Live & Local: LivingRoom

 

A series of micro-commissions for artists to engage with communities throughout the East and West Midlands.

Background:
Live & Local artists are welcomed into village halls - the ‘living room’ of a rural community - to perform for and to be treated as a member of that community while they are visiting. Live & Local: LivingRoom takes this concept as its starting point and we are inviting artists to submit proposals to remotely engage with communities in their actual living rooms.

In 2020 as a response to the impact of Covid on the health and wellbeing of
communities and individuals Live & Local was awarded funding from
Warwickshire Creative Health Alliance to develop Live & Local: LivingRoom. This pilot project paired artists with a wide range of different community groups across Warwickshire to remotely co-produce artworks which were then shared in the wider community and across the Live & Local network.

The success of these projects has led to us rolling out Live & Local LivingRoom to all eight counties served by Live & Local. These are:

- Derbyshire
- Leicestershire
- Lincolnshire
- Nottinghamshire
- Rutland
- Staffordshire
- Warwickshire
- Worcestershire

The Project:
Through a series of micro-commissions, we will engage artists/companies to create bespoke performances or artworks for a community with whom they are paired.

As the situation around Covid continues to change we are looking for projects
that can be delivered remotely using both digital communication and more
traditional telephone and postal means.

Live & Local: LivingRoom will identify communities to be involved throughout 2021. We will pair each community with professional artists, who might be singer/songwriters, a band, a poet, a theatre company, a spoken word artist or a dance company. The artists will hold conversations with members of their paired community and this will be used in the creation of a short work. This might be a series of songs, dance, a selection of poetry, a storytelling piece or a physical artwork. The work will then be shared with the community via on-line channels (such as You-Tube or Facebook) and/or in a non-digital format to enable people who do not have access to digital content to also share in the work. This might include a touring book of poetry, DVD or CD of the work or direct story telling sessions by telephone. Whatever the type of work, the intention is for it to involve different members of the community and then be shared as widely as possible throughout the community in a way which complies with the social distancing measures in place at the time.

The Commissions:
We are inviting proposals that fit the above brief from artists (past, present or future members of the Live & Local family) for projects which can be delivered in line with social/physical distancing requirements.

The projects should be able to be delivered digitally but also in an ‘analogue’ way (such as telephone storytelling, physical artworks/publications, DVD/CD etc).

We estimate each commission to be in the region of £700 - £900 depending on the proposal.

Please visit the Commissions section of our website at liveandlocal.org.uk for full information, the brief and a link to submit your proposal.

 

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