10 Lessons from 10 Years of Producing
In November 2025, MAM will be celebrating a whole decade of producing dance and arts projects.What have we learnt in that time?
A lot. The past ten years has taught us everything about organising, co-creating, evaluating and more to make a project succeed. We’re always learning, but have a better idea than ever about what to look out for and where to focus efforts in the producing world.
So, to mark 10 years of producing, we’ve pulled together 10 key lessons from the work we’ve done over the years. We hope you find this useful in your own producing practice, but if you’re interested in something more in-depth, or have an idea you think our experience can help with, then drop us an email: hello@movingartmanagement.com!
Learn from Feedback
Feedback from clients, artists, collaborators and audiences is a gift – and one we never take for granted. Over the past decade, we’ve learned that listening isn’t a passive act; it’s an essential part of the creative process. Every project offers new insights, so we intentionally create space for honest, constructive reflection.
Whether it’s through formal evaluation tools, open debriefs or casual conversations with participants and audiences, we make it a priority to hear and respond to different perspectives. This approach has helped us fine-tune everything from artistic delivery to accessibility and logistics.
In action…
Feedback from our Move: In Progress (formerly FRESH North East) platform led to more support structures for emerging artists, including mentoring opportunities and clearer pathways to future work.
At community events like those featured in Meta4 Dance Company’s Desire Lines project, feedback helped shape how sessions were co-designed with participants, ensuring that people felt genuinely heard and included.
Feedback doesn’t just improve a project - it’s how we stay accountable, keep learning, and continue to do better.
Feedback session at FRESH North East.
Work Across Art Forms
Although our roots are firmly in dance, we’ve never limited ourselves – or our collaborators – to just one medium. While many of our clients are dance artists, the projects we