Category: The World of Worth

8 pieces of advice to teachers: how to get the best out of artists

There’s plenty of advice around to artists about how to engage with schools, comply with their cultures and generally cope with the myriad of policies, initiatives and behaviours which swarm through school classrooms.

But where’s the advice to schools which will help them get the best out of their visiting artists? This is a start and it looks initially at the employment process.

Employing artists in schools is frequently couched in terms of preparing the workforce of the 21st century (ie children).  It’s a pity then that its the employment practices of the 19th century which are used to bring about this transformation. In order to bring schools’ employment practices into the 21st century, please try and take note of the following.

1. Provide a focused project specification in advance to the interview with the artist which is realistic and doesn’t expect aforesaid artist to deal with all your school’s long term intractable cultural problems. Don’t try and attempt to raise your SATS levels in the core curriculum on the basis of 2 hours a week.

2. When artists apply for a role in your school, however short-term, do the decent thing and reply to their application and give them an idea of when they are likely to hear the results of their application. A short email is all it takes.

3.After the interview, give some constructive feedback as to why the artist was unsuccessful. Yes, this can be difficult if you can’t articulate the reason why you haven’t employed them – but there must have been some reason, however tenuous. Also, please try and do that before the end of the month. Leaving it upto 6 months is neither use nor ornament to anyone.

4. If you have a preferred supplier, don’t waste everybody else’s time in establishing long, fake procedures which you know you won’t honour.

5. Once you do employ someone, please be aware that this is likely to be part of their freelance portfolio and that their daily fee cannot be translated into the equivalent of an annual salary. They do not get paid holiday pay, do not get paid a pension and cannot claim sickness benefit. What might look like a large fee to you has, more than likely to last a few days – and the planning and evaluation time that will also be necessary to work with your school.

6. Please try and stick to the timetable you have agreed with your artist. There is nothing more frustrating than agreeing a ten weekly project only to be informed in week seven that the class has a sponsored bouncy castle event to attend that week, so putting paid to your carefully co-constructed schedule. If your school has to fit too many activities into a limited timetable, there is something wrong with your timetable, not the artist.

7. Please try and engage with the sessions the artist is running. This means not sitting back doing your marking; not using it as an excuse to leave the room; and not being passive-agressive when asked to join in.

8. If you would like the project to include a training component for your permanent staff, warn the artist, allocate extra time or specific sessions for such training, and pay accordingly! Simply allowing teachers to sporadically sit in on/“observe” and interrupt the children’s workshop time, without allowing the artist to plan for and integrate their presence, is counterproductive for all concerned. 

There will no doubt be lots more advice to follow from other colleagues; they’ll be added as and when.

A Day in the Life of Me: “you can’t fix silence with silence”

Jade Mercer, a Community Drama student back in the day when Liverpool was at its heyday as European City of Culture has been kind enough to send me her diary entry of 3 April, 2008 when she was in the thick of her final project, Shadows and Showdowns. Does anyone else remember that project? It would be great to hear your perspective of it too.

Shadows and Showdowns

“Today we rehearsed Scene 5, the one where Liam smashes the jar. We’d been dancing around that moment for a week. Lewis finally just went for it, and the sound of that glass hitting the floor in the old rehearsal room? Chills. I think we’re finally cracking the tone – not pity, not trauma porn. Just truth. Honest, raw truth. Cassie’s monologue gave me goosebumps. Maria wrote it based on a story from one of the girls at the youth hub. We tweaked the wording to protect identities, but the emotion is all hers. We also had a tough talk about trigger warnings. Sophie raised a good point – what if someone in the audience isn’t ready to hear this? We’re adding a quiet space next to the performance area with tea, fidget toys, and a youth worker on standby. Tomorrow’s our first test audience. Real people. Not tutors, not peers. I’m excited. Nervous. But mostly proud. We built this from nothing but a need to speak.

Quote of the day: “You can’t fix silence with silence.” (Cassie, one of the characters).

Jade now works as a Community Theatre Practitioner and Trauma-Informed Facilitator. She is based in Cornwall and founder of The Listening Room, a socially engaged arts collective working with communities affected by housing injustice, care systems, and mental health stigma. A 2008 graduate of LIPA’s Community Drama programme, Jade has spent nearly two decades creating performance with and for marginalised voices, using storytelling as a tool for agency, healing, and change. Her work blends co-creation, forum theatre, and trauma-informed practice. She has delivered projects across the UK and internationally, and regularly mentors emerging facilitators in ethical, inclusive methods. She believes in slow art, soft power, and the radical act of listening.

