Conceived and led by Art of Festivals Associate Daniela Gerstmann, Making Things Up uses improv comedy theatre to build confidence, foster connections, and empower people to break free from social isolation. Building on from a successful pilot in Manchester, UK, Art of Festivals has received support from Canada Council for the Arts SEED fund to research how to start a similar series of workshops for people experiencing homelessness in Montreal.
Creative Producers, let's connect! Crafting Networks is a series of discussions hosted by Fanny Martin (Art of Festivals) and William Ruiz Morales (Ouow Studio) at performing arts festivals across Europe during the summer of 2024. These sessions will provide an opportunity to collectively explore how producers connect and exchange amongst themselves, and how they build relationships with artists, presenters, funders, audiences and everyone involved in the ideation, creation, production, and circulation of live art. Crafting Networks is a Project of CIPA - Creative & Independent Producer Alliance co-produced by Art of Festivals and Ouow Studio with travel support from Motus Mori Institute / Katja Heitmann.
Art of Festivals founder Fanny Martin has been elected for a 3-year term as a member of the IETM Advisory Committee at the General Assembly of the IETM Plenary Meeting 2024 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Fanny Martin and MBZ’s Artistic Directors join over 1,000 delegates in Berlin for Classical:NEXT, the “Global Gathering For All Art Music Professionals”, to connect and reconnect with colleagues across the music sector.
Art of Festivals is starting a new collaboration with Music Biennale Zagreb and its parent organisation, the Croatian Composer Society, to produce the 33rd edition of Music Biennale Zagreb in April 2025.
Climate Change and Other Small Talk has been awarded the Best Comedy Podcast of the Year by the American Writing Awards, a contest established by a group of US-based authors in 2021.
Now in its second year, The Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT) awards the 2024 PACT Green Award to Toronto-based Sunny Drake Productions. The award is presented for Sunny Drake Productions’ work CLIMATE CHANGE AND OTHER SMALL TALK, a theatrical podcast produced in association with nine other theatre companies across Canada and around the world, highlighting the climate crisis from a fictional and humorous angle.
Art of Festivals founder Fanny Martin was invited to contribute to the second instalment of the Antonin Artaud Fellowship, founded by proto produkciia in partnership with Opera Aperta to support the exploration and experimentation of Ukrainian interdisciplinary live arts artists. This round of the Fellowship is implemented in collaboration with the Fundatia Gabriela Tudor (Romania) with financial support provided by the European Union through the House of Europe program and the Culture of Solidarity Fund (funded by the European Cultural Foundation).
The documentation of the Kyiv Producer Gathering co-facilitated in November 2023 by Olga Diatel (proto produkciia, Insha Osvita) and Fanny Martin (Art of Festivals) was launched on 12 January at the 2024 Under the Radar Symposium thanks to support from CIPA - Creative and Independent Producer Alliance.
Katja Heitmann’s latest creation, performed over several days by an ensemble of Leeds residents aged 20s to 80s in Leeds Art Gallery’s Central Court as one of the final events of LEEDS 2023 Year of Culture, was previewed in the Yorkshire Post.
Art of Festivals’ founder Fanny Martin is invited to a 1-week trip to Kyiv, Ukraine to discuss community-building and skills development for local producers. Thank you to Olga Diatel and everyone at Insha Osvita and proto produkciia as well as all their partners the Prague Civil Society Centre and Asortymentna kimnata.
We’re continuing our collaboration with CIPA - Creative & Independent Producer Alliance with a new action-research project exploring systems theory, the role of super-connectors and the propagation of trust.
We’re heading to Asia to participate in HKAAA’s 2023 Leadership Summit on the topic of partnerships and learn from peers about their approaches, challenges and solutions.
Art of Festivals’ Creative Director Fanny Martin is off to the seaside as part of OAUK Festival Focus, a programme of curated visits to outdoor arts festivals. Accompanied by members of the OAUK team, each event has a particular focus and is an opportunity to learn more about each festival’s aims and objectives, understand practical issues, meet producers and artists, ask questions – as well as see a lot of work.
It’s September and we’re back in the classroom to deliver in-person workshops on how to think like a producer to the 2023-2024 cohort of Arts & Publics artistic leaders and cultural animators (en français).
Art of Festivals’ Creative Director Fanny Martin has been selected for The Ethics Centre (Sydney, Australia)’s inaugural residency programme to undertake an initial research phase into the concept and practice of Starting Well, leading to further explorations and practical applications.
After Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), SPRING Festival (Utrecht), and CaDance Festival (Den Haag) in May, Art of Festivals will take part in CPH Stage (Copenhagen), IETM Plenary Aarhus and ISPA Manchester in June for the opening of Factory International.
“Art cannot be more urgent.” First presented inside Utrecht’s central train station, RELIQUIEM takes audiences on an audio tour of the ever-growing movement-archive conceived by Katja Heitmann, guided by people who have donated their stories and gestures – and those of their loved ones – to become part of our shared heritage.
