If you are interested, hard working, based in the north east, friendly, enthusiastic, with a good attention to detail,  and at college, university or recently graduated – please email cp@luxiontheweb.com with a short introduction to yourself, and a CV if you have one.

As Luxi is a new company, we thought you might want to know more about what you could get from the experience.  So we collected thoughts from some people who have trained, volunteered and interned with company director, Caroline Pearce, in the past:

“ The HAAM (Higher Apprenticeships in Arts Management) programme was an incredibly valuable opportunity for me. I was well supported by Caroline throughout the programme and was provided with excellent opportunities to experience  arts management across a range of art forms and events. Caroline nurtured creativity and individual interests alongside developing essential skills in administration, project management, budgeting and marketing. The internship directly led to me getting my first permanent job in the arts, which has led to a successful and fulfilling career as a Creative Industries Manager.”  – Roxy Bramley, Creative Industries Manager at Northern Film and Media – trained with Caroline in 2005-6

“I worked with Caroline for just under a year as an intern, assisting on the Cultural Ambassadors’ Network at Newcastle City Council. The Network seeks to build stronger relationships between artists and schools in the North East. Caroline was a brilliant mentor, and the experience that I gained whilst working with her was undoubtedly crucial in securing my first paid job in the arts. My work was always clearly structured, and Caroline offered plenty of advice and insights into the Arts Education landscape in the North East. During my placement I got really involved in organising some key events, which provided invaluable networking opportunities (and were good fun as well!) During and beyond my internship, Caroline has been incredibly supportive of my development, and we still keep in touch 3 years on. If you have the opportunity to work with Caroline, I would really recommend a placement with her as a great way to gain some invaluable experience in a professional arts environment.”  – Liz Bacon, Operations Officer, Creative Learning at Barbican Centre – interned with Caroline 2009-10

“ Caroline is by far one of the best creative mentors I have ever had. She is very honest and dedicated. She was always keen to understand what I wanted to achieve and help build my skills and knowledge to enable me to achieve this. Back then I was just starting my career within the creative industries and I needed guidance to figure out my direction and Caroline was amazing in assisting me to gain lots of experiences in lots of different areas. I feel very privileged to have had such an amazing mentor. There is hardly a day that goes by now where I don’t use a skill that I learnt from Caroline. I would highly recommend her. ” – Nichola McIntosh, Creative Director, hART Factory – trained with Caroline 2008-9

“ As a mentor Caroline Pearce is supportive, attentive and responsive. As an expert in her field Caroline was able to advise, guide and most importantly challenge my thinking effectively, helping me define and move my work into the direction I wanted it to go.  8 years on, Caroline still remains a great support and often the first port of call for advice and opinions all things career and arts related. ” – Laura Hunter, Arts Project Manager, Freelance – trained with Caroline 2005-6

“After completing my undergraduate degree at Northumbria University, I secured a place as a trainee on the Performing Arts Management Internship (PAMI); an opportunity to design and deliver creative arts projects in and around the Tees Valley. Caroline led the PAMI and was my mentor through the 12 month internship. She provided great support and encouragement throughout, with a wealth of experience.  Caroline was essential in guiding me through my first working experience after University. The skills and training I gained then, provided the foundations for developing my career around young people, community driven advocacy work and a passion for inspiring, educating and building confidence in young people.  I joined the BBC in 2007 as an event organiser for BBC Blast, in 2009  I started at Radio 1 as a producer – my dream job. My journey in getting here, most certainly started when I met Caroline. She has continued to be a positive influence and a great source of contacts when I have needed! ” – Clara Raven, Radio Producer, BBC Radio 1 – trained with Caroline 2005-6

“ I worked at Luxi, alongside Caroline, for only a few days (unfortunately) at Easter 2013.  I was amazed at how much Caroline taught me within that short space of time. I gained an overview of what it is to produce and be a producer within the art; a very important, skillful and fruitful job. With the opportunity of internships now available with Luxi I think anyone with even a slight piece of interest should apply, it’s a fanstastic opportunity with lots to gain. ” – Jasmine Devlin, Student in Fine Art, York St. John University – work experience with Luxi 2013

Art by Jasmine Devlin
Photo by the artist.

As a student studying, working and living within the art world, Creative Industries are a very important place to be involved. As part of my second year course at York St John University, we are required to find placement somewhere within the ‘Creative Industries’, particularly a place where we feel our career aspirations may lead.