A Day in the Life of The Creative: Unlock Your Creativity

In the final part of our serialisation of Mess Theory, you can find out how to Unlock your creativity by exploring Possibility Thinking and What Ifs with the eight New Testament Saints of Creativity: Mathew, Mark, Luke, John, Maggie, Meg, Lynn and Joan.

Unlock Your Creativity

I have agreed to return to my day job and refrain from challenging the mid-ranking personnel powers any more than they’ve already been challenged. Back in the land of grey and pink that is the multinational global conglomerate Firm, the notion that everyone is now a Creative (or at least can demonstrate a modicum of creative genius) is now plât de jourand I have accepted that proposition with magnanimity. I have been instructed that part of my new role as Lead Creative is to be the Professional Mentor for my charges.  Oh. My. God. This means enquiring their health, wealth and wellbeing and other distractions.  I have to show a smidgeon of interest in someone else. For. Heaven. Sake. Would. You. Believe. It?  Some things take the biscuit, and this one takes the biggest cookie of the lot.

Civilians say you should pray to St Anthony when you lose your keys. One word in Saint Tony’s ear and hey presto, love, your keys will miraculously appear in the place you least suspect them. You can presumably pray for a key to unlock your creativity, presuming you’ve lost that too. The new young recruits who lined up today for my course in ‘Unlock Your Creativity’ (the agreement I made with the Firm in order to keep my status as Lead Creative in aforesaid conglomerate) have clearly mislaid their creativity keys in a wide variety of hidey holes. They’re a motley crew of no-hopers, mis-placers and dead losses and quite how I am going to help unlock their creativity beggars the imagination. The line-up of the eight ‘Young Creatives (as they’ve been labelled) I’m facing is at best implausible, at worst, deluded.

But I shall do my best. Up to a point. Just in case any of these ne’er-do-wells have a smidgen of creativity locked away in their souls (assuming that’s where it’s been lost), then the last thing I need to do is open it up, cause further mayhem and inadvertently lose my job in the process. Unlocking creativity is much like shaking up a bottle of Coca Cola and then unscrewing the cap. Everyone gets very sticky very quickly and if you’re not careful the shirt on your back starts dissolving into a nasty brown fizzing mess. And some one usually pays the price.

So, I shall start slowly and carefully and keep an eye out for anyone who looks remotely creative. Everyone may well be creative these days if you believe the hype – but some are more creative than others and they’re the ones who’ll cause trouble for the rest of us.

Possibility thinking and what ifs.

Matthew Mark Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on.

Maggie Meg Lynn and Joan, how can I get you all sent home?

The life of the Creative is not, contrary to misguided civilian opinion, all about making product, delivering services or filing a new patent every hour on the hour. Whilst I am fervently occupied much of the week in all those activities, the work of the true Creative is done in not the doing of things but being flat on one’s back, looking out the window and reflecting.

The eight ‘Young Creatives’ that have been foisted upon me by personnel bear an uncanny resemblance to various Old Testament figures who would be better off attempting to lead the Labour Party than they would trying to usurp me as The Creative for the multinational conglomerate Firm for which we all find ourselves sharing office sofas, laptops and broadband width. Quite how I am going to gainfully occupy them is anybody’s guess, so I am using the Lord’s Day to consider the possibilities and the what ifs: a useful tactic in the operational thinking armoury.

Whether you’re two or ninety-two years old, thinking through the possibilities is essential if you need to maintain your rightful place in your organisational food chain. Calculating the consequences of the ‘what ifs’ is also paramount if you want to ensure that you’re not deemed the cause of any unfortunate accident that might fall upon anyone else who might want to disrupt your place in that organisational food chain.

Mathew Mark Luke and John; how do I get you off my back?

Maggie Meg Lynn and Joan, how can I get you all the sack?

Want to find out how Mathew, Mark, Luke, John, Maggie, Meg, Lynn and Joan fare in the multinational conglomerate? Just check out the whole of Mess Theory here:

Mess Theory

Mess Theory

Mess Theory has been inspired by my belief that creativity is dependent entirely on mess.  We need scrap, junk or any old rubbish to exert our creative muscles and this book is no exception.

