Four more paid opportunities land as part of Incubate in October, including a rare in-conversation event with filmmaker Shane Meadows. The Old Electric’s Creative Director Melanie Whitehead explains more about the thinking behind the programme of paid professional development opportunities.
Incubate, the new programme of training workshops, skills-sharing sessions and behind-the-scenes insights into how creative projects get made, has got off to a strong start in September.
Kicking things off, Harry Clayton-Wright pulled back the curtain on Mr Blackpool, an ACE funding surgery was fully booked out, and a session on values and vision is helping local creatives reconnect with what drives their practice.
Delivered by The Old Electric as part of Creative Blackpool’s Sector Development activity, the paid training programme was built directly from feedback from the town’s creative sector – and October brings four more opportunities, each aimed at a different stage of a creative career.
Old Electric Creative Director Melanie Whitehead chatted to us about the thinking behind the programme, and what’s coming up next.
For Mel, the starting point was recognising just how varied Blackpool’s creative sector actually is.
“Everybody’s at different levels and different stages,” she says. “Some people are flying high and just want to be in a room full of other people who are doing something similar to them, so they can consider how they might work together. Other people are just on their first runs.”
That range is why Incubate splits into several strands rather than one programme.
TRAIN covers short, half-day sessions – budgeting, online presence, how to run a workshop – “for people who are perhaps in their early career, or people who just feel like they haven’t quite got it right for themselves.”
DEVELOP grew directly out of Mr Blackpool at the Grand Theatre, a show Mel describes as “so brilliant, really hard fought” to get onto that stage, and Harry and the team wanted “to open out that process” and share what they navigated.
And SHARE brings artists with similar backgrounds together for a day of shared activity, with a conversation “threaded through” about whether a collaborative project could come out of it.
“It’s about recognising that this is an investment in you, and in the creative community.”
Underneath all three sits one principle Mel is emphatic about.
“This is not about you having to take a half day off from your freelance work, or whatever else you’re doing,” she says. “It’s about recognising that this is an investment in you, and in the longer-term creative community within Blackpool.”
Because spaces are paid and limited, the programme runs on a light-touch application process – applicants pick their top three sessions – rather than first-come-first-served.
“What we didn’t want was one person booking everything, not necessarily really thinking about what they really wanted from it,” Mel explains.
This October there are four ways to get involved with the Incubate programme.
INVITATION: R+D for Birds Don’t Run. They Fly
Thursday 1 October, 10am-4pm, House of Wingz
SHARE’s next outing is a day-long R+D process with Blackpool-born writer and Coronation Street actress Lauren-Nicole Mayes, developing her new play Birds Don’t Run. They Fly, set in Stanley Park and exploring domestic abuse.
Mayes is looking to collaborate with two musicians/composers/sound artists, a movement artist and a videographer, working from a script sent out in advance so they can arrive with ideas ready. The play has already been performed at a few festivals, Mel says, “but she’s really set on wanting it to be inspired and take its next stages with a Blackpool artist.”
Participants are paid £250 for the day and while there’s no guarantee anyone goes forward into the next stage of the work, but it’s a genuine invitation to learn, share and create together.
INSPIRE: In Conversation with Shane Meadows
Friday 2 October, 6.30-8pm, The Old Electric (in-person and online)
This is the first outing for Incubate’s Inspire strand, which Mel describes as “about connecting with artists, practitioners and people who have done amazing things, giving us the opportunity to talk to them, find out about their experiences and connect with them in different ways.”
The first guest is someone Mel’s known a long time.
“I went to school with Shane and I’ve been trying to find the right opportunity to bring him to Blackpool to talk to us, and we have finally found it.”
Meadows is juggling international festival commitments, so the event will run online if he can’t make it in person – “he is desperate to come to Blackpool, revisit the town and meet everybody,” Mel says, “but if we have to do it online, we will.”
The conversation will dig into territory Mel says comes up constantly in Blackpool’s creative community: how place shapes the stories people want to tell, and how artists draw on their own lives without straying into documentary.
Meadows will be “open to conversations and questions about how you make work about a place, how a place inspires the kinds of stories you want to tell, and how you connect to the people and experiences that come from your own life without moving into documentary territory,” she says.
“That is something that comes up quite a lot in our scriptwriting. We all want to be inspired by our own experiences of life and try to respond creatively to them. Shane has done that so beautifully over the years, so I’m really excited to talk to him again in front of a group of people and, hopefully, open it up as a conversation.”
In-person tickets are a refundable £2.50 deposit, returned once you’ve attended and asked for it back; online tickets are free.
INQUIRE: An Introduction to Working with People in Probation
Thursday 8 October, 10-11am, online
Led by Kate Goodrich from specialist organisation Tipp, this free online session is one of a handful of Incubate strands you can simply book onto, no application needed. It’s aimed at creatives who might want to take their skills somewhere unexpected – “for people who are thinking: actually, I’d quite like to explore how I could take my skills into a different area,” Mel says.
TRAIN: Freelancing 101
Thursday 15 October, 2-5pm, The Old Electric
A half-day session with Chartered Marketer Jean Atkinson on the fundamentals of freelance life: legal and financial considerations, identifying and pricing your marketable skills, finding and keeping good clients and building systems for sustainable growth.
Participants are paid £75 and applications close 9am Thursday 24 September.
“We felt that by offering a broad range of opportunities, we could support people in becoming the architects of their own creative careers.”
Beyond October, one of the strands Mel is most animated about is the ACE funding surgeries – and the numbers explain why.
“Fundraising is really hard,” she says. “The percentages for fundraising success are very low. At the moment, I think around 8% of Lottery applications get through to actual funding, while with Arts Council England it is around 13-15%. It is really tough.
“It also takes a huge amount of administrative time, energy and personal effort to get to the point of submitting an application,” Mel adds. “Rejection can feel like a personal rejection of what we are doing. We can sometimes internalise it as a judgement of our value, or as a feeling that we are not good enough. That can become a real barrier to people progressing any further.”
The surgeries are Incubate’s attempt to help creatives navigate this – bookable 30-45 minute slots with ACE Relationship Manager Karen Cody, who’s run them with The Old Electric before.
“What we want to try to do is support people in making the most robust applications they can, and help them avoid falling at the first hurdle,” Mel says. You can bring a rough idea or a Project Grant or DYCP application already in progress and ask “am I on the right lines?” – drawing on Cody’s “vast experience of looking at thousands of applications over the years” to flag whatever might be holding it back.
The catch is capacity: Cody and a couple of colleagues are only in Blackpool for one day in October.
“Certainly, people who have attended these sessions previously have gone on to have success with applications in the future,” Mel adds, “so it is really worth doing.”
For Mel, the breadth of the programme is the whole point of Incubate’s design.
“There are so many different pathways that people are taking, and we cannot possibly respond to all of them individually,” she says. “But we felt that by offering a broad range of opportunities, we could support people in becoming the architects of their own creative careers, and really thinking about what those building blocks might be to help them move forward.”
How to apply
Full details of every session, including application links, are available on The Old Electric’s Incubate page. Bookable sessions can be booked directly and sessions marked “by application” require the light-touch application form, open now.
Main Image: The Old Electric by Claire Walmsley Griffiths
