2.1: Describe your practice
The objective of the first section is to encourage you to think about your practice and in particular how you might go about describing your practice to a third party.
This skill is really important for a number of reasons:
- by being able to describe your practice, you will come to understand what it is that you own, for the purposes of copyright, in your practice
- being able to describe your practice is a really useful skill when making applications to funding bodies, or when thinking about developing a business plan
The objective at the end of this section is for you to have drafted a description of your practice
Practice (I)
Listen to Kate talk briefly about how she believes a disabled person’s practice has changed over the years and how it can continue to be developed.
Practitioners
Think about your responses to how other dance artists describe themselves and their work. You might like to look at the following website:
External links will open in a new web browser tab.
As an exercise in thinking about the value of articulating practice through description, consider the strengths and weaknesses in what you read.
Pick out three points from these websites that you think go to explaining really well what the artists are aiming to achieve and their work.
Practice (II)
Have a look at this part of our film
How would you describe the dance?
Now think about your practice. Consider how the description may need to be nuanced for different readers and audiences. For example, how would you describe your work for:
- a general audience, unfamiliar with what is particular about your work
- a potential funder from whom you were looking for funding for a project
- potential collaborators, to provide them with a clear insight to your artistic aims and intentions
- or even a bank when you are looking for a loan to develop your project?
This needn’t be very long – just a couple of paragraphs will be fine.
Refinement
Now give your paragraphs to as many people as possible who know your work and ask for their feedback. Use that feedback to improve what you have written. Reflect on the text that you have now: would it persuade your friend to come to your show? The funder to fund your work? Would the bank begin understand your work?
Developing the skills to describe your work to third parties is really important but also very challenging. It is an iterative process, as you come to understand how to talk and write about your work in a way other people will find persuasive. It is a process that should be kept under constant review as you work to hone your skills.
And importantly, as we will learn in the next section, thinking about your work will start to help you to identify authorship and ownership of copyright in the work. And this, as you will discover, is most important as you come to think about how this copyright might be used to underpin a business model.