Convener(s): Laura Cubitt

Participants: Beccy Smith, Johnny Dixon, Nadine Ishani, Ellie Zeegen, Mike Bernardin, Christie Jennings

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

Discussing the potential for a group meeting for meetings sake; to play, develop, share skills, flex ensemble muscles and feed creativity. To be available as a resource during periods of ‘out of work-ness’, to develop artistically, to learn from peers, to be there as support after any study or training may have finished or in place of it.

A desire arose for this to be ongoing rather than in the vein of one off workshops that are currently available and offer specific ‘ training’. Something that is not training or ‘study’ but simply what it is; non educational, devoid of ‘end gaming’ tendencies.

Questions that arose and arose again;

What’s would be the aim of such a group? What would it produce at the end? What would the group specifically offer to attract people to attend? Is it good enough? Where will it get me in the end? Would there need to be some ‘quality control’ as to who attended in order to guarantee a certain ‘standard’ of work?

…leading to the question of whether the impulse to put something in front of people and ‘show’ it is a natural extension of play.

So…

These questions seem to conflict directly with the original intention of the group and we realised that culturally we are forced in to a minor struggle with ourselves over working in this way.

In the end…

We agreed such a group would be nice, is wanted, that careerism kills creativity and some sort of creative mentoring could perhaps be used in conjunction with such a group…or may appear through such a group of it’s own accord; peer mentoring. The importance of artistic muscle