​2021 was another tumultuous year for most, but we were fortunate enough to continue to have each other and our lovely networks, which we’re pretty pleased with. We got supercolds, spent more time on zoom than our new year's resolutions would have been happy with, Laura had a 3 month burnout period and Ash moved to Brighton. We feel alright as of December 15th, thanks for asking. 

Despite the stop-start nature of life mid-Covid, we fundraised £513,198 for independent artists, an average grant of £14,255.50.

We also produced some fantastic work this year:
Stomach Full - Rachael Young
The Rising Sun R+D - David Shearing
Out of the Frame R+D - Connor Bowmott + Regan Mott
24 Italian Songs & Arias + Voices - Brian Lobel
BINGE - Brian Lobel
Medusa Reclusa R+D - Lauren John Joseph
He’s Dead - Marikiscrycrycry
Prada in the Rain R+D - Marikiscrycrycry
REGNANT - Xavier de Sousa

We gave direct support to 32 creatives through advisories, mentoring and consultancy. This has enabled us to meet some brilliant folks all over the country, to help with their strategic planning, business planning, fundraising and sustainable development. 

As part of our ACE-funded Producing for the End of the World we delivered free Arts Council Project Grants and DYCP workshops to over 70 individuals. We’ll be doing more on this project in 2022. 

We launched OPEN DOORS: The Real Cost of Artist-Led Spaces with East Street Arts, the beginning of a campaign we’ll be doing a lot more work on in 2022. 

We taught brilliant future artists at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Rose Bruford College, London Studio Centre and Middlesex University. This ranged from delivering an entire Festival module to delivering one-off lecturing on fundraising, producing and collaborative practice. 

We delivered further facilitation with professionals, early-career practitioners and young people with East Sussex Arts Partnership, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Theatre Bristol, Producer Gathering and The Committee at The Yard. Through these we explored money, value and sustainability. 

We were fortunate enough to work with Eve Veglio-Hüner during her LSC placement and as Assistant Producer following that.

23% of the work we did in 2021 was unpaid. As freelancers, having a quarter of our time as unpaid is unsustainable and we will continue to challenge the culture of this and explore ways for this time to be compensated for ourselves and others. 

2021 has basically been 2020 v2 for everyone and we hope that you got through it as unscathed as possible. We’re tired, you’re tired. Let’s have a bloody break and then see what 2022 has to offer.

Ash + Laura x

We're very pleased to be working with powerhouses Malik Nashad Sharpe and Xavier de Sousa on their upcoming performances in London and Manchester. Find out more below and hopefully see you there!

REGNANT - Xavier de Sousa
HOME Manchester
​27 November, 3-9pm
£20 whole show // £6 per hour slot // concessions available, book here

REGNANT is a new theatre performance, a dinner party with the guests diving into how we interact with each other within the context of migration and belonging. It is composed live with you, our guests, and patrons. Almost all the materials present on stage, from the pottery to the decoration and the food, have been created by hand for you.

As your hosts, we invite you to join us at the dinner table, get merry, make friends and explore structures of power within local communities and how they influence how we shape our collective future.

In REGNANT, Xavier expands the dinner-party setting of his previous show, POST, to think more broadly about collectivity, community and privilege within the performance space and in the development of the narrative itself. This performance will include a variety of local guests and co-performers, who will be turning up across the duration of the piece.

​UPDATED on 17th Nov: we've removed our template as ACE finally have their own one now!! Download here.

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​This might be useful if you are planning to apply as soon as the new applications open on 22nd November, or if you just want to see how different the application looks.

Just a note on dates: any under £15k apps must be submitted by 19th November 2021, otherwise it will be an under £30k app from 22nd November so plan wisely!

​READ THIS NOTE BEFORE USING: 
This template is created based on the guidance released from ACE on 2nd November 2021 and is only a makeshift version of a template to help understand what the application in Grantium *might* look like – as it hasn’t opened yet I can’t guarantee that it will be formatted exactly as below but hopefully this is close and can help us to get our heads around the many, many changes!

We'll add an updated template when we can access the form in Grantium, so more soon!

We're super excited to announce that Brian Lobel's beautiful project 24 Italian Songs and Arias has been reimagined as a digital archive of 24 interpretations of those 24 songs. It has been created with support from Gweneth Ann Rand and Allyson Devenish who are also part of the show, and has been commissioned and made possible by University Musical Society (UMS) at the University of Michigan.

