by Reece McMahon & Emily Beecher

Hello!

Emily and Reece here – founders of REcreate. In January 2024, REcreate will turn 3 years old (wow!). When we set out on this adventure, we don’t think we quite knew what to expect, but how lucky we have been!

We had the idea to set up REcreate back in 2020 during the pandemic, after meeting on China Plate’s ‘The Optimists’ producing course. Throughout the pandemic we worked side by side as indie producers to support as many artists as we could and realised that by working together, we could achieve more than we ever could alone. And what a time we have had.

We’re so incredibly proud that in under three years, we’ve worked with over 550 creatives, 1300 participants, on 30 projects and have raised over £1,000,000 for artists to make those projects happen. We’ve worked across dance, theatre, musicals, outdoor arts, and live art touring to numerous partners and venues alongside developing and running two artist development schemes. We’ve particularly supported artists who are marginalised in some way, recognising the barriers they’ve faced to get through the door already and acknowledging that to stay in the sector requires continued, bespoke support. We’ve mentored them on their own projects, paid them for their work with us, and so far, we’ve been a launchpad for five early-career producers.

After a particularly busy year with many achievements, including an incredibly successful Edinburgh Fringe season of three shows, we have taken some time post-summer to reflect on where we are at and where we are going – both individually and as a company.

As well as co-running REcreate, we’ve both being actively developing our independent practices too – something which we know has always informed and added immense value to the work we do at REcreate. From REcreate’s formation Reece has worked as Producer at New Diorama Theatre, and in Summer last year took up a new role as Executive Director at Chisenhale Dance Space. In addition to her producing role Emily has worked as a dramaturg and story consultant on numerous projects in and out REcreate, as well premiering her first solo show ‘Summer Camp for Broken People’ and delivering the world premiere and tour of Good Enough Mums Club, the musical she’s been developing for the past 10 years, all alongside being a single parent to a teenager.

This period has given both of us the necessary time and clarity needed to properly reflect on the individual journeys we’ve been on as producers, leaders, and creatives.

Reece has made the decision to move on from REcreate to begin new adventures and focus more of his energy on his role at Chisenhale, supporting dance artists to develop their practice and careers and developing his own practice in cultural leadership – he will be leaving officially at the end of 2023.  

Emily will be taking a long overdue break and, with Reece’s support, will be focused on facilitating this transition and beginning to shape the next chapter of REcreate.

Both of us will be taking some time to rest and re-focus on what we want to bring to our careers and work after these three brilliant years working as a team and growing as people and creatives. We don’t know exactly what the future holds but we know we’re incredibly grateful for our time together and the amazing work we’ve had the honor of creating.

So, we’ll be going quiet for a little bit – but we look forward to RE-connecting in the new year.

Love,

Emily and Reece x

by Emily Beecher

There is a deep irony in me attempting to write a post on ‘Rest’ at 10:21pm when I’ve been at my desk since 8:30am (aside from a cold and icy scramble to get to the post office earlier). I don’t know about you but this year has been a RIDE. I had a bumpy start to the beginning of the year and it took me until the end of March to find my stride. The reality is last Christmas our house found itself in the grips of Covid once again (sadly not for the last time!) and it meant that plans were cancelled, breaks were forfeited, and proper rest didn’t really happen.

So now, a year later, I am leaning into the idea that rest is a radical act. This year as we moved towards December, Reece & I made the decision that this week, the week commencing the 12th of December, we would limit external meetings and only take meetings on existing projects that needed some wrapping up before the holidays. Then we decided that we’re ‘closing the office’ from 19th December to 9th January. Yes, we’re taking THREE whole weeks.

Part of this is a practical decision: my daughter isn’t going back to school till the 9th and I’m a single mum who’s learned that trying to juggle both school holidays and work doesn’t actually work. But the reality is, the slightly unspoken thing is I, we, need rest.

We have an incredible year ahead of us at REcreate next year, multiple shows in production, the Edinburgh Fringe, a couple of UK tours, an audio project, some artist and producer development programmes, and four R&Ds in the first four months of the year. I have two deeply personal shows going out next year – one I’ve been working on for 10 years and the other for five. But we have to remember that Good Stress is still Stress, and the best way to combat stress is with rest.

Earlier this year we ran our pilot artist & producer development programme – Accelerator – and when we asked all the participants what sort of things they wanted support with – Boundaries and Work/Life Balance were at the top of the list. When we were talking about Boundaries I remember sharing my theory that boundaries should be ‘rubber bands not brick walls’ to looks of surprise. The thing is, a brick wall if met by another immovable force would break apart (and people trying to walk all over your boundaries tend to be an immovable force!) but a rubber band would provide you stretch when you need to be accommodating but can be pulled taut when you don’t want to budge. The key is to know when you need to be each thing.