Mess Theory plays with the challenges of getting and securing gainful employment in the creative industries whilst providing an alternative insight into what that work can entail. ‘Creativity’ is one of …

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A Day in the Life of The Creative: Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself.

As part of our serialisation of Mess Theory this Easter week, here’s the next instalment of our fearless exposé of life in the Creative Industries.

Nothing to fear but fear itself.

“Life is nothing short of perfection and nothing on earth can ruin it.” 

How hollow those words look this morning after last night’s departmental meeting when all the heads of department of district six of sub-sector seven of division eight of chapter nine of the multinational conglomerated conglomerate that is the corporation came together to listen to the latest diktat that was issued forth from the chaps on high. Now, loves, I’m not saying I’m jealous or anything. I’m not saying I’m insecure or paranoid or anything. Or indecisive or panicking or having a rabbit in a headlights moment or anything. But. At last night’s meeting I felt an overwhelming riptide of stuff flood over me leaving a mucus slime trail of all those unwelcome unsavoury emotions washed up on my Creative consciousness.

Exaggerate? I don’t think so, loves. You would feel the same if you had been presented with a fait accompli which meant that instead of being The One and Only Sole Creative in the multinational blah blah blah that is the corporation, there now stands to be (and I quote) “one more Creative” to join the Firm’s ever burgeoning workforce. One more? One more Creative? What do they think they’re doing? How can you possibly have two Creatives in the same Firm? It’s asking for trouble: creative differences in the car park, tears before elevenses, tantrums, lunchtime tempers, talent mismanagement, storming the drinks dispensers, the works. What possible reason could there be for wanting me to share our beloved industrial economic military complex roost with a second Creative?

“We’re all going on a journey.”

We’re all going on a journey. How many times have I said that when it comes to explaining the creative process to civilians who don’t know their process from their product? And here it is, being used on me.

I had started the day in quite good form, determined not to let the revelations that the corporation was about to appoint a second Creative to their ranks disturb my inner sanctimoniousness.  The very fact of typing that possibility makes me gag, but type it I must and face up to it I have no choice. I was midway through innovating the packaging of widgets when some Mid-Ranking Personnel Executive strolled up to me, enquired about my health and promptly told me ‘We’re all going on a journey’.

I held my nerve for a bit and politely enquired where this journey was starting, where its end point was and what I could expect to visit on the way, but he was noncommittal and refused to rule out anything whilst ruling everything in.

“It’s an organic journey,” he explained carefully. “It’s going to emerge and we’re all going to evolve together in a collective shared experience which emphasises our common humanity whilst recognising our dreams and fears and addressing our strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats, particularly in relation to our recently implemented personal growth charter also known as the corporation’s behaviour modification programme.”

So far so bad. “An organic journey? How fascinating.” I replied, barely able to disguise my disgust at his misappropriation of my previously cherished metaphor. “So much more engaging than an inorganic journey, don’t you think?” He nodded cheerily, bade me farewell and continued his stroll up the five-mile-long production line which disappeared over the horizon. We’re going on a fucking journey, love, and I’ve been sat in the cattle truck to hell next to some squealing civilians who have sensed they’re about to get a fat cheque and are already plotting on how to splash their cash in the most obscene ways possible. A new Ferrari! I hear from down the line. Dear God. A world cruise! Heaven help the world. The new Damien Hurst!

At which point I had to throw up. Go on a journey I might have to but not if I have some ninny’s jewel encrusted stuffed shark sat next to me on the railroad to oblivion. Time to get active methinks. Time to disrupt, agitate, innovate. Time for the Creative to break out of his box.

Thinking outside the boxes.

Well, Mr Mid Ranking Personnel Manager, you may cheerfully wave us all off from the safety of your platform on that journey of yours to Destination Oblivion, but this passenger is having none of it. What your mid-ranking mind set forgets is that us Creatives – and this Creative in particular – are renowned for our ability to act lean, behave mean and think outside any inconvenient box you put in our way. Because Mr Mid-Ranking Personnel Manager, this Creative has no intention of letting you call the shots about which journey I’m going on and how I get there. And let me tell you for why.

The typical day in the life of the Creative involves constant struggle against the status quo, permanently challenging accepted social norms and disrupting the common sense of common people. Our struggle means that the likes of you, Mr. Mid-Ranking, as a non-Creative, can hand us over any kind of problem you like, knowing full well that whilst we might cause you some temporary discomfort, your problem will in the end be solved by us applying our differently wired neural pathways and unique aesthetic taste to that problem.  Us Creatives generate solutions for you non-Creatives and once in a while we have to take stock and realise that we have to apply our thinking to our own lives and dig ourselves out of any holes we may have inadvertently fallen into.

