We are looking for a new company producer

This month we’re hiring a Company Producer to lead the company in delivering its activity for Elevate. Over the next two years we’ll be writing a business plan, potentially an NPO application, experimenting with having our first dedicated space in Birmingham, and developing our board and governance structures. In the face of Covid-19 and the ongoing changes to our sector, resilience and adaptability will be key.

We’ll still be making art: we’ll continue to conduct experiments in democracy with Oh God! Not Another One?, Race Cards and salt will still be out in the world and we’ve still got to finish that Missy Elliott musical – and there are some really big and exciting dreams
around adoption, scripting and how we might support and nurture other artists.

But this is a job about strategy – working with me, Toni-Dee (access assistant and artist associate), Sarah (administrator), and our board (Emma Frankland, Akwugo Emejulu, Tim Etchells, Priya Jethwa, Amahra Spence and Clare Clarkson) to build structures that give the company the stability it has needed for years. You need to be passionate about this stability, and all that that can open for artists, especially those of us typically marginalised. I also need someone who can be dedicated to Birmingham and to what it looks like to truly root a company in the city.

It’s also about finding new approaches to the challenges and tasks outlined above: thinking about business plans as both political and artistic documents, thinking about how one might work restorative justice practices into company policy, thinking about how climate justice can (or cannot) be written into your company’s ethos in a meaningful way when you depend on international revenue. All of this has to be turned into tangible processes to work, to make it happen.

We’re a company that is committed to the marginalised. To people who are working class, have disabilities, to People of Colour, to Womxn, to people who identify on the LGBTQIA spectrum, to elders and children, to people with chronic illnesses, to people with complicated immigration statuses. So whoever this Company Producer is also has to be someone who is keeping the company accountable to those values; to a code of ethics that sees art as something that pushes back against oppression.

So there it is: a callout for someone else who has that desire for collaboration, partnership, and sharing in the joyful, the utterly exhausting and the profoundly important nature of working in this sector.