Greener Touring for Performing Arts: Schedule Easily, Travel Responsibly
Julie's Bicycle - workshop on touring sustainably
❓ How can we reduce our environmental impact whilst still bringing performance to different parts of the country or the world?
❓ How can we cross fertilise and share creativity across distances?
❓ How might we create international artistic creations that support regeneration & justice?
Farah Ahmed (Julie's Bicycle) led this workshop with Frederick from the Change Agency in Copenhagen (he was with us via Zoom).
Frederick presented the Principles for Human & ecological thriving
⛔ Stop extracting from the earth
⛔ Stop accumulating synthetic materials
✔️ Harvest with ecological cycles
✔️ Share resources equitably
He gave us a couple of examples of touring organisations that have taken a completely new approach to touring.
“A play for the living in a time of extinction” - this is a monologue staged by a local creative team and with a different woman for each location. Thereby reducing the number of people travelling and enabling the production to live with the community after the makers have left.
✔️ All power should be off grid
✔️ Electricity generated during the performance
✔️ All costumes and set produced locally using secondhand materials where possible
Eco Show Boat - and ecological arts lab and performance space in a canal boat.
Branché use 3 local teams to perform productions in their local area (Quebec, US & Europe) allowing all touring to be very local.
Productions live in the community after the company has left.
I love this idea of “gifting” a production to a local community.
In our workshops, we brainstormed ways of becoming more sustainable, from choosing accommodation that has a genuine green policy to hiring instruments and equipment locally rather than transporting them.
One thing that really stood out to me as a vital change was the idea of coordinating venue bookings. If venues were able to coordinate bookings across a country, it would make the travel for a tour more sensible.
For example one venue may book 2 years in advance whereas another may be booking only 6 months in advance.
Currently it is impossible to minimize the distance between one venue to another because artists are unable to book all their tour venues in a reasonable time frame and get performance dates and venue locations to tie up to a minimal travel distance.
Use evaluation / show reports
How can you know what items you have to take with you and what items you can hire when you arrive?
Evaluation should not be a chore, it should be a valuable resource that you can refer to when planning your next tour. Make notes on what is available locally, what needs to be transported and what can be hired on location.
Get in touch for more information on how StageSwift acts as a central point of truth where all the information about a tour resides with all your information at your fingertips.