A Look in the Mirror

As part of this reflective blog series, I will be focusing on my time as an associate artist with The Mighty Creatives for the Emerge Festival in 2019.

‘Emerge was funded by spirit of 2012. This funding enabl[ed] the programme to deliver 24 festivals over 3 years.’ The Mighty Creatives, Emerge Festivals

This festival work was the beginning of my work within the events industry and one of the core experiences that developed my interest in the study of it. The festival is structured to be in two parts, a mentoring process for young creatives working within the midlands of England on the correct form of a community event, and the curation of a single-day festival by local community groups within culturally impoverished areas of the country. Throughout the time we had with the groups, we would introduce forms of creativity to them and give them the opportunity to expand their knowledge and use these skills to generate content for the final performance day.

My self-titled role as producer for my Theatre company’s version of the festival involved liaising with key shareholders, organising the logistics of the festival, and producing key operations documents such as risk assessments and operational manuals. Much of this role involved speaking with The Mighty Creatives and following their clear set plan for the logistics of the festival, whilst also incorporating the creativity of the participants and local community.

The hope of the festival was to bring a togetherness to the communities we worked with via outreach projects, and to give young people in the area a chance to engage with the creative sector in a way they perhaps were not used to. Our purpose as a creative team was to facilitate work made by and for the young people, and to curate the art produced into a full festival based around the works and life of Shakespeare. One key problem to overcome in this festival was the organic growth of the interest and participation by the community in Sandwell.

Clarke and Jepson state that one of the main failings of community events is lack of engagement for spectators claiming that engagement is ‘strongly evident and easily recognizable within friend/family groups at all community festivals, but minimal between unacquainted peers sharing demographic similarities when attendees were primarily spectators.’(2014,20).

This was particularly important with our festival in Sandwell as there was a large divide between the academy we worked with and the local council-supported community group. As our time with them grew longer there was a clear divide in the culture and community between the two groups. This caused friction within the organisation of the festival and with the individual stakeholders we had set up within each of the two groups. Though this was a consistent issue we found it difficult to eliminate this despite intervention from The Mighty Creatives. As this course block moves forward, I would like to analyse the steps we took with this festival and determine what changes could have been made to improve the outreach and cohesion of the Festival, whilst also evaluating my own creative practice.

References

The Mighty Creatives. ‘Emerge Festivals’

Available at: https://themightycreatives.com/what-we-do/programmes/emerge-festivals/

[Accessed 01/02/22]

Clarke,A.Jepson,A. Exploring Community Festivals and Events.Oxon:Routledge.