Supporting Gold Arts Award producers

In this blog we hear from Jennifer Blackwood, Creative Learning Coordinator the egg, Theatre Royal Bath, about how to support Gold Arts Award producers.

Our aim for running our Young Producers programme was to encourage young people to create events, projects and opportunities of their own and develop their own audience. Gold Arts Award is the perfect way to structure this. The Young Producers run @theegg events throughout the year for 14 – 19 year old's, focusing on a different theme for each event, including carnival, acoustic & spoken word, horror and film nights. The producers meet once a week before the event to learn how to and implement planning, marketing, liaison and research. The @theegg events are produced for a current young audience (14 – 19 year olds) and have sharing platforms for artists across multiple art forms.

Creating structure for your producers
As an adviser, it is valuable to plan your producers’ contact time, considering sessions dedicated to researching and contacting acts, rehearsing, marketing and understanding your organisation’s ways of working. It is important to set deadlines and reminders for your participants to ensure they work well as individuals and as a team to motivate each other. This will make it much easier to support their project management training and give them time and space to think artistically about what kind of event they would like to create.

We structure our Gold Arts Award programme around Unit 2 (leadership of an arts project) and weave Unit 1 (personal arts development) into sessions at a later stage. We find that creating a group of Arts Award participants around a date for an event helps them support each other and have time to develop their interests before embarking on Unit 1. It is worth slotting one-to-one catch ups through your Unit 2 sessions to build a picture of the individuals’ interests and research points of interest for their starting points.

We facilitated discussion early on after introducing the project to explore roles that were most suited to the individual. It’s important that each individual looks at their strengths and their interests to identify what role would best suit and would be most interesting to them; from Stage Manager to Lighting Designer. We had worked with all the participants before on other projects, so we had an idea of their strengths and interests. It’s crucial to assign them to specific roles as soon as possible to give them the confidence and ownership on their particular decisions and responsibilities.

Creative facilitation
Give the participants as much artistic and operative responsibility reasonably possible. It’s really important for them to understand the undertaking of it so that they feel they are taking artistic risks, that the audience is not guaranteed and that operative regulations are in place for a reason. If it fails, it’s a huge learning curve; if it succeeds, the sense of accomplishment is authentic!

Get them into a habit of discussing their personal artistic interests, experiences and ideas with each other on a regular basis; they will better understand why and how each individual contributes to the arts and to their project and their place within it.

To help them understand how their event could work, take them to an event, or a range of events. Get them to think about how the event worked while they are there, pick out aspects they would do differently and inspiration that they want to use for their event.

Creative evidencing
Here are a few ways of getting the evidence you need:

• Employing a photographer and briefing them fully on Arts Award (photos of individuals working in their role, on their event as well as the event and audience) is a valuable way to ensure you get the evidence needed.
• Have a Facebook group page to discuss the project outside of group sessions. It is a great tool to develop their own conversations and ask questions.
• Film them or ask them to film each other in break out groups during sessions and ask them to upload to the Facebook group.
• If you can add visual aids for discussion, such as post it note mapping or flipchart to upload to Facebook, it may help trigger memories of sessions.
• Give them a schedule at the start of the project to stick in their book with the content of the session, this will help them structure their learning along the way and while working on their portfolios at home.
• One of the participants can take minutes for the meeting to be shared on Facebook.
• Save a 10 minute slot in the session for writing in their diary.
• Create a progress sheet for each individual, it’ll make it easier to note reference for inspiration, progress quickly with decisions or shy away from responsibility!

Directions and strategies to consider for your organisation
@theegg events have been greatly invigorating for developing our 14 – 19 years audience and participation. It’s important to keep reminding your group that they are solely responsible for generating their audience; through their artistic choices and marketing strategies. Just like anyone creating their own piece of artwork, it is up to every individual to promote their work to people they know, share it as widely as possible and create something that people want to come to.

The events have made a valuable transition for groups of young people who would not normally participate in the same projects to work with each other. We invite other Arts Award groups to take on one night or perform at the event. We also feed our work experience, inclusion and youth theatre participants into the project. It’s a great way of meeting and working with other organisations.

Local Arts Award Supporters and other organisations are a really valuable tool to enable your organisation to fully extend your offer of art forms and expertise while making connections that would be useful for other projects and partnerships. By giving the participants a list of previous young artists we’ve worked with for headlining the event, we’ve created a feasible platform for our ‘Emerging Artists’ to practice their new material and be employed in their local area. The participants, audience and other acts receive great quality and inspiration ‘within their reach’ performance to round off their evening. Individuals that have shown their aptitude, project and event management skills have been employed by the egg and other companies, as well as having their own creative businesses on the side. Arts Award paves the way to real creative employability and business skills.