Circus Producer Fellowship
Fixed Term
Year One - £18,000 pa
Year Two - £22,000 pa

The Roundhouse has continually pushed boundaries in music and performance. Today it’s a space dedicated to nurturing creative young talent, as well as presenting an eclectic line up of music, theatre, dance and circus.

The Circus Producer Fellowship is an Arts Council England funded position for an up-and-coming Circus Producer to gain experience, support, traineeship and mentoring. The Fellow will work in-house for the Roundhouse CircusFest 2010 and 2012, as well as being placed with leading circus producers and commissioners.

For a full brief and application pack please email recruitment@roundhouse.org.uk, download from www.roundhouse.org.uk or phone Haleema Latif on 020 7424 9991 ext 449.

Deadline for applications is 5pm on Wednesday 17 February 2010.
Interviews to be held on week commencing Monday 22 February 2010.

Mintfest International Summer School for Street Arts.

Newly emerging professional street artists, or students of drama or theatre with an interest in working in the outdoors, are being offered the opportunity to spend a week working with leading national and international street artists to develop their skills and talents in the run up to Mintfest, 2010.

They will work on a show, created by their course tutor, which they will showcase at the end of the course to large audiences and industry professionals alike at Mintfest, Kendal’s International festival of street arts.

Now in it’s fourth year, Mintfest has already become one of the UK’s largest and most significant street arts festivals. It is a member of Without Walls, a consortium of 8 of the UK’s most strategically significant outdoor arts festivals, whose aim is to support the development and creation of outdoor work in the UK.

The week-long, residential course will take place in Kendal, Cumbria from August 29 - September 5, 2010.

The course is open to both UK and International artists and will cost £200, which includes all accommodation, tuition fees and meals. There will be a maximum of 30 places available, and demand is expected to be high, so people are advised to apply early.

The deadline for applications is 26 March 2010.

The Mintfest International Summer School for Street Arts is the first of its kind in the UK!

If you know of individuals who may be interested in taking part, or organisations who this information may be of interest to, please do forward the information on.

For an application form and information see the website: www.lakesalive.org.

Completed application forms should be returned to: Jenny Graham at Kendal Arts International jenny@kendalartsinternational.com.

Should you need any further information or have any queries please do not hesitate to contact Jenny on 01539 720252 or email as above.

Venues

Regional champions could send out a questionnaire to each venue in their region to assess whether that venue has an adequate knowledge of its building fabric and suitability for rigging points. This might flag up new spaces for circus-style work.

Marketing

Use advocates such as Lyn Gardner to encourage critics (in her words) “to be enablers of the new rather than gatekeepers of established cultural norms.” This could be a campaign by PR agencies prominent in the arts or a series of lunches for theatre critics at which their role is debated and discussed.

Train theatre critics in the vocabulary and language of Street and Circus performance. Look to replicate the young critic’s initiative currently run by Circus Arts Forum in other regions and sectors. Encourage attendance by a theatre critic to the Circostrada critics training, if it is run again.

Create training or a short seminar to create or share best practice in viral marketing techniques that can harness the interest in Street Arts and those taking photographs on mobiles and translate that interest into audience building. (This may be a suitable project for an audience development agency such as Audiences London as we are not aware of work currently carried out in this area.)

Replicate City Circ in other regions: City Circ is a new network of inner and outer London venues, and ‘alliance’ for contemporary Circus Arts in London. This could include a ‘curated’ season to firmly establish circus in theatres across a given region and allow marketing economies of scale for print and PR.

Work which will tour to other venues is more likely to get a review from a national newspaper as they can flag up later performances: PR agents and companies doing their own PR need to understand the requirements of national titles to provide them with information in order to maximise their chances of obtaining coverage.

Creation Spaces

Identifying hotels which are closely located to creation spaces and negotiate special deals for large groups and long term bookings.

Grants for Arts

Improve awareness within Arts Council at a regional level of the constraints of creating circus work. Any work with new equipment requires a number of weeks to master the rig before contemplating creating work. This translates into longer rehearsal times and relatively larger budgets when compared with theatre counterparts.

Consider the need for theatre specialists, such as dramaturges and directors in addition to circus and performance specialists in production teams. This will again make projects relatively more expensive and Grants for Arts assessors may need to be aware of this.

Encourage partnerships with local universities to add robust methodology to project evaluation. The new Street Art degree programmes (e.g. at Winchester) could be useful sources of collaboration for this.

Commissioning

A role for a central or brokered approach to commissioning - based perhaps on the Without Walls model - where a group of local authorities from diverse regions can collaborate to commission a large-scale outdoor piece of work which has a legacy or tour built in at the outset.