Taking the famous book as a starting point, 24 international singers have been invited to offer their interpretations and share their stories on their journey to finding their voice. Brian and friends also ask you to submit your own versions, because we really want to hear what you've got, and it's polite to share!

www.24italiansongs.org

Today we're launching a UK wide survey for studio holders in artist-led spaces. 

This survey marks the beginning of a longer term collaboration with East Street Arts. At this time it will focus on gaining a deeper understanding of the labour hours and associated costs to individuals that goes into running artist-led studios, a vital part of the arts ecology.

Artist-led studios are often nimble and reactive, but entirely reliant on those who make up the collective or membership cohort to function day-to-day. While there are anecdotal explanations for why many artist-led spaces find it difficult to be sustainable or even grow, at this point we want to avoid making any assumptions.

Who can fill this out?
This survey intends to collect data from artists and arts workers who identify as part of an artist-led space. Our use of the word art and artist is not discipline specific.

If you have a studio that you do not consider to be artist-led, or if you do not currently have a studio, you can still fill in some of the questions that should appear as relevant to you, as comparative data will still be very useful for us.

Definitions
The term artist-led to describe who you are and what you do means different things to different people. We are using the term artist-led studios to include those that:
- Have artists at every level of decision-making and of their governance structure. Practicing artists lead on all decision making.
- Are independent, DIY and grassroots organisations that include artists in their make-up on some level.

The survey is anonymous. At the end of the survey you will be given the option to enter a prize draw for up to £50.00 in vouchers for Village Books (a Leeds based independent bookshop) at which point you will be asked for your email address. This is on a separate link which cannot be connected to your survey answers, so the survey answers will always remain anonymous.

The survey will take approximately 6 minutes to complete. 

Access
If you have any questions or require access support to fill in the survey, please contact us or call the East Street Arts office to arrange a meeting on 0113 248 0040.

​FILL IN THE SURVEY HERE
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​​We're pleased to announce that we are partnering with East Street Arts on OPEN DOORS: The Real Cost of Artist-Led Spaces - a collaborative campaign to understand the barriers that artist-led spaces face in achieving and maintaining sustainability.

It will focus on gaining a deeper understanding of the labour hours and associated costs to individuals that ensures the running of these spaces, as a vital part of the arts ecology.

Over the next few months, more activity as part of this campaign will be announced, including information on events and ways to contribute to this conversation.

Connect with us on social media for more updates:
​@_TheUncultured_ and @EastStreetArts

​Written by Ash
[Length: 6.5 mins]

The funding landscape has been looking even more arid since the pandemic, unsurprisingly. While there have been some innovations in how support might reach individuals such as Strike a Light’s Let Artists Be Artists, on the whole the system is based in competitive, zero-sum game cap-in-hand applications. As individuals we’re an unpaid workforce in an unregulated market spending days at a time writing explanations for why we need money, knowing that each time we win there are many, many more who lost. 

They say the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at maths. In fact, it’s likely a tax on the poor, the desperate, the ones in need. 

A lottery ticket costs £2 for an entry with very, very unlikely odds of winning millions at best. Competing for funding in the current application-focused structure costs vastly more in unpaid writing time, and while the odds are better, it will likely be for a few thousand at best. Around 1 in 5 eligible applicants were awarded DYCP in round 9, while 1 in 7 entries into a 49 number lottery will get 2 numbers correct. You don’t get any money for 2 numbers, but you do get a free lucky dip, giving you another crack at it. Under current rules you are only allowed 2 goes at an ACE DYCP. Even as a seasoned DYCP writer it takes me around 2 days to write a DYCP application. It takes around 45 seconds to buy a lottery ticket if you’re already in the shop, so somewhere in that equation cost/labour wise you might not necessarily have totally better odds at the lottery, but you could certainly get a ticket and repurpose the time you would have spent writing an application doing some actual paid work. 

A bursary, derives from the Latin for bag or purse. It’s just a chunk of change to enable someone to live and get on with the stuff they need to do. We all need this, all of the time. We spend so much time scrapping around for money to make work, to show work, to see work, to go to work, to pay for someone to care for our children while we work. We all need a bag of money that alleviates all this wasted money-searching labour so we can just get on and actually work. So, I don’t know how bursaries are assessed. I’ve not sat on an awarding panel, and so I’ve never been given the information on how someone can say who should receive that bag of money and who shouldn’t. Who should feel relief, and who should feel like they didn’t ask nicely enough. Who should feel the comfort of knowing bills are paid for long enough to focus on their actual work, and who should feel like they wasted their precious time on this earth writing a begging letter to a room full of salaried people who don’t know or can’t remember how it feels to wonder if you have enough money to see you through to the end of the financial year. 

