Steps to Producing a Collaborative Show
© Ginger Freedom 2015
1. Choose a date 9 months to a year ahead of time. Longer if you have your eye on a venue that one must book farther in advance. Longer yet if you've never produced an event before. If you haven't co-produced a show before, I'd suggest producing a studio showing until you build up your co-production chops, to build confidence in yourself, and also within your community in relation to your production ability. Co-producing, in many ways, is more challenging than doing it all yourself.
2. Put a call out to your community, in whatever way suits your natural style, for a few key people to co-produce the show with. These folks become your core, base, heart of the flow.
3. Schedule a face to face meeting for those who express an interest. If an interested party lives out of town, skype or facetime the participant in. Discuss what the project would entail. Give your potential collaborators a chance to think about committing to the project. Move forwards with interested parties.
4. Set up a way of communicating amongst the key organizational co-creators that suits the style of the group and enables the group to store information easily, and able to be accessed by all members of the co-creators easily. Knowing simple things such as whether the person is easiest to reach via phone, text, email, through a social media chat form saves oodles of time and lessens frustration.
5. At another meeting establish a mission/vision/set of values for the event, discuss how you will resolve conflicts as they arise, and collaboratively come up with a name for your event. Agree on a domain name for the project website, project social media platform, fundraising drive (if you choose to have one)
6. Collectively create an exhaustive to do list of what will need to be done to produce the concert. Generate a production calendar. Store these items in a place where key people can access the information easily. This can be done via email easily enough.
7. Assign to the key organizers tasks from this list that best suits their interest. Assign one person who has the time and ability to pick up balls that are dropped, NO MATTER WHAT, in interest of keeping the flow going.
8. Create and send out your call for submissions. Within the call for submission, you can save yourself a lot of time if you include within the call for submissions the bulk of what you need to write your press release as well.
9. Establish the participating artists as well as a wait list. Life does get in the way, people do drop out, and in my experience, there is always someone ready, willing and able to step in.
10. Assign production tasks to participating artists based on their interest level, experience level, and availability of time. I have found, what works well, is to accept that people have varying skill levels, experience, time, and to assign tasks based on what they can reasonably achieve. The end result ensures everyone contributes SOMETHING, and while some conribute WAY MORE than others, realize, with working class artists, some have more time/experience than others, and any tasks that are passed on makes less work for you as a producer, and gives the artists to have a sense of ownership/stewardship of the event, a heart/soul/ego connection. When people have this sort of connection, they also tend to take greater care with regard to inviting people to the event.
11. Be ready to reassign tasks if someone drops out, or if someone drops the ball, and go with the flow of your production to do list.
12. The day of the event I'd highly recommend having an opening circle and give artists a chance to introduce each other, and set an intention for the day.
13. Hold a post production meeting and discuss what worked well, what didn't and how the model could be improved and enjoy the satisfaction of the learning experience.
14. Carry out post production tasks.
15. Count your many blessings from the experience, and be glad!