Week 5: Presenting gender diverse programmes
Introduction
Keychange is an international movement which aims to encourage music festivals and organisations to commit to a 50 per cent representation of women and gender diverse people across their programming and staffing. Keychange 50:50 was originally set up in 2018 by Vanessa Reed, during her time as Chief Executive of the PRS Foundation, with the aim of achieving a 50:50 gender balance in music programming by 2022. Keychange is now led by the PRS Foundation, Reeperbahn Festival, and Musikcentrum Öst, and supported by Creative Europe alongside a wide range of international partners. Although the initial target of 50:50 by 2018 was not met, an ever-growing number of organisations remain pledged to this goal, which has become an international project. By committing to diversifying your own programming, you too are joining a large movement working towards gender equity within the music industry.
This week, you will consider how to bring together everything that you’ve learned so far. You will build your own toolkit to help you start diversifying your own programming (or diversifying it further if you are already working in this area). Additionally, you will hear from Angela Slater, composer and founder of Illuminate, talking about her work directing an all-woman ensemble which specialises in presenting work by historic and contemporary women composers.
By the end of this week, you should be able to:
- bring together everything that you have learned so far about what the challenges are around building gender diverse programmes, how you can contribute to making positive change, and strategies which you can adopt to perform works by historic and/or contemporary women composers
- create your own toolkit to help you start building your own gender diverse programmes.