So, you may very well stand there on the platform smiling and waving at me in this train carriage to nowhere but the fact is that I can jump out of any box in the blink of an eye and there’s nothing you can do about it. Look: here I am, standing next to you, staring into your shiny shaven face. See that, now I’m looking down and waving at you from up in the rafters and whoops – look again Mr Mid-Ranking because here I am on another platform shouting at you from afar. 

And hey presto, here I am again standing right up close and personal next to you again because I can and because for me there are no boxes you can confine me to, no carriages you can consign me to and no trains to the end of the world you can assign me to. Because I, sir, am the Creative in this infinitely huge corporation and your boxes mean nothing to me.

What do you mean, here’s your P45?

I, sir, am not your employee. I am a freelancer. Do you know what that means? Free as in unencumbered. Un-owned. At liberty to take my services anywhere I choose. Lancer as in I have a long sturdy pointy weapon which I use to lance boils, whether they be of a social cultural or economic nature. I am The Boil Lancer Extraordinaire so if you think you can get me to sign in some poxy box on your form then I suggest you think again before this lance freely finds its way up your arse.

Next!

Read all about Mess Theory here:

Mess Theory

Mess Theory

Mess Theory has been inspired by my belief that creativity is dependent entirely on mess.  We need scrap, junk or any old rubbish to exert our creative muscles and this book is no exception.

Mess Theory plays with the challenges of getting and securing gainful employment in the creative industries whilst providing an alternative insight into what that work can entail. ‘Creativity’ is one of …

£12.99
Shop now

A Day in the Life of The Creative: From Rags to Riches

It seems there’s quite a bit of interest in what it is to be The Creative in an organisation: so here’s our next episode of Mess Theory.

From Rags to Riches

In the olden days, love, before the notion that we Creatives ever existed, people never quite knew how things were turned out.  Especially if they, like me, worked in mega conglomerate Firms whose sole raison d’être was to make shed loads of dosh for no reason at all other than to make sheds load of dosh.

How did things get invented? Mused the people. How did we innovate the plain old small nutty chocolate biscuit into a tasty after dinner treat which was dressed to impress the higher echelons of aristocratic society? The answer, love, is simple: it was the work of the humble Creative who was invariably chained up in a gargantuan dungeon which belonged to the firm and into which would be thrown small morsels of nourishment three times a day to stave off starvation of the increasingly deranged Creative.

In the olden days though, love, they weren’t called Creatives and they had none of the professional benefits which we enjoy today. No, they were referred to as ‘those chaps in admin’ or ‘the girls in the typing pool’ or even worse, ‘that lot’: frequently accompanied by a vague wave of the hand in the direction of the corporation toilets. Because, love, in the olden days we Creatives were perceived as being not much higher up the evolutionary ladder than the humble sewer rat.

Happily enough though, love, times have moved on and we no longer have to suffer the slings and arrows from outrageous lower division marketing executives or fend off the contempt of our contemporaries. Because these days, love, we are out of the basement and up into the loft of some high value downtown mid-range kitchen unit condominium, the envy of our predecessors and source of amusement to those in the know. These days, love, history has come to an end, and we live in a permanent year zero with no one from accounts calling us to account for our follies and foibles: these days, love, the Creative is the source of all profit for that lot on the top floor of the multi-billion dollar corporation. 

No one knows how we do it; they know even less about how things turn out; but one thing they do know is that with one shake of our scaly tails, we can transform their business from a lowly potting shed into an agricultural miracle. They don’t know how, why, when, where or who: but they know the what of the bottom line and that is all that matters these days too for the life of the Creative.

We have our habits to maintain and a lifestyle to stick to so if that means applying a little of our creative magic to the balance sheet of the corporation, then who are we to protest? Our history is never far away, and no-one got rich quick by being locked up in a dungeon.

Mess Theory

Mess Theory

Mess Theory has been inspired by my belief that creativity is dependent entirely on mess.  We need scrap, junk or any old rubbish to exert our creative muscles and this book is no exception.

Mess Theory plays with the challenges of getting and securing gainful employment in the creative industries whilst providing an alternative insight into what that work can entail. ‘Creativity’ is one of …

£12.99
Shop now