My practice is very much Fine Art based, concentrating on installation work which provokes thoughts and experiences within the viewer. I straight away saw a connection between working with different artists and creative groups to support their projects and my own ideas and work. This placement and connection with Caroline and Luxi will, I think, be a very beneficial long lasting and important one.

I was introduced to Caroline Pearce through a mutual friend, Artist Francesca Hudson, and was met with great enthusiasm and exciting ideas for placement opportunities.

Being a manager and producer working across many art forms and projects, with a specialism in business and marketing, is an area which is completely new to me, but something I think will be very important for me to farmilliarise myself with for the future.

One of the main benefits of this placement was absolutely seeing the many different types of art practice which Luxi works with, and the huge amount of possibilities and opportunities art and culture can have within the community and within the world beyond education.

The types of tasks involved included, press, marketing, social and traditional media, market research, sourcing new customers, sourcing competitions and potential galleries, attending arts and understanding the pros, cons and general realities of making a living in the arts.

There was a lot of discussion on creative theories, different artists and the audience of art. It was so refreshing and motivating speaking to someone outside the Fine Art boundaries and seeing the different ideas and interests of someone so in-the-know within the Creative Industries platform. Caroline took me under her wing and along to meet the Head of Arts for Newcastle, which was a privilege and a very interesting experience listening to the converstaion between them discussing past projects and possible future ones. We then collaborated on some decision making and chose some of the art work for Nicole Vivien Watson’s performance scheduled for the project ‘Auricular’ scheduled  at BALTIC 39 at the end of June

Research and Marketing was a large part of the week, and I learnt how to research adverts for projects and performances, and research press opportunities, as well as learning how to write limited blurbs for documents such as leaflets, posters and press releases. These processes gave me an interesting insight into something which I would love to learn.

We took a trip to the Theatre Royal where I was able to see how Caroline has helped develop a dance project for the Salamander event, which will happen as part of Festival of the North East in June. It was then very apparent that people approach Luxi and Caroline to help support their ideas and help manage their time, contacts, budget and ideas, which is a very important role to play and needs to be done in each any creative project.

One day we were cutting out paper shapes, the next day we met with heads of cultural organisations and had lunch out, another day it was all writing reports at the computer.  I am really looking forward to seeing Gillie Kleiman’s show A Lyrical Dance Concert and learning more about performance at GIFT Festival.

From working with Caroline and having done other different placements previously it is very clear to me the different routes working in the Creative Industries can take. I will absolutely be attending any of the projects Luxi take on when I can, and I intend to broaden my Creative Industries knowledge and experiences. I am ecstatically happy with how my placement has gone and have a lot of inspiration to take with me wherever my career may lead. To any student or person with an interest in art, I would highly recommend contacting places you are interested in to see how they work and what you can learn. I think that Caroline’s job and Luxi as a whole is a very beneficial company, and there is a huge opportunity for it to become something very popular and really special. Thank you Caroline and thank you Luxi.

If you, like us, are interested in pushing the boundaries of collaboration, keep an eye out for Happy Accidents, our project working with makers of different artforms to explore collaborative processes and especially how different people consider their audiences.

If you want to see a play in an amazing warehouse, you should book tickets for Alice in Bed which we are producing with Tender Buttons.  Tess Denman-Cleaver is a brilliant, young director who has been working with artists and community groups for two years to prepare for the production.  Rehearsals start later this month and performances are from Wednesday 27th February to Sunday 3rd march.  Tickets are really scarce so if you are interested, I suggest you book now.

Later this year we are planning a host of projects in Darlington, not least The Jabberwocky Market.  2013 marks the 150th birthday of the town’s Indoor Market so it’s overdue a bit of theatre, not that daily happenings there aren’t performance enough.

Dancers are still really close to our hearts and we are finding ways to support professional development opportunities for the excellent artists we work with, making links with some of the best international training and performance spaces and helping shows made here to travel.

That’s all for now, but before I go, I’d like to publicly thank some of the people who have been extremely supportive during our first year…  Peter Flynn and Katherine Banner our amazing board, Stephen Wiper, Lynda Winstanley and Lyndsey Middleton, everyone involved in If These Walls Could Dance, Amanda Drago and Arts Council England, Jeanne Hale for her unerring support, Natalie Querol and Caroline Routh, Hannah Clarke-Stamp, Sarah Hearn and all the dancers from Dance Nest, Heather Knight and Teresa Threadgall, James Froment and Alison Rigby for variously picking up the technicalities and some wonderful artists, in no particular order, Emma Beach, Lynn Campbell, Peter Groom, Gillie Kleiman, Michael Spenceley, Nicole Vivien Watson.  As ever in these things this list could go on and hopefully it will, this year.

