Roadmap to Recovery: SOPs for the Creative Sector

About the event

In 2020, safety took paramount importance for any live experience, and in order to support the live events sector, the Event and Entertainment Management Association (EEMA) published a set of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for venues, crews, presenters, vendors and others involved in the creation and execution of events across different industries. Roadmap to Recovery: SOPs for the Creative Sector was held as part of the British Council’s Festival Connections, in partnership with Arts and Culture Resources India  (an Art X Company initiative), an annual programme of expertise, knowledge and networking between India and the UK, on 29 October 2020.

This Festival Connections session explored the SOPs produced by EEMA and how these could prove beneficial to the festival sector. The session brought stakeholders from the Indian festival space and representatives from EEMA together to discuss and think of ways to restart the live events space.

Siddhartha Chaturvedi, CEO, Event Crafter and General Secretary, EEMA started the discussion with a presentation of the SOPs and provided insights into the thought process of developing such an extensive document. Swati Roy and M. Venkatesh from the Bookaroo children’s literature festival and T. Vijaykumar from the Hyderabad Literary Festival conversed with renowned designer Sumant Jayakrishnan on how SOPs can be put into action from a literary and visual arts festivals perspective.

The discussion continued with Thanush Joseph, Co-Founder and Director, Seventy EMG, and Vanessa Maria Mirza, Director, Dance Bridges Festival, conversing with Gunjan Arya, CEO, Only Much Louder (OML), on how the SOPs can be adopted, keeping the performing arts scene in the fore.

Thanush and Vanessa explored various aspects of the SOPs and the possible implementation challenges they have with respect to the size and scale of their respective festivals. As someone who contributed to developing the section on music festivals in the SOPs document, Gunjan emphasised how the SOPs are meant to be a guiding light and build confidence amongst event producers and the audiences to restart the sector.

The webinar presented the nuances of the SOPs, addressed concerns around its implementation, and offered a platform for discussion amongst different stakeholders from the sector to ideate and build new ways of the festival making keeping the health and safety of all stakeholders involved at its crux.

This event was held as part of the British Council’s Festival Connections in partnership with Arts and Culture Resources India (an Art X Company initiative), an annual programme of expertise, knowledge and networking between India and the UK.