Help me find the right London venue for my new physical theatre play

After 30 mins of sitting on my own, Debbie Becks arrived, expecting to attend a different session. She then sat with me and gave me the most valuable one-to-one, impromptu coaching session based on her role as a producer. Rather than talking about specific venues,  we looked at the community aspect of my project, including how to reach different community groups that I wish to work with and their specific involvement in my production at different stages of development (workshops, rehearsal observations, ensemble roles in the performance, post show reflections). We also looked at many other aspects such as how venues operate in general, how to build relationships with them and how to pitch my funding bid according to the targets that ACE itself needs to fulfil due to government specifications (note: ACE staff are nice people! They don’t want to turn things down; but they are bound by directives from higher up, so help them meet their targets).

Debbie gave me a fantastic, detailed model for the outreach aspect of my project and advised me to pitch the whole thing as a pilot project to test community engagement; aiming to give an experience of being involved in a professional performance too teens and older people, as well as sharing the performance with a local community who might not normally see theatre.

She advised me to look for target areas in London, listed by ACE and consider running my project in one of those.

Debbie also got me to consider the differences between self-produced and co-produced (I will be self-produced for now but aiming for co-production later). 

She advised me to get a template pitch from my producer to send to venue programmers (why didn’t my producer offer this already, I’m now wondering??) and explained that this should be up to 2 sides of A4, to send alongside the video of my recent performance.

Another lady appeared, whose name I don’t know, and gave me ideas on mentioning other supporters (venues/ organisations/ people) when I write to venues, to indicate that others are invested and have confidence in my project.

All in all, a golden session!!!!!!!!