I feel similarly about work/life balance. I don’t believe you can achieve a perfect balance in a day or even a week. Life isn’t that simple, instead, I tend to look at my life over months and quarters. Sometimes you absolutely need to work your ass off to get something done. You can burn the candle at both ends because you need to (and often because we WANT to) but you can’t do that forever. You will burn out long before that candle ever does.

We work in the arts, not medicine, no one is going to die because we didn’t answer an email. This week already I’ve been asked several times if I can ‘just slip in a quick chat between Christmas and New Years’ or can I ‘just do a couple of hours on the 23rd’ and when I pushed back on one project and was insistent that I wasn’t comfortable asking people to do work over the holidays and really – should they be working over the holidays? I realised sometimes if we’re not constantly go-go-go, if we’re not working all the hours, and doing all the things then we question our worth. We should not be making ‘busy’ or ‘exhausted’ our personal values. We need to lean away from our value being solely the amount of work we get through and start moving towards the quality of our lives, towards our capacity for joy, and for me, in order to be able to even contemplate those things, I need for my cup to be full.

So this year I’m thrilled that we’re actively making rest a REcreate priority. I don’t know about you but I am going to bake all the treats (so that I can obviously eat all the treats!), I’m going to go for walks in the woods, I’m going to see friends, and play Chrismas Movie Bingo with my daughter (there’s nothing like screaming DEAD PARENT or WREATHS INSIDE for it to feel like Christmas). I’m also going to sleep late and go to bed early and stay up far too late watching Traitors (no spoilers, we’re behind!) and get up early to walk the dog with no one else in sight. I’m going to call people I haven’t seen enough of this year and send silly memes to the ones I see all the time. I’m going to make cocktails and dance in the kitchen, and sing too loudly and off-key and I’m not going to care. The question is – are you joining us?

After a piece premieres, I often feel a big hole, as if something has dislodged itself. For the last 2 and a bit years I have been working on the project Mapping Gender. However, when I cast my mind back, I realise that the beginnings of this journey were almost a decade ago, before I even knew the word non-binary. Before I could take this word and use it to communicate something about myself.

In 2014 I created a book which acts as both an art object and an essay which explored borders and the in-between spaces. This work laid the foundations for what would develop into Mapping Gender. Then one day walking through the V&A historical costume galleries, I came across a mantua. This mantua was designed as a court dress, made between 1765-70 in England with fabric from France, and most striking of all, was about 1.8 m wide and as narrow as the human body would allow. The dress spoke to me of the constructions of femininity, feminine ideals, and their relation to beauty, class, race, and empire. The sheer volume the garment occupied would have dominated the space, simultaneously exhibiting a quantity of wealth expressed in the amount of visible fabric. However, the person wearing this mantua would have experienced restriction and discomfort as I did as I rehearsed for Mapping Gender wearing an imitation of this very one. The flatness of the specific dresses couldn’t help reminding me of maps and their flatness in relation to the world they purport to depict, somehow there didn’t seem to be space for the person in this garment, the garment was the person. I knew from the very beginning that this was something I needed to explore.

Working on Mapping Gender has been such an exciting process bringing together so many different elements and ways of expressing the complex ideas of the work. The research for the project has been sprawling and sometimes difficult to contain and control, reflecting the subject matter of the work. To help pull together all these strands it was a joy to bring the broad team of makers and creatives together. Each element of the project, be that smell, video, sculpture, historical costume, lighting or design, has its own story to tell, and its own way of relating to the concepts

The thread that passes through all these elements is that of the border; how and why it is defined and what it does to people and places. Borders exist everywhere on the micro and macro levels of our lives, they can be vital but are often harmful. Felt by people who existed by them, the ones who they affect and by the people who fall in between. My specific interest in borders stems, in part, from my dual nationality which gave me the feeling of standing in two places at the same time and never at home in one or the other. Later, as I came to understand myself as non-binary and then also as transgender I felt the way humans are divided into distinct genders seemed at odds with the way that I felt and understood myself. Mapping Gender is the place I have been able to explore these feelings around navigating these borders, particularly those which do not appear as physical structures but which shape us nevertheless. It has been such a privilege to interview and work with so many trans and non-binary people, and the responsibility that comes with taking care of those voices and perspectives yet also honouring my journey and my body in the work. In many ways, that feeling of something dislodging itself is part of the work – part of the work that continues in my body which will continue as I come to understand more about the invisible borders and their presence in us.

Images by Camilla Greenwell Photography

Reece and I have been talking about our values a lot as we’ve launched REcreate over the last week, but these just aren’t fun social media posts, they’re things we truly value and try to live by. So today I want to tell you a story about Reece and how his commitment to those values has been life changing for me.

