “guarantee coherence” throughout the transformation process, Urtasun explained.
This second process will be long, Santa Cecilia has warned, but both she and Urtasun have stressed that whatever the legal model adopted by the new INAEM, “it will remain 100% public”, thus clearing the fear expressed by the sector that is become a foundation or something similar. “The important thing, beyond the resulting legal system, is to provide it with more resources to streamline and adapt the management of production centers to artistic activity,” according to Santa Cecilia. The rigidity of the current regulation has generated complications of all kinds and has forced patches that have sometimes generated new problems: delays in workers’ payments, rock hiring processes, strikes or the impossibility of tours.
Waiting for this reform to conclude, Urtasun has insisted that the creation of the new general direction will have immediate effects because it will be accompanied by an increase in specialized material and human resources that will improve the efficiency in the management of all departments. This translates, for example, in the speeding of the processing of subsidies to the sector, subject to a bureaucracy that involves true torture for professionals. “We are going to gain administrative muscle. Before addressing the legal reform of INAEM we give ourselves with an administrative reform, so that everything is done in the best conditions, ”said Urtasun.
Santa Cecilia has also explained that the General Directorate will integrate a dance dissemination office, another demand in the sector, which becomes a reformulation of the National Dissemination Center for the Dance announced in 2018 by the then director of the INAEM, Amaya de Miguel , with the aim of promoting mobility and internationalization of Spanish creation in the discipline. Then the creation of a National Dance Theater was also announced, a project that is not contemplated in this legislature, according to Santa Cecilia.
They will also leave INAEM and the two institutions dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage will be integrated into the new general direction: the Center for Documentation of Performing Arts and Music and the Performing Arts Museum.