Other playwrights (last year and this) include Dennis Kelly, Mark Ravenhill and Neil LaBute. It’s a hell of a roll-call. And what unifies them is anger: at the Government’s response to the economic crisis, at their punishment of the poor and the vulnerable for the crimes of the super-rich, at their ignoring of a growing environmental catastrophe and the many lessons of history, at their sheer maddening stupid venality. They – we – are bloody furious. Fury makes for phenomenal, galvanising art. Think Guernica. Think Mother Courage and Her Children. Think Cathy Come Home.

The onstage role in Fragile was played in last year’s Edinburgh Theatre Uncut by Kieran Hurley, who wrote the piece I’m directing for this year’s event, London 2012: Glasgow. You may not of heard of Kieran, but he’s a bit of an emerging megastar north of the border. His show Beats was named Best Play at this year’s Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland, and when his Theatre Uncut play was first read at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, Phill Jupitus played one of the parts. His show Hitch is one of the most beautiful, heartfelt and downright enjoyable things I’ve ever seen in a theatre – made all the more meaningful by its subject-matter, Kieran’s own hitch-hike to the G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy.

His Theatre Uncut play London 2012: Glasgow is a brilliant, scabrous satirical romp through some of the politics of national self-presentation (and self-preservation) that made this year’s Olympics, however thrilling the sporting spectacle, a nauseating exercise in the manufacture of corporatist ideology. It superbly nails the puerile metropolitan pomposity behind that massive branding project. Sure, London had a lot to be proud of (although I don’t know that Kieran necessarily agrees). But it also had loads to be ashamed of. That pomposity, that shame, are balloons delightfully popped by Kieran’s wicked satirical play.

What Fragile, London 2012: Glasgow and many of the other Theatre Uncut plays from both years share is a remarkable ability to distill their justified anger into something that gives tremendous artistic pleasure. And it does so while absolutely communicating that anger. You have to go along to your nearest Theatre Uncut event. You might even want to get involved. This situation is all fucked up, and it has to change. So be part of that change.” - Daniel Bye

Theatre Uncut events are taking place across the world from 12-18 November 2012

“Living Postcards began in the summer of 2012. I wanted to create short pieces that could be filmed at locations around the region. I was keen to make something that was boldly expressive and could allow whatever it was that we wanted to say, to become possible. At the start of the process often, if not always, we don’t know what it is we are making and it’s really the meeting of people in the studio that kicks off the process.

We worked on this project with a collection of different types of performers, dancer Beth Loughran, actor Jen Carss, film maker Joe Youngman and myself.

We started with nothing, just ourselves and the idea of making something. I come with very small ideas; perhaps ‘bits of things’ that I think are useful. With Living Postcards it was pictures of places. I came across photographs of Berlin in 1945, just after the war had ended and I was struck by these. One in particular, of a woman outside her shell of an apartment block, in a swimming costume, hair fixed, watering her plants. This was charming to me; the care she takes with the plants in light of her home behind her was such an intriguing contrast and seemed to say something.

The photographs become starting points for us; I asked the performers to create responses to these photographs. These can lead to anything, movements, stories or performed images and I wanted to eventually combine all these things to create pieces where dancers spoke and actors moved and could express themselves however they want.

We spent a lot of the rehearsal time just exploring, I ask a lot of questions and we make a lot of material. Invariably most of this ends up not being used in the piece but it does give us a huge collection from which to pick things we like which are then worked to create the piece. The locations were a huge part in the making of these films. We had to find places that would allow the things we had made to happen. We were lucky to be able to film in some fantastic locations from all around the region and the settings were so beautiful, we were thrilled.

We enjoyed making these short films very much and the freedom given to us by everyone involved to make what we wanted was so generous and kind, and I’d like to thank everybody.

So thankyou, and here’s to more.”

*To clarify, If These Walls Could Dance has been created by a wonderful team, led by Director, Gary Kitching with Dance and Choreography by Emma Beach and Debbie Waistell.

I care what people think, of me, of the work I do, of who I work with, of their work, of everyone else’s work, of everything.  Although often derided, I consider this trait to be a strength, it’s an important skill for a person who, like me, helps to communicate with the public, choose work for audiences, programme and curate work for people and select groups of people to work together.  It’s important for marketing, PR, producing and programming.  Also for analysing trends and anticipating and reading situations.  I also care a lot about communication, and by that I mean understanding how a message is received, by the reader, the listener, the conversationalist, or audience.

