29 October, 2020 | 4:00 - 6:00 PM | Webinar _________________________________________________________________________________ FESTIVAL CONNECTIONS
An Annual Programme of Expertise, Knowledge, and Networking between India and the UK. Roadmap to Recovery: SOPs for the Creative Sector __________________________________________________________________________________
In 2020, safety takes paramount importance for any kind of live experience and in order to support the live events sector, EEMA published a set of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for venues, crews, presenters, vendors, and others involved in the creation and execution of events across different industries.
For this Festival Connections session, we explored the SOPs produced by EEMA and how these could prove beneficial to the festival sector. The session brought in stakeholders from the Indian festival space and representatives from EEMA together to discuss and think of ways to restart the live events space.
Siddhartha Chatuvedi - CEO, Event Crafter and General Secretary, EEMA started the discussion with a presentation of the SOPs and gave us insights into the thought process of developing such an extensive document.
Further to which, Swati Roy and M Venkatesh from the Bookaroo Children's Festival, T Vijaykumar from the Hyderabad Literary Festival conversed with Sumant Jayakrishnan (Renowned Designer) on how SOPs can be put into action from a literary and visual arts festivals perspective.
The discussion continued with Thanush Joseph, Co-Founder and Director, Seventy EMG and Vanessa Maria Mirza, Director, Dance Bridges Festival conversing with Gunjan Arya, CEO, OML on how the SOPs can be adopted keeping the performing arts scene in the fore.
Both Thanush and Vanessa, explored various aspects of the SOPs and the possible implementation challenges they have with respect to the size and scale of their respective festivals. As someone who contributed to developing the section on Music Festivals in the SOPs document, Gunjan emphasized how the SOPs is meant more as a guiding light and the intention was to build confidence amongst event producers and the audiences in an attempt to restart the sector.
The webinar presented the nuances of the SOPs, addressed concerns around its implementation, and offered a platform for discussion amongst different stake holders from the sector to ideate and build new ways of festival making keeping the health and safety of all stakeholders involved at its nucleus.
You can watch the entire recording of the webinar session here.