The Change-Maker Series
The creative and cultural industries are facing a time of unprecedented crisis and many professionals in this area have found themselves needing to acquire new skills, approaches, and strengths in order to thrive in these challenging times.
This spring Guildhall School will host a second series of free online participatory workshops for creative practitioners, led by a range of exciting and insightful artists and leaders. The seven workshops, hosted on Zoom, will respond to the live challenges and changes facing everyone who works in the creative sector today. Each week, a different facilitator, all of whom were recruited via an open call within the sector, will lead discussions on various topics.
The next six, with free tickets available to book now, are:
How to be number confident with Niall Daly
Thursday 14 January, 6-8pm
Book a free place on this workshop
Many people are numberphobic. This session will help to demystify financial terminology and processes whilst helping participants to come away feeling confident in tackling their taxes this year.
Niall is a Chartered Accountant who works with businesses and individuals to help demystify financials and accounting helping people be more ‘number confident’. Niall has started, run and sold a number of businesses in the past. He works as a Growth Expert and finance lecturer on the 10,000 Small Business. Niall has also worked as a consultant to a number of businesses including BBC and ITN, as well as a number of creative and digital agencies.
Visibility, accessibility, and accurate d/Deaf and disabled representation: on stage, screen, and behind the scenes with Libby Welsh
Thursday 28 January, 6-8pm
Book a free place on this workshop
How do you make your work as d/Deaf and disability friendly as possible? Why does accurate representation matters for d/Deaf and disabled people? This workshop covers how to make both performance and the creation process as accessible as possible, as well as how to approach casting when you're looking for d/Deaf and disabled performers.
Libby Welsh is an actor, dancer, choreographer and access consultant. She also has profound bilateral senso-neural hearing loss, and was implanted at the age of 14. She's 90% regular human, 10% terminator, and a little bit weird- but absolutely determinedly unpretentious.
Playful Thinking for Creativity with Yesim Kunter
Thursday 11 February, 6-8pm
Book a free place on this workshop
Play has been understood as childish and frivolous but in recent years we have started to observe that there is a need to acknowledge playfulness as a source of Creativity and good Mental Health. With a playful mindset; adaptation and evolution becomes easier, resistance to change lifts up, as the act of playfulness brings joy of connection. But how can we learn to discover our own playfulness?
Yesim Kunter is a recognized play expert and a creative strategist understanding behavior of people to create new experiences and define new opportunities. She has facilitated numerous successful ‘PlaytoInnovate® Workshops’ in training organizations with diverse backgrounds from kids to professionals for leveraging Creative Thinking. Yesim has also held talks at prestigious conferences such as Children Media Conference, RedBull Futuro, US Play Coalition, TEDx, World Innovation Conference, Global Innovation Forum London, TRT Turkey. Previous to her consultancy she had worked for Toys R Us, Lego and Hasbro as a play futurist.
Making green theatre, and making theatre greener with Pigfoot
Thursday 25 February, 6-8pm
Book a free place on this workshop
As theatre-makers, we have a responsibility to explore the issues that matter. In the world we currently live, this means sharing, exploring & creating around environmental action. This workshop is for theatre-makers interested in making their practice more environmentally sustainable. It is also for those wanting to find ways to approach making work about the environmental crisis, especially for companies/individuals interested in devising.
Pigfoot is a multi award-winning, carbon-neutral theatre company, dedicated to making collaborative work about the climate and ecological crisis. Upcoming work includes a Spring 2021 tour of How To Save A Rock - a bike-powered climate comedy about how to still have hope, for kids and adults alike (Sunday Times Playwriting Award winner 2019; Staging Change Award winner for VAULT Festival 2020). Recent work includes Lockdown: GreenUp, a digital environmental theatre festival for eco-curious theatre-makers.
Sparks: Strategies for Neurodiverse Artists & Their Supporters with Jason Warren
Thursday 11 March, 6-8pm
Book a free place on this workshop
This workshop will help to provide guidance for those with ADHD or on the autistic spectrum that work or study in the arts. Jason will look at tangible strategies for common challenges and will also expose the unique advantages that can be developed. The session will also provide context and research-led information about how our unique neurochemical differences demand alternative approaches to well-established working processes.
Jason Warren is a director, writer, actor trainer and a passionate advocate for neurodiversity in the arts. Through the magic of going undiagnosed with ADHD for most of his life, his career has taken him to some strange and wonderful places.
Aside from supporting neurodiverse staff & students at acting schools, some previous career highlights include: writing 'Creating Worlds’ (the first practical guide to creating interactive theatre); accidentally getting banned from a country due to working in ex-conflict zones in support of the creation of local democracies; running theatre festivals for emerging artists whilst working entirely from a broken smartphone; and consulting on how an interactive show can be created in the headquarters of a Cold War era dictator.
The Online Musician - The Self-Marketing Artist with Tom Chapman
Thursday 25 March, 6-8pm
Book a free place on this workshop
With live, in-person performance largely still on hold, sourcing revenue from other streams is more vital than eve. Whether investing in online marketing or not, a continued online presence and dialogue with fans is a crucial step in preparation for an eventual return to live performance. This workshop aims to explore the benefits and potential pitfalls of navigating a changing digital landscape and how to come out on top.
Percussionist and drummer Tom Chapman’s main project is The Urban Folk Quartet (UFQ), with whom he has performed extensively across the world since 2009.
As an educator, Tom has delivered masterclasses and workshops at several European conservatoires and universities as well as working on community projects, particularly with Music For Youth. As a visiting Lecturer at The University of Chester, Tom works on several modules of their Popular Music Performance course, with a recent emphasis on approaches to online content creation and social media management for musicians. Tom has been in charge of UFQ’s visual output, social media and web content for over a decade and has spent much of lockdown furthering his research into digital marketing, as well as working on a number of online festivals.
Devising Transformative Narratives with Zhui Ning Chang
Thursday 8th April, 6-8pm
The workshop will invite practitioners to brainstorm and together build transformative and futuristic narratives to meet the current challenges of today. Using science fictional exercises and whiteboard brainstorming, we will look at how to challenge the narratives in performance today and what possibilities we can carve out of the future.
The exercises will be anchored to two key areas: how to embed alternate futures in theatre practice (in our approach to empathy, collaboration, the narratives we tell and the people involved, the access provided), and how to decolonise our mindsets in education (in our understanding of theatre history, cultural exchange, and impact of sociopolitical events on the arts). Participants will take away with them insight into alternate futures, how to unpack and subvert historical material in interaction with live performance, and practical tips for embedding science fictional exercises in their own narratives and practice.
Zhui Ning Chang (she/they) is a Malaysian theatre director, producer, writer and facilitator based in London. She is drawn to stories that engage with social issues in sharp and inventive ways. Zhui Ning specialises in intercultural performance, multilingual theatre, and creating work by and for underrepresented communities. Her directing work has been presented with companies in the UK, USA and Singapore.
Zhui Ning is a co-founder of the theatre collective Lazy Native, championing Southeast Asian work on international stages. They also serve as Associate Director at Flux Theatre and Connections Producer at Global Voices Theatre. They trained on Tamasha Theatre's Directors Programme and hold an MA Text and Performance from RADA and Birkbeck, University of London. https://www.zhuiningchang.com
