Now let’s move away from the theoreticals, and onto the practical. Organising will be easy: it’s all down to a series of emails, both to teachers and students, first advertising auditions for the event, then the event itself. My idea is to have teachers promote the event in the pupil bulletin, as well as potentially the school newspaper, and to create some sort of poster that will advertise actually seeing the event itself. The audience for the project will be, I predict, pretty dependent on the performers advertising to their friends and family to come, so I’ll make sure they push the event as much as they can.
As I said earlier, we’ll be performing the event in my school’s theatre, after school so that parents and guardians can come. Hopefully, the event will be decently easy in terms of venue, equipment and all that sort of thing, because it’ll all be run through the school and they can provide sound and lighting. Because of this, I won’t need that much in the way of budget, though we’re currently deciding whether we want to charge a small fee for the event and have the money go to charity.
We also have an issue of time constraints. I’ve planned a month’s worth of time between product introduction to the finished event: a week to advertise auditions, the auditions themselves, then two-three weeks where the performers can practice their acts ready for the performances. Hopefully, this will all take place in the first term after the end of the Christmas holidays. The loose timescale allows other events to happen in the interim, such as our school Cabaret, as well as giving me the terror of a deadline. There is a small chance that the dates we establish won’t line up with another event, such as GCSE performances- in this case, we can perform in the main hall, instead. The worst case scenario would be moving the date of the performance, but I think that’s quite unlikely.
As I’m hosting the event, in more ways than one, I’ll be the first point of contact for any performers when it comes to dealing with their problems. There are issues I can solve on a local level- can I leave the event early, can I change my act- but there’s every chance I’ll come across a problem that I can’t solve alone. For this, I think my three contacts are my teachers: namely my drama teacher, Ms Davis, who’s unofficially in charge of the space; my english teacher, Mr Tugby, who’ll be my first port of call when establishing dates; and my music teacher, Ms Johnson, who also happens to be my arts award supervisor. Between these three, I’ll have a support group that can help me take on this task- plus, they are all better than I am at comforting someone with stage fright.
Alright, time for something I’ve been putting off. Welcome to the risk assessment.
Firstly, health and safety. What’s the likelihood of having a spotlight drop itself on somebody’s head?
I think it’s low, because at the very least, it hasn’t happened yet. Seeing as the point of the event is to showcase your own writing, poetry and other art, I think it’s decently unlikely that we’ll have any act that requires a lot of physical movement- still, if somebody wanted to devise and perform their own dance routine, for example, I would have to ensure that they felt safe and had enough space to move. Our school stage is almost level with the first row of seats in the audience, so we have to ensure that nobody in the audience is going to be hit by something. Again, I don’t know how that would happen, but we’ll do a dress rehearsal before the event in which I get to see everybody’s acts, so I can evaluate them for audience-hitting potential and, if I have to, ask the act to move further upstage.
A more likely danger of the event is the potential of violating data acts, especially for social media. Although I am not planning to show the event online, there’s a chance that someone might post pictures of it on their facebook, without the consent of the performers. This is a breach of safety- I’ll either have to get the consent of the performers to be photographed before the show, or give a disclaimer to the audience not to post pictures of the event online. I’ll possibly do both, just to be doubly safe.
Again, I will evaluate my leadership through the feedback of performers at the event, as well as the aforementioned teachers whose help I’ll need to run it. For this, I’ll need to overcome certain bad habits: for example, I have a tendency to read an email, decide to respond later, and never respond. Being able to stick to the deadline we have set up, as well as being compassionate and listening to the concerns of both performers and the teachers, are both things I want to work on doing. I think the ultimate proof of my leadership ability will come in the form of the finished event, and the fact that it managed to get off the ground at all. Let’s hope it gets off the ground, shall we?