General / Why we started the Brassmonkey Bursary appeal

Why we started the Brassmonkey Bursary appeal

We decided it was time to stop complaining about the lack of diversity in our professional worlds of physical comedy, clown and devised theatre, and do something about it!

We thought a place that we could have maximum impact was right at the outset of professional training – when people are forming budding creative relationships that then build into partnerships and go on to nourish our creative communities.

So we want to encourage diversity in our hugely successful professional training workshops in clown and comedy, to reflect the communities that we perform for, and which we build our creative communities from. That means diversity of ethnic heritage, LGBTQ+ and neurodiverse peoples, and anyone under-represented on our stages of course. But we also think it is crucial to get more people from working class and economically disadvantaged backgrounds into our workshops.

Because let’s face it, it costs a bomb to train in performing arts! Also, to keep bashing away at being a professional performer, if you don’t have affluent parents with deep pockets bailing you out, even if it’s just from time to time, is bloody hard.

So we are asking our supporters, superfans and everyone across the performing arts communities who benefit from having great performers being trained up (commercial and mainstream theatre, we are talking about YOU) to raise the money to provide TWO talented individuals with the funds to attend our 3-week intensive training programme in March 2020, including some financial support for travel and accommodation, so that non-Londoners aren’t out of pocket. (We may ask you also for help in putting people up if you have a room spare in London in March!).

We already raised enough at our birthday party in May to fund one participant. Now we are asking you to help contribute to raising £1200 to fund a second one!

Details on our Go Fund Me page here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/brassmonkey-workshop-bursary

And details of how to go about applying for a bursary here: https://www.spymonkey.co.uk/bursary.html

More information on our training and education programme here: https://www.spymonkey.co.uk/training.html

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