After collecting the everyday movements of over 1,500 people and presenting them in live exhibitions in multiple cities, Katja Heitmann presents a new work drawn from the movement-archive at SPRING Festival (Utrecht, 19-21 May), CaDance (Den Haag, 27-29 May) then touring to Den Bosch, Eindhoven, Düsseldorf and more to be confirmed. Art of Festivals is developing international relationships to bring Motus Mori artworks to new cities and produce commissioning frameworks for new creations.
Conceived by Sunny Drake, written by 9 international playwrights, co-produced with companies from Australia, India, Mauritius, Nigeria, Chile and Canada, and lead-produced by Art of Festivals, Climate Change and Other Small Talk reached #3 in Canada, #3 in Nigeria, #1 in India and #1 in Poland in the Apple Podcasts charts for Comedy Fiction in its first week.
This session report was commissioned by IETM to capture the lively panel discussion moderated by Filip Pawlak (IETM Global Connector 2021-22, Poland) and featuring choreographer Jovana Rakić (Serbia), theatre-maker Mindy Drapsa (Sweden) and Access Consultant Rachel Marks (Canada).
More connections and knowledge exchange at the OAUK Reconnect Conference, with 350 artists, presenters, producers and funders working in street theatre, traditional & contemporary dance, music, puppetry, comedy, pyrotechnics, visual art, digital art, circus, parades, carnivals and melas.
We are once more practising the art of packing for a mini-tour of North American conferences and industry series, representing CIPA - Creative & Independent Producer Alliance at ISPA and Under the Radar's symposium and taking in the newest experimental performances showing this month on New York’s stages.
We’re so happy to share this beautiful New York Times feature about Katja Heitmann and her extraordinary project, Motus Mori Institute – an archive of human movement, collected through movement-interviews, preserved through the act of passing on and shared in the form of rituals and celebrations. Art of Festivals is brokering new collaborations with international partners to bring this project to many more cities.
We’re starting a new collaboration with 101 Outdoor Arts, ArtsAgenda and European networks for art in public space with a leadership development session designed for Toolbox International 2022 cohort.
Art of Festivals was invited by Réseau SPARC Network (Supporting Performing Arts in Rural & Remote Communities) to facilitate peer-to-peer sessions and present a new interactive workshop to develop collaborative competencies for their 2022 Symposium in Prince Edward County, ON.
As a proud member of IETM since 2020, we’re delighted to take a delegation of Canadian arts leaders to the next Plenary Meeting in Belgrade, Serbia (29 September-2 October).
Art of Festivals hits the road this autumn to represent artists and weave networks at Tanzmesse (Düsseldorf, DE, 1-3 September) and FiraTàrrega (Catalonia, SP, 8-11 September).
Art of Festivals is heading west to deliver a workshop co-designed with Kelly Hill from Hill Strategies at the Organization of Canadian Symphony Musicians (OCSM) + Orchestras Canada (OC) Western Orchestras Regional Meeting and Learning Sessions, 8-9 August, Regina, Saskatchewan.
Art of Festivals is invited to contribute to the Northern Jazz Promoters Internship programme with a 2-part workshop on Growing Audiences, a dialogue space for music presenters who want to reconnect art & society.
Free to download or play online, Future Arts Centre is a digital simulation of a multidisciplinary venue over several management cycles, imagined and produced by the Embassy of France in Canada with strategic production advice from Art of Festivals.
Recordings from the three Spotlight sessions on Collaborating with Peers, Collaborating with Artists and Collaborating with Society are available on the WorkInCulture’s website.
Art of Festivals is invited as a mentor as part of *hothouse*, manchester jazz festival’s talent development scheme for emerging jazz & improvised music artists in the North of England.
SPARC - Supporting Performing Arts in Rural & Remote Communities (Ontario, Canada) commissions a conversation with Mark Robinson (Thinking Practice), Rachel Marks (Relaxed Performance consultant) & Fanny Martin (Art of Festivals) to share insights on thriving as an independent arts consultant, tools and tactics for creative resilience, sporks, poetry and career cycles.
Art of Festivals publishes the interactive version of State of Emergence - a metaphorical pattern developed to support individual reflection and team facilitation - as a culmination of an action-research project funded by Canada Council for the Arts.
Orchestras Canada commissions Art of Festivals to share insights and tips on evaluation that can be carried out by staff, volunteers and board members to increase their understanding of their audience feelings, needs and desires.
Art of Festivals’ Creative Director Fanny Martin is invited by international contemporary performing arts network IETM to facilitate the Funding & Policy strand of the Girona (Spain) Satellite meeting.
In this essay on Mentorship, Empowerment and Cultural Equity as Ingredients to Build Community, CIPA fellow member and Art of Festivals collaborator Carlos Diaz Stoop highlights the key principles at play in peer-led collectives and networks such as ICP to cultivate professional communities outside institutional boundaries.
How do we build a peer network through co-learning and collective decision-making? Led by 5 Creative Producers, the ICP: Learning Collective experiment unfolded from September 2020 to February 2021 to co-create ground rules and a manifesto, share a budget for guest advisors and digital literacy courses, produce a community celebration and share insights in a series of dispatches.