Planting and Cultivating Support Systems for Stage Artists

General

The second Closing the Gap round table has been hosted by our member The Green Room in Cologne, Germany.

Learn more about the Closing the Gap programme here

Musicians, dancers and theatre workers often work in fields demanding constant peak performance, many times under precarious conditions. The pandemic created and exposed fault lines, with many artists still navigating its impacts and suffering from increased anxiety and lack of confidence in a professionally stable future. Additionally, compounding geopolitical events are increasing artist displacement, with many highly trained artists entering the European culture markets under conditions of severe precarity.

The second Closing the Gap round table aimed to foster a dialogue between practitioners – artists, cultural operators, and medical/therapeutic experts specialised in working with stage artists – and policy makers and implementors – local and regional politicians, workers in local and regional cultural granting institutions, and representatives from healthcare and cultural trade organisations.

These diverse parties that influence the everyday working conditions and future prospects of stage artists came together to discuss short- and long-term issues, with the aim of creating recommendations for artists’ health advocacy and paving the way towards the implementation of wider and deeper forms of support for stage artists.

Read the advocacy sheet they developed here.

Programme

DRAFT PROGRAMME

Thursday, August 31st

19:00 - 22:00 Informal meeting of core team (hosts, international guests, speakers)

Friday, September 1st

8:00 -13:00 Study Visit to Wuppertal Opera, tour of Wuppertal Opera and talk with new intendant Dr. Rebekah Rota on supportive institutional structures for artists’ health.

14:00 – 17:00 Meeting with practitioners, experts and policy makers about “planting and cultivating support systems for stage artists”

Introductions:

- Presentation of ENCC Closing The Gap programme

- Presentation of the work of The Green Room and the focus of the round table

- Presentations of participants

Working groups: discussing some dimensions of the topic / issue in smaller groups

Plenary with the results of the working groups, main conclusions and next steps

18-20:00 Informal meeting, drinks

20-21:00 Concert with TGR GreenHaven Artists-in-Residence Polina Babinkova and Anton Mikhalevskii

Saturday, September 2nd

10-13:00 Meeting of the core team to develop advocacy sheet for publication

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