A Closer Look at Booking & Touring
Posted by ArtStarts on Tuesday April 5th, 2011
ArtStarts is dedicated to increasing BC student’s access and exposure to professional artists and art. Our Booking and Touring service is one of the key ways that we achieve this. With the annual Showcase recently behind us and booking and touring requests beginning to pour in, we thought we’d check in with the program’s manager, Tara Bailey, for some insight into the inner workings of the service. We discovered that the process isn’t always smooth sailing, providing some twists and turns that keep her and her team on their toes!
Members of the Booking & Touring team, Rekha, Tara and Akemi.
How many school shows did ArtStarts book in the last school year? What was the overall reach of the artists on tour?
Amazingly, we coordinated over 1,800 bookings during the 2010-2011 school year, with approximately 80 groups performing in all corners of the province and nearly every school district in between.
How does ArtStarts decide which artists tour to which areas and how many shows they get booked?
Actually, ArtStarts doesn’t make those decisions. It’s the individual schools or districts that do. They contact us to let us know who they’d like to book, based on what they saw at the Showcase or by browsing our Artists on Tour Directory. It’s our role to manage all the steps between that request and the artist hitting the road on tour.
How do artists become part of the Artists Directory anyway?
A new artist first needs to be accepted to our annual Showcase. They submit an application (we got over 80 last year) then a committee of artists and educators jury the submissions and make the final selections. At the Showcase, the 40 selected artists each get 12 minutes to impress visiting school, district and community representatives with an excerpt from their touring show. The Showcase is so inspiring and exciting; it really gets the booking process rolling.
Give us an idea of what goes on behind-the-scenes when organizing bookings for an artist. What sorts of logistics are considered? What kinds of challenges arise?
In short - a LOT of phone calls back and forth with the district and school contacts and the artists! After the Showcase, school presenters start letting us know who they’d like to book and when. We then liaise with the artists and work really hard to “connect the dots” to match their availability with the school’s needs and requests, all the while maneuvering around the Pro D days, holidays and other school activities.
You can imagine that this gets pretty complicated when we’re dealing with multiple requests (and therefore multiple schedules) for one artist and trying to work all the details into a logical and manageable tour for that artist. Not to mention when there are multiple requests for multiple artists from multiple schools…you get the idea! Inevitably, changes in schedules, availability and even cancellations crop up, which can sometimes affect entire tours.
The entirety of this process could take a single day or up to two months depending on the complexity of factors involved.
What’s the best part of your job?
That’s easy - seeing the performance impact on children in their own environment is truly amazing. In addition to that we get feedback from teachers or “arts champions” of sorts reaffirming how important seeing that particular theatre piece was for their students, or knowing that it’s the first time a community has had the Ballet or Opera in their schools- that’s huge.
--
- Read about 2011 Showcase here.
- Learn more about Performing in Schools.
Submit comment