Reece and I met on China Plate’s excellent The Optimists course in the heady days of Feb 2020. I remember the exact moment I knew we’d be friends – we were nearly hit by a bus crossing the road and descended into fits of giggles. When Covid shut everything down I reached out to him when I needed help with an Emergency ACE bid for The Good Enough Mums Club (GEMC). 

We worked so well together we brought him on board GEMC as Associate Producer. Then we discovered he only lived a 15 minute bike ride away, so as soon as we were allowed to bubble we had co-working days together. If you’ve ever worked with Reece, you know what a delight this is.

One day a week turned into two, work turned into stay for dinner, that turned into let’s go for lots of what ended up being called ‘Beecher Walks’. We laughed, worked hard, I cried a couple of times and he won Maisie over with Nintendo Switch and Monopoly card games. 

In December Maisie and I went to visit him at New Diorama to say goodbye before he left to see his family in York for Christmas. By the time we’d got home, Boris had locked us down again. Reece hadn’t ever not been home for Christmas but now if he was going to have to spend Christmas in London he was obviously going to spend it with us. So he moved into our flat for the holidays and together we had a brilliant time doing puzzles, dancing in the kitchen and eating an obscene amount of cheese.

Throughout this time we were working to form REcreate, we established our values, based on the things we truly believe will make this industry better. Now here’s the thing, those values aren’t random words, they’re things Reece lives. Which brings us to life changing.

This week we’re producing an R&D of Denise Harrison’s new play Pandora in Cornwall. As a single mum this is exactly the kind of work I’ve been turning down for almost 12 years. There is no way I can juggle being away for a week with being a mum – I just don’t have the support to make it happen. So when we were talking about how we were going to make this work, because Reece needs to be in London for work so he couldn’t go, he said, without a moment’s hesitation, ‘well I’ll just move into yours and take care of Maisie that week’ and that was that. 12 years of barriers wiped out in an instant. Not out of pity, or with reluctance, but because he leads with kindness, generosity and joy, and those things lead to inclusion.

So this week while I’ve been R&D-ing in sunny Newquay, Reece has been on parent duty for a kid that is not his (although he’s apparently renamed her Cecil). This support not only unlocks the potential for me to participate in opportunities previously inaccessible to me but now it also enables me to do my best work and to support others to do the same. 

I just want to say to Reece, thank you for being my confidant, champion, producer, business partner, bestie,and future housemate. You’re the best, thank you for living our values and for making me, my life and my career, better. 

by Beth Sitek

I think we can all agree that being an independent producer is one of the most elusive & isolating jobs in the arts industry. I didn’t even know what producing was throughout my years at school and university – it was something I stumbled across when my mate asked me to produce their Edinburgh Fringe show for a laugh & some free beer back in 2018. 2 years & 1 pandemic later, I’m questioning more than ever: who are we & what on earth do we do now?

Lyn Gardner quoted a Devoted and Disgruntled event back in February 2020 where producers were described as “magical unicorns … they are magic and they have the answers.” Needless to say Miss Rona rinsed me of all of my magic & I have more questions than answers at this point. Having had no formal training & questions that have only turned into bigger questions, I’ve felt more like a lone wolf than a magical unicorn for the most part of my career. That was before I was exposed to the possibilities of what co-creation, peer support & alliance can bring working as part of newly founded & freelancer led company, The REcreate Agency. 

Having worked as the Associate Producer since March of this year, I’d sum up my experience in a mere three words. I’d have to go with – filling. a. void. It’s been really fabulous to have actual humans to speak to as opposed to keyboard-warrioring my frustrations on Twitter in the hope that someone agrees with me. No but seriously – I had no idea that so much can be achieved through people power & a shared determination to support & develop artists through producing practices that actually care about the people working within them. Particularly now as everything re-opens & buzz words like ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ are being thrown somewhat carelessly by organisations who don’t even know the meaning of the words; as though our realities & futures don’t depend upon us being able to participate in an industry that favours those with money, contacts & a formal arts education. 

Emily & Reece talk lots about how REcreate was born & what their inspirations were for its creation, that being; we can do more together than in isolation. This increases our output, (3 producers working across numerous projects simultaneously is pure rocket fuel), but this is not the thing we celebrate. In an industry that tells us to work harder, we’ve decided to work smarter, by working together. The pandemic has shifted the tone of the industry – it feels like a more understanding & empathic environment to work within & this is certainly the case within the REcreate team & how we work with artists as well as each other. That being said, there have been times where freelance artists have been put in precarious positions, taken advantage of & cut off for various reasons by venues, companies and other artists – sadly this is not something that has disappeared, yet. 

The biggest tool REcreate has given me throughout my short time with them is self-belief. I know I am definitely not a magical unicorn. I see producers rather like magical wolves who are just as fluffy but have one hell of a back-bone & work better in packs. We certainly do not have all the answers but more importantly, we are dedicated to finding them out.