Are you a producer?

So you’re a Producer, or you think you might be or want to be, and you want to understand how to find the right artists and projects to work on, that will fit your skills and pique your interests, that fit with your values and offer appropriate rewards.

There are very many Producers working in Culture, there are even more beyond that, this analysis will help you find your place in that landscape, help you understand your USP, your strengths and appreciate what you’re not and maybe don’t ever want to become. Knowledge and awareness is power; for too long the role of a Producer has been a bit shrouded in mystery, particularly in the UK subsidised arts sector, and we believe that more open conversations will help us all and the artists and projects we work on to appreciate and understand our value and therefore shine a light on each of our brilliances and give us the confidence to understand our weaknesses so we can embrace them in order to choose to change them or focus elsewhere.

If this questionnaire works as we hope it might, asking these questions of yourself and taking them to any new project will help you make sure that all the important areas are covered before it’s too late, so you’re as prepared as you can be to take on the right projects, turn down the wrong ones f(or you), ask the best questions of colleagues to be able to recommend peers or bring on board a colleague with a complementary skillset…

For some of these questions your answer will be that you don’t care – note that you don’t care, this shows an area that’s not important to you, which could be great for your collaboration if no-one minds about it, or if someone else really does care and you’re happy to fit in – clarity around that really helps everyone. 

I believe that these questions will help you to understand what you need and want from a project and help you address and be sure to retain those as priorities… needless to say, there are no right and wrong answers… if the work or project or artists isn’t right for you, they will be right for someone else. Big organisations have expensive and time consuming systems to do this process, as independent producers we’re reinventing and understanding the wheel for ourselves every time. This process will help you find projects that are the right fit for you.

This document was prepared by Caroline Pearce, Nicola Lawton, Kelly Golding, Vicky Graham and Emily Beecher , for Luxi, and peer reviewed informally by several Producers working professionally in subsidised and commercial UK theatre in 2020.

It is a companion document to the Producer / Artist Toolkit and we recommend using both in whatever way is useful to you. All feedback and comments are welcome, please contact us on hello@luxicreative.co.uk