Creative Scotland Funding!!

I am so excited to announce that we got Creative Scotland funding for the development of our work With Catastrophic Consequences - for more info about the project you can click here which will take you to that section of my website.

I thought I would write a blog post reflecting a little bit about the process of writing the funding application, including how I got started, where I looked for help and advice, and any handy tips and tricks I picked up along the way. I want to do a little disclaimer here to say that I am by no means an expert, but if you’re an emerging artist looking to write your first application maybe hearing about my experience could be helpful!

What fund did I apply for?

I applied to the Sustaining Creative Development Open Fund, which is as it says in the title, for artists who want to invest in their own practice. Because the nature of what we were interested in was developing the work (and therefore developing myself as a performer and choreographer) this was the right fund to go for.

How did I start?

I think in order to get started it was really useful for me to develop a clear idea of why I wanted the funding. I had just done one week of residency with Alex and Ramon at Citymoves in Aberdeen and we found ourselves so inspired by the process. I was mainly motivated by the wonderful artists I was collaborating with and knew we had to keep collaborating and I really wanted to be able to pay people fairly. I was able to use that creative motivation from working in the studio to envision what else we wanted to achieve and an idea of what resources we needed to achieve it.

Talking to people

At the start of the process I spent a lot of time approaching friends and colleagues who had gone through a similar process, either with Arts Council England or Creative Scotland, just to have a chat with them, to pick their brain, and get their tips. From these meetings I learned that you can also meet with someone from Creative Scotland directly, so I set up a meeting to talk through my ideas with a member of their team, which I think was incredibly helpful for gaining an understanding of what they were looking for and developing that relationship.  At the time of my residency at Citymoves I was being mentored by Joan Cleville through the PEER programme with Studio Wayne McGregor who was the person who encouraged me to look at the Creative Scotland Open Fund application. He was instrumental in giving me advice and help.

Figuring out what I needed

Joan encouraged me to think carefully about how many weeks and what resources we would actually need to develop the work. I think as a young artist I was so used to rehearsing in the evenings around other commitments, or for shorter periods of time that it didn’t occur to me I could ask for the time we needed. Initially I had thought two weeks would be enough, but in the end I asked for 4 weeks, which I think is a much better time frame to develop the work in the way that we want to. I also knew that I would want to learn from others and split the work load so I also included a producer role in my application and a marketing and communications manager role, who are the amazing Alison Thomas, and Clara Cowen. Alison was instrumental in the process of writing the application and Clara has been developing beautiful graphics for social media and I’m so glad I have them on board for the project.

Ask for support

Something I really had to learn throughout this process was that I can ask dance organisations for support, and most people in the dance industry are eager to help and support with whatever they can. I’ve always been shy to reach out to people but this process taught me that if you do it you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Whether that is in-kind space, support with the application itself or a letter of support, its worth it to ask.

A note on the practicalities of actually writing it and the timescale.

I sat down and decided I would write this application around the end of October. I spent a lot of days sitting at my dining room table typing on my laptop. I finished and submitted the application on the 9th December. So all in all the process probably took me about a month and a half, but that was a month and a half in which most days were dedicated to writing it. This also included time to send out drafts to people who would look over it for me.

There were two organisations that run specific programmes to support artists with their applications that I reached out to:

 The Albany in Deptford run Artist Advice Surgery which I’ve linked here.

 And Siobhan Davies at the time ran Artist Support sessions, although it looks like it may not be running anymore, I would highly recommend still getting in touch if you need support.

Here are my quick tips for this process

1 Figure out what resources you need

2 Talk to people about the project, about the process, talk about it all

3 Ask for what you need, (not the bare minimum that you think you might get, what you really need)

4 Reach out to organisations

5 People want to help and support you, so let them

I realise that this blog is just touching the surface of my experience, and it also won’t be universally what works for everyone, but if anyone wants to chat about my experience or wants any further tips or advice that worked for me this time around, please do get in touch with me.

Can’t wait to share more about our work as we get into the studio.