We wrote two lots of two bursaries into our Producing for the End of the World project and then realised we didn’t know how to give them out at a time when every freelancer just needs money. Money to work, money to be able not to work. So we decided to give out 4 bursaries of £600, specifically for producers, on a lottery basis. They just needed to send us a CV by way of entry, which we only checked to make sure they were actually producers in the Live Art/performance sector. If they were, they were eligible and were entered in. 

In the first round, for self-identifying early career Live Art/performance producers we had 56 applications and did a random number generator on google. This lottery selected Natalie Chan and Beccy D’Souza. We’ve done some mentoring with these folks as well which has hopefully been helpful, although the money will have probably just compensated their time doing this mentoring. 

In the second round, for self-identifying mid-career and established Live Art producers we had 21 applications and again did a random number generator on google. This time it selected Siân Baxter and Rafia Hussain. We actively invited applicants to spend the money on something that directly benefited themselves, and not to allow it to subsidise someone else’s project. They assured us they did that. The things they spent it on were basic - alleviating some precarity, knowing that bills are covered, and some time for rest can be accounted for. 

£600 is going to change nothing in the long-term, and will change very little in the short term. But that’s why it was even more important to just get it out to people, without application or judgement of “quality” or “merit”. It was just a bump, maybe a lifeline, ideally it would be a luxury.

With freelancers working on average 2 out of every 5 days unpaid, we shouldn’t have to beg and plead for an amount of money that won’t even cover our monthly childcare. We should, without explanation, be able to go on fucking holiday. We should not have to show the amount of work undertaken for it, or endlessly evaluate how “timely” and “significant” it has been for your practice. Because it’s just a few hundred quid, helping a few individuals and their families. And in the middle of a pandemic, when most producers lost everything and still reached their arms out to support the sector around them, that’s a pretty good spend of public money. 

These bursaries were generously supported by Arts Council England. Who is generously supported by National Lottery. Who is generously supported by people like my nan, Beryl Bates, who played every week, twice a week, for the 25 years before she died without ever winning more than a tenner. Thanks Beryl.

​As artists and producers, we hold a lot of information of programmers in the UK and internationally - so we have come up with a few ways to make sure we don't stop any plates from spinning.

We've created 2 versions of our Relationship Tracker to share as resources for artists and producers - read more below about each and how we imagine you might use them.

Created in Excel - also compatible in Numbers

This version of the resource is built to track one artist's relationships across 4 categories (tabs across the workbook):
-UK venues
-UK festivals
-International venues
-International festivals

There is also a WLTM tab (Would Like To Meet) where you'd add in programmers you'd like to make connections with in the future. We imagine that once you make contact, you'd move them into the relevant category tab above. 

In column F, there is a dropdown to indicate what kind of relationship you have with the programmer so far, which we imagine you'd update as the relationship evolves:
-Programmed
-Commissioned
-Bursary
-Offered in-kind
-Shown interest

Columns I-L are focused on action - what is your artwork priority when contacting them, date you contacted them, log their reply and further action.

Created in Excel - full functionality only works within Excel

As this one is a bit more complex, watch this video for a guide on how to use it.

​Hope they're helpful!

As part of our Producing for the End of the World project we’re offering £600 to two independent mid-career/established Live Art* producers. 

You might want to apply because Shit’s Hit The Fan since Covid and you need:
-Training
-Therapy 
-Office equipment/software
-Match funding for your own project
-Childcare
-Time away/holiday.
We don’t need to know what you want to do with it, but we hope you’ll use it to benefit yourself.

Who
You must be an independent producer working within Live Art*, who identifies as mid-career/established - meaning you no longer consider yourself ‘early-career’ or ‘early on in your practice’.

You can be based anywhere in the UK

As we are two white cis women, we really would like to reach producers who identify differently to this.

How to apply
Please send us either an up-to-date written, video or voicenote CV, a website link or portfolio link to apply. This is so we can double check you meet the criteria of being an independent mid-career/established producer, are based in the UK and are working in live art.

Send your CV/Link to [email protected] 

If you meet the criteria, your name will be put in a hat and randomly selected.
Because of this random selection process we will be unable to offer feedback. 

When
Deadline for applications is 21st June at 5pm. Late submissions will not be entered. 

We're super pleased to have been invited by Diana Damian and Joe Parslow to teach on the Festival module for second years at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama!

We'll be working with the group to think about how we can work ethically and efficiently to curate, administrate, promote and deliver a festival...in a 10 week turnaround!!

Super excited to start this work and meet the group!
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