Eastern Angles Artistic Associate (Peterborough)
Based at The Undercroft, Engine Room is our annual residency project for Peterborough – creating and hosting new productions, delivering workshops, rehearsed readings and enabling new talent development.
The Artistic Associate will be at the heart of the planning and delivery of this community-focused programme of work, funded by Esmée Fairbairn, Heritage Lottery, Vivacity and Arts Council England.
CONTEXT
Eastern Angles is the regional touring theatre company for the East of England taking work to around sixty different venues each year. Principally based in Ipswich, at the Sir John Mills Theatre, we also have a satellite office at Chauffeur’s Cottage in Peterborough city centre. Our pioneering work in this city of low engagement has helped transform the cultural scene and has involved new writing, community engagement with Heritage Lottery projects, transfer of our Christmas show, and community plays in found spaces such as Flag Fen Archaeological Park and The Undercroft of the Tesco Superstore in Serpentine Green Shopping Centre.
Peterborough is an exciting place to be, and our office at Chauffeurs Cottage in the centre of the city is the hub for a raft of new organisations now working in the city: Vivacity (the city’s culture and leisure trust), Metal Culture (the arts agency with similar bases in Liverpool and Southend), Peterborough Presents (an ACE Creative People and Places project), NIE (New International Encounters – working with young people), and a host of local artists and eager community performers.
In recent years we have created community plays like Dark Earth and River Lane, sent shows to Edinburgh like I Heart Peterborough, run a massive Arts & Heritage Project Forty Years On which included a strategic tour of Parkway Dreams, and most recently found our own new venue The Undercroft where we have trialled and presented much new work.
TO APPLY:
Complete the application form and the Equal Opportunities Monitoring sheet and return to by end of play Monday 5th March.
Interviews will be held on Tuesday 13thMarch in Peterborough.
JOB DESCRIPTION
Job Title:Artistic Associate (Peterborough)
Salary£18k
Responsible to:Artistic Director
Responsible to you:Artistic teams where designated
You will be:
-with us for 12 months from April 2018
-planning, scheduling, and delivering a community-focused programme of performances, rehearsed readings and workshops that will comprise our Engine Room season in October/November 2018 at The Undercroft in Peterborough
-delivering workshops in schools in Peterborough as part of our year-round education outreach programme
-reading scripts and feeding back to writers, directing rehearsed readings and helping to produce the presentations
-conducting ongoing evaluation of the Engine Room project
-working with our associate Youth Theatre company UROCK on direction, rehearsal and production of performances
-representing the company in Peterborough and developing new connections and audiences for our work
-using creative community engagement skills to help Peterborough residents develop a cultural habit
QUALITIES SOUGHT
For this artistic and representative role we are looking for someone who has:
- a knowledge and love of theatre, an empathy with the nature of regional touring, and an interest in new writing.
- experience of directing theatre, running community engagement projects and managing budgets.
- initiative and is a proven self-starter
- good communication skills across all media, being literate, numerate and with proven creative ability and an excellent eye for detail. You will be able to think clearly and strategically and enjoy producing plans and executing decisions.
- the ability to work well in a small team and be willing to contribute to the creation of future strategies for the company. You must have the capacity to organise your own time effectively, ensure that all work is up to date and accurate.
- excellent word processing, data management, spreadsheet skills and all-round competency on Microsoft packages.
- good copywriting skills
- ability to assume responsibility
- present a tidy appearance and deal with people in a warm and friendly manner
It would be a significant advantage to have
- transport, or access to transport, and the ability to drive
- community engagement experience
- dramaturgical experience and skills
- previous experience in workshop devising and education
Eastern Angles – the wider picture
‘The East of England would be a far poorer place theatrically without the indispensible Eastern Angles.’ - Lyn Gardner, The Guardian
Eastern Angles is the regional touring theatre company for the East of England and performs to over 18,000 people each year across 65 venues. Formed in 1982, Eastern Angles has blazed a trail across the East of England, becoming a national model of excellence for rural touring before expanding to include national touring, Edinburgh Festival visits and site-specific work.
Our varied programme offers over 175 performances each year, often reaching people who would otherwise have no access to professional theatre, and currently includes a community tour to village halls with new writing from the region, special projects and development work in Peterborough, site-based performance at The Hush House, and a Christmas show to Ipswich, Woodbridge and Peterborough. As a critical component of this we commission new plays, and workshop new scripts. Where the opportunities allow, we also tour shows nationally.
What makes Eastern Angles different?
All our shows have a sense of place and mostly a flavour of some aspect of the East of England. Increasingly, they provide the public engagement element of larger Heritage Lottery Fund projects and this brings extra resource to the production (e.g. Oysters for Spring 2015 as part of the Pioneer Sailing Trust project to restore an oyster dredger ( and Somewhere In England for Spring 2016 (as part of the Eighth In The East project to record and explore the effect on the social and geographical landscape of the arrival of the American 8th Airforce in 1942
After twenty-five years of touring rural communities we turned our hand to urban development in Peterborough and found we liked it. We have put on over a dozen shows there, performing in small community spaces, the Key Theatre Studio, a marquee at Flag Fen archaeological site (Dark Earth, a community play with 40 performers) and The Undercroft of a shopping mall at Serpentine Green (River Lane, a community play with 80 community performers).
We also tour to Edinburgh, London and other parts of the country. I Caught Crabs in Walberswick played at The Bush and I Heart Peterborough at Soho Theatre. Both plays by Joel Horwood got great reviews in Edinburgh and London.
We run our own Spektrixbox-office system selling tickets for our self-promoted market town performances, our larger site-specific shows, our Christmas shows and visiting companies using The Undercroft and the Sir John Mills Theatre.
We have our own 300-seat mobile raked seating system. This allows us to create variously configured auditoria in halls, barns and found spaces (such as our aircraft hangar venue, The Hush House), make our Christmas show traverse, and also hire our seating out to other organisations.
Eastern Angles will remain at the centre of the Peterborough offer as it prepares to move into the brand new city Arts Hub at The Mill, contributes to a possible City of Culture bid, and continues to be a major player in the city.