Alexander Wright from the Flanagan Collective wants to know if YOU would like to get involved in their work – and if so, how?
We are making a new show. A version of Sherlock Holmes, in the room in this picture. It’s running for six weeks in York over summer. It’s pretty exciting for us, but also pretty daunting. We want to get it right.
We make a lot of work and we often make it quickly, or it moves around a lot, or it’s a little team and it’s in the back of a pub. This is probably similar, just a bit bigger. We want to invite more people in to the room – in to the rehearsal room and in to the show as it runs over summer. We don’t want to keep our doors closed and our secrets secret. We ain’t really got any secrets that I know of.
So we’d like to offer some placements. ‘Placements’ is a rubbish word. All I know is that I learnt everything I know by doing it and getting on with it and I know it’s always useful to meet and work with new people, watch how they do it. I’m not saying we’re good at what we do, or that we are good people to watch or to learn from, but we’re people and we’re putting on a big show. And we’d like to invite people to be a part of it if we can. But we want that to be on their terms, not ours.
Let’s be upfront. We’re a small company with very little money. We don’t have staff and we don’t have funding. So we don’t have a hope in hell’s chance of offering paid internships or paid placements. I’d love to be able to. So, our question is how can we offer out, or open up, these roles/options without taking the piss? Sure, there’re things we think it would be great to have some folks come and work on, but it’s probably more for you to tell us than us to tell you.
So that’s the question we’d like to ask. We want to invite people to come and work with us on our new version of Sherlock Holmes. But we want to know what you’d want to be in it for you, what would be valuable? We’d like to know what you think, then we can try and make it happen. I don’t mind if you say “by watching rehearsals”, I don’t mind if you say “by letting me direct the show”, I don’t mind if you say “by sitting and chatting for an hour at the beginning and end of every day”, I don’t mind if you say “you’re in no way a company I could get any help from in a month of Sundays”. All news is good news.
Either email at alexander@theflanagancollective.co.uk or tweet us as @FlanCol or reply on here.
All thoughts welcome, please.