HOW DO I GET PAID FOR MY WORK? (KATHLEEN)

Topic: How do I get paid for my work
Topic leader: Kathleen Downie
Other people who attended:
Delphine – came at the start and mostly we talked alone. Later Suzanne, Billie Hanne and someone else whos name I didn’t catch came.

Its about having an external reason/energy/context to make work.
For the world to receive it.

Types of strategies of making money from performance:

• In Toulouse there is a donation box, so you perform and people pay what they think it is worth.
• Rather than going through all the funding hoops you can just make the piece and carve out the space independently to prepaire and perform and then charge a fee – there is simplicity to this approach but not much prep time.
• In order to protect what is really valuable to you, what areas are flexible?
• Keep knocking on doors, keep persisting but then let it go, don’t hold on.
• To gain partners for an arts council application think about who you know. Match funding, networks. Go from where you are.

• Are you allowed to ask for money for your work if you don’t pay taxes? Delphine
  • You have to be self employed in the U.K. but it varies in different countries Kathleen

Other considerations:
Knowing that the work had to be sold in a field and it seams that the field in which this kind of work is living does not exsit in the financially supported paid world, But it does exist here although some people Do get paid for it e.g. Julyen and Billie.

Billie Hanne:

• The work must come first
• There is always a space to continue to make with quality.
• Of course we get disheartened, it is just important not to become the victim of this.
• Use the space you have and when if you are in a small space with little money, find the place to imagine BIG and then see what comes out of that.

• Its about value. In many ways the market place is bullshit and it would be great not to have to face this in relation to making work as the state of mind required to write funding applications is very different from the one required to make work and it can take away from the work.

• Some people manage to be very easy about it and light and just write the words that the people with money want to hear and then do what they want in the studio.