We hope that you are staying strong and nurturing those creative ideas during this strange time. Currently we are thin on the ground for arts news as all events & activities are off for the foreseeable time. Slap would love to see your ideas and creative explosions during this lockdown period! What are you doing to keep the artistic flow and encourage others?
As we know, this situation is having a huge impact on the creative and events industries, with venues, tours, projects and festivals postponing or cancelling and very uncertain times ahead.
We’re hearing from many of you lovely local arts providers with your own closures and halts on creative goings-on and our biggest love goes out to you all. The venues, festivals, bands, workshops, classes, galleries, artists, events and individual creative folk who are all hit hard by this. A lot of people working in this scene are freelance and we hope that some support comes to you soon.
On the positive side, we’re seeing an incredible response from these very same industries, offering new and exciting ways to entertain us all while we are home. So many live feeds, ideas, virtual gallery tours, free theatre productions, interactive gigs, free courses, games, poetry and so much more……Look out for Grayson Perry’s art classes on C4 & The National Theatre are streaming live productions for free! Keep it up people you are inspirational and boosting morale at this difficult time! Also, Arts Council England have temporarily stopped a couple of their grant schemes including Project Grants for the short term to offer a support fund for creative industries affected. (see link below).
We are all affected by this in one way or another and let’s show how strong our community spirit is by reaching out to others, ordering from our local suppliers, pulling together, checking on your neighbours and looking after those who need extra support. And help people’s isolation with vibrant inspirations!
So please do USE us! We’d really love it if you could send us your ideas! Simple instructions on making things, schedules for live feeds, invites to virtual meetings, useful links and other things to get us all through this in a healthy and happy way.
If you are interested in having an arts feature on you/your org/your work, or fancy sending us your sparkling artsy content for our blog, please contact Kate on : arts@slapmag.co.uk
If your feature is a music review please contact editoral@slapmag.co.uk
Below are some useful links for small businesses/self employed creatives:
https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/covid-19/our-open-funding-programmes#section-5
https://www.worcester.gov.uk/news/coronavirus-registration-opens-for-grants-to-worcester-businesses
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-to-employers-and-businesses-about-covid-19
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/coronavirus-business-support-to-launch-from-today