Create advocacy opportunities for ISAN, CAF, and NASA representatives to speak at important local government conferences and start a dialogue with local governments and encourage alliances that might commission large scale work.

Create a practical checklist for commissioners that covers key areas of risk, contractual requirements, a standard brief for bespoke commissions based on models of best practice from around the country or internationally.

Ensure transparency of available funding when advertising or seeking new commissions so that the level of available money is clear and people can tender realistically.

Create, in each region, a sustainable (possibly informal) network for local artists, producers and commissioners who can discuss and recommend ways to build investment in skills and infrastructure.

Develop a useful forum for the signposting of opportunities for emerging and existing artists and organisations: this could be online.

Create professional development for Local Authority Arts Officers to aid their progress from funder/buyer to commissioner. Again, this might be useful on a nationwide basis through collaboration with local government organisations.

2012

Ensure that there is an opportunity for international exchange and skills transfer where working with international companies on any large scale street and circus projects in connection with 2012 initiatives.

Promote the natural affinity between sport and the athleticism and discipline required in creating circus work and building circus skills. This could be emphasised by inviting all the region’s 2012 programmers to a Circus or Youth Circus event or festival and instigating conversation there.

There is no flying trapeze rig in a building in England: could there be a conversation with the ODA to see if, while building sports facilities for 2012, one or two buildings could include the rigging for a flying trapeze (two free-swinging trapezes) in a suitably large space. This would enable world-class circus skills to be developed.

Partnerships

Encourage companies or groups of companies in the same region to set up partnerships and alliances of widest possible nature: local authorities, government bodies, police, private sector and public sector, arts and education. This process is based on LIFT’s Business Arts Forum, described in “Changing the Performance” by Julia Rowntree.

“I am carrying out a piece of headline research about circus artists in
England . If you are a professional circus artist I would be very grateful if you could take a small amount of time to fill out a survey. The survey is being carried out on-line but I can forward paper copies to anyone who does not have computer access.

The link for the survey is:

HERE

The survey takes about 20 minutes to complete and the deadline is 5pm on Friday 27th September. All information is treated in strict confidence.”

Please forward this to anyone who you might be able to help.

Thanks!

Below are the notes from the flipchart sheets:

Commissioning Toolkit – Group 1

Commissioning Toolkit – Group 2

What would your suggestions be? Please add them in the comments below.

For your own copy of this document, please click here, for more about the East Midlands click here.

Here are the responses to the 3 questions asked by the facilitator on the day:

What do we mean by circus and street arts, in the context of outdoor arts?

What are the contexts in which this work is produced and presented?

What are the structures needed to support the development of this work?

Are there any you’d like to add?

To download this please click here for the PDF and for more on the North East click here.

Here are the responses to the 3 questions asked by the facilitator on the day:

What do we mean by circus and street arts, in the context of outdoor arts?

What are the contexts in which this work is produced and presented?

What are the structures needed to support the development of this work?

Are there any you’d like to add?

To download this please click here for the PDF and for more on the East Midlands click here.

The 12th Fira Mediterrània de Manresa moves forward in its programming for professionals

The programme for the 12th Fira Mediterrània de Manresa is now available at the website: www.firamediterrania.cat

From the 5th to the 8th of November, the most dynamic market of traditional performances, concerts and shows in the Mediterranean will welcome more than 200 professional acts and activities presented by 105 different companies. 43 of these shows will be works performed for the first time: 21 absolutely new, 8 new in Spain and 14 in Catalonia.

The promotion of scenic arts, circus and family concerts is just one of the mainstays of the 2009 market. One of the shows that has warranted the greatest interest is that by singer Souad Massi, the grand dame that perfumes Algeria through denouncing the situation of women in her country. She will perform at the Kursaal Theatre on Saturday, the 7th of November.

Registrations with discount until 10 September

“Don’t miss the chance to travel across the dreams with ROJO (Red). You’ll discover new worlds and languages.”

Let us know if you go along and what you thought…

For more about Catalan arts please see the website - www.catalanarts.cat

The Circus Development Agency has been set up by a group of people with a professional involvement in circus.

Our central resource is our website which is packed with useful information for artists, programmers, producers and the public about a range of information from health and safety to where to find artists to book – www.circusarts.org.uk

We send out a monthly newsletter to our members with listings, jobs, news and opportunities.

We also run monthly surgeries with key arts professionals within the industry which are open to all.

Our aims are:

Our advocacy work includes advising the media on their representation of circus, work at a European level as a member of the Circostrada Network and working with schemes such as Elemental in the UK.

For any enquiries please e-mail info@circusarts.org.uk or call 0207 0960999