When people suggest that I am a producer, I used to ask what they meant by the term; often met by a fairly dismissive response suggesting that it’s very obvious, yet each response has been identifiably different.

Often also, the question ‘what is a producer’ is answered by what a producer does and a list of tasks.  These tasks could be undertaken by people with many titles, including Coordinator, Project Manager, Programme Manager, Project or Programme Officer, Project or Programme Executive, Creative Producer, even Director, Manager, Curator.  Context makes a lot of difference and terms chosen are often those preferred by individuals.

So, as one hypothesis, I identified a line through these roles, in reference to venue working, from Project Manager to Programme Manager to Producer, which can illustrate the same jobs with increasing levels of decision making responsibility and these are all roles in which I am very interested. I became increasingly interested in the role of venue producer.

For me the Producer’s role can include almost all and any other roles depending on the skills and interests of that producer and the needs and gaps of the specific project and artist and to some extent, the stage at which the producer enters the project.

I can and do produce in a number of ways.  Identifying these differences is valuable to ensure the right skill set is offered from the start and to reduce frustrations or misunderstandings.

1 – In one version I am a producer who leads a project, conceiving or harnessing the idea and leading all the elements, recruiting the artists and team and defining the brief.

2 – For an artist who has an idea or a project, I work closely with the person or group to fill in the gaps and enable the show or project to happen successfully.  Most often this would be with an artist who has experience of producing their own work and understands the need to grow their team.

3 – Until recently a large proportion of my work was to a brief from a larger organisation, with a budget and deadline and required objectives.  This is more of a project manager role and ideally I ike to retain a proportion of this kind of work to support the other elements in my portfolio.

There are many other types of producer.  Some are basically investors or investment collectors buying into projects, often within a commercial context.  There’s another category who identify an artist whose work they believe in and create an environment in which they can fulfil this potential, to me this is almost like the artist being the Producer’s muse.  I am not currently in a financial or appropriately networked enough position to become the former and the latter is a model that I have tried a few times and found that it does not match my skills.  I believe that working out the kind of producer that I’m not, has helped enormously.

Artform

Most of the producers I know and work with are either in theatre, or work across art forms.  Through this project I started to explore the management and producing of dance.  Some people I spoke to and work with are very keen that producers are artform specialists, particularly in dance where there is an understandably keen interest in the sector to ringfence roles for dancers after they retire from performing.  Having worked across dance and theatre and into new media and various other artforms, I find that there is value in both approaches and that a mixed ecology encourages excellence and creativity.

My previous experience has been both specialist and cross-artform and my interests, although often in the realm of performance, are not artform specific.  One of my core interests is in collaboration and collision of expectations, processes, skills, experiences.  I am extremely interested in seeing what happens when one artform uses a standard process from another, or where ways of thinking and working are interweaved in different ways.

For a long time I worried about being accepted within particular artforms, as well as simultaneously being concerned about becoming pigeon-holed.  Actually my starting point is often conceiving or buying into the concept, and everything else is chosen based on synergies and emerging requirements.

Sharing and developing the learning

I am a great proponent of providing advice and support to enable others to follow in the pathways I find, helping others to take opportunities and enabling support mechanisms.  I am keen to share thoughts and knowledge, particularly where that has been gained through subsidised projects.

The project has exposed new questions which I hope to explore in the future, including:

*Is being an entrepreneur an essential trait for any producer?

*Producing across sectors – more and more producers seem to be working in both the subisidised and commercial sectors and having learned intensively about the commercial sector on the Stage One training course for West End producers, I discovered that the two sectors are much more similar than I had previously realised.

The future

I am now planning various new projects exploring how collaboration within and across artform can affect performances, with a particular focus on providing experimental, professional development for dancers.  Another strand will look at how much audience expectations affect the making process.  I have also realised that I have a particular interest in bringing together groups of professionals and amateurs around a theme and people’s relationships to things or places, and I plan to develop these projects for the benefit of communities both local and professional.

I found the project a fantastic experience to allow me to explore lots of ideas and begin to develop projects which may turn into major strands of work for myself and the artists with whom I work, now and into the future.  I was also able to explore ways of working which did not suit me.  The project helped me gain a deeper insight into the life choices of a freelance artist and develop my empathy with the situation, which will enable me to support artists more effectively.

In summary

I am a producer,

I have always been a producer,

A good producer should also be a good manager,

There are many kinds of producing that I do, that I don’t and that I do and don’t want to do,

There are many kinds that I can do really well,

I want to create brilliant work which people enjoy, appreciate and recognise.