As many of you know, I have been inviting thoughts and comments from artists interested in the future of Artist Development at NTW...I hope you will think this is an exciting new development. I’m very keen to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Over the past 18 months, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with artists, about all kinds of stuff: their work, what they make, why and how they make it, the things they feel they do because they are excited and compelled to do and the things they find themselves doing because its a way of financially supporting what they really want to be doing. We’ve also been talking about all the things no one ever told them they would need to learn in order to be an independent (and often self-producing) artist. Examples? Being good at budgets. Understanding public liability insurance, licenses and contracts. Tax. The list is a long one, and I’m sure you each have your own.
In an effort to try to demystify some of these things, we are going to launch a new pilot of work - ‘Artist Huddles’, to support the development of skills contributing towards professional lives of artists, beyond the rehearsal room (or up a mountain, where ever you may be).
WalesLab will curate an event to be hosted at a partner venue across the country - a Huddle. Each will feature at least two talks on a particular subject such as:
The content of each talk:
To get the ball rolling, I’m going to programme the first two talks but then I am really keen to hear from the artists community directly so that we can programme the content of the Huddles together. The subjects will be quite specific - we can’t, (and nobody would want to...surely) try to cover everything known about finance in one go!
The artist community via the NTW Community will program the talks for each event. Each talk will be given by a member of the NTW staff or a visiting expert in the field. You can let me know what subject you’d like to be covered in the comments section below. Remember to keep it specific if you can….
The Partners:
It’s fantastic to have such brilliant partners on board for this work. They are: Chapter Arts Centre, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru and Pontio. Each partner organisation will have the opportunity to offer a talk on the ways in which that organisation currently supports artists and how they would like to see that relationship grow.
If you can't make all the Huddles in person, don’t worry, we’ll be live streaming each of them online and hosting a copy of the talk on our website for future reference; a resource you can return to time and again.
The Huddles will be rounded off with a session of 1-2-1 surgeries hosted by members of NTW Staff, the host organisation and any visiting experts at the huddle. This is your chance to ask the questions you've always wanted to ask.
Not all the dates are confirmed yet, so keep an eye on the WalesLab group for updates, and please get in touch to tell us which subjects we should be focusing on.
‘Huddles’ has been supported by Esmee Fairbairn and ACW.
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This is a superb initiative. I can't wait to get involved.
A discussion of balancing might be a good one - as Terry Pratchett once put it art is not there to earn money, it's what you spend money on. With artists having to work to make money to live on, perhaps something on balancing those two things would be useful.
I hope there'll be a session in Aberystwyth.
Hi everyone - glad that this is getting a brilliantly positive response.
Thanks Paul for the your suggestion. Anybody else got any thoughts on what they would like to hear people talk about?
sx
Hi Simon, this sounds fantastic. I am particularly interested in the 'How to diversify your income streams' and role of the producer topics.
P
Looking forward to hearing what subjects artists suggest for the talks over the 4 events - always great to have lots of input into events like this.
x
Brilliant! Good work, keep us posted
Sounds fantastic!x
Great initiative, Simon.
It reads like a sound effort to dismantle a seeming wall of "admin issues" into simpler tasks to tackle, with support from good, generous people. Well done for thinking of artists/companies at all stages of development, too - we could certainly do with help in some areas.
Looking forward to hearing how it grows . . .
Jx
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