Dancing in the dark

It is, to put it mildly, a bizzare way to decide the fate of a national arts company which continues to please audiences right across the UK and has drawn critical acclaim on tours as far away as Tokyo. If the curtains do come down for good, those forces within the Scottish Arts Council who believe classical dance is a

contemporary irrelevance and would rather spend Ballet's #2.1m annual budget on dance in a modern idiom with a socially-relevant message will have got their way. But the 100,000 people or more who have turned out, year-in year-out, to support Scottish Ballet's performances will go deprived of their favourite art form as the SAC goes off in search of an alternative audience which may not even exist in sustainable numbers.

Scotland, meanwhile, at the very moment that we are being asked to decide our constitutional future, will have lost a significant cultural symbol and one of those diverse national icons which are an indefinable - but critical - ingredient of international esteem and sustained economic success. It is no accident that, as well as the entertainment unions and the 50,000 signatories of a petition delivered to Downing Street this week, those lobbying more quietly for Scottish Ballet's survival include Crawford Beveridge, the chief executive of Scottish Enterprise, and a senior diplomat from the Japanese Embassy in London who, in a letter to Arts Minister Sam Galbraith, describes

Scottish Ballet's potential demise as ''a great cultural loss, not just for Scotland, but for the rest of the world''.

One thing is certain. If Scotland did have its own parliament, this issue would not now be being decided in such a backstairs, unaccountable, and devious fashion. Consider the facts. Last September the SAC's dance panel met Scottish Ballet for an in-depth discussion of the company's progress. I have seen copies of the minutes of that meeting. The panel concluded there had been ''a fundamental shift in the company's attitude''. Its conclusions were full of words like ''positive'' and ''encouraging''.

That, outsiders may be surprised to learn, was the last time the two groups met face-to-face. Yet that SAC panel - appointed and empowered

by whom is far from clear - is now proposing what amounts to a death sentence on

the company.

Clearly there has been a catastrophic breakdown in relations between the ballet company and the Council. The root cause was an initiative of the last Government - the National Companies Implementation Group - designed principally to encourage orchestra sharing between Scottish Ballet and Scottish Opera.

As a carrot to encourage them to swallow the long-term cost savings implied, Arts Minister Jamie Lindsay promised an extra #2.4m to be shared among Ballet and Opera and the two national orchestras, the RSNO and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

However, when Ballet took a long, hard look at the logistics of sharing musicians when both companies might be performing simultaneously, it found that its promised #300,000 share of the #2.4m would be more than swallowed up by new costs.

Its officers tried, in vain, to have these economic realities debated within the NCIG. When it persisted in its objections at the final meeting of the committee, in June, it was deemed to have ''walked out'' of the process and into the wilderness. Scottish Ballet's chair, Oona Ivory, insists to this day that she and her colleagues were told to leave. Since then events have escalated alarmingly.

Last month Ballet's application for #300,000 of National Lottery funding for a new production of The Magic Lamp was rejected by the SAC because ''your application does not fully meet the key criteria for this fund relating to financial viability''. Because of Ballet's ''withdrawal from the NCIG process'', the Arts Council letter went on, the additional #301,000 which the company was to have received as part of a year-old agreement to boost its core funding ''is now no longer available to it''.

In its death-by-a-thousand-financial-cuts approach to re-solving Ballet's fate, the SAC is now to consider a recommendation from its dance panel that the remaining core funding for the current year be withheld, a certain sentence of death. For someone like me, who has enjoyed Scottish Ballet's work for many years and has seen, at first hand, their artistic and commercial success, dancing for Scotland in Japan, what has happened since last September is an outrage.

Here we have the unaccountable, in the shape of the Arts Council dance panel, in full pursuit of the unacceptable - the demise of a national dance company, engineered through the secretive back door of arts politics. If Scottish Ballet, in the Arts Council's opinion, is no longer worthy of national status or continued financial support, its fate should have been subjected to a full, frank, and open review.

Magnus Linklater, Seona Reid, and the other members of the Arts Council board still have time to think again and open up their strategic rationale (including their artistic prejudices) to wider public scrutiny. If they don't, the Arts Minister Sam Galbraith, who has been notably silent as this tragedy has unfolded, should intervene.

Surely, on the eve of a brave new Home Rule settlement, Scotland is not going to settle for the wanton destruction of Scottish Ballet without publicly confronting the question: Do we need a national dance company and, if we do, what kind of dance company should it be? If Scottish Ballet does lose its battle tomorrow, one of the first acts of the new Scottish parliament should be to take the Arts Council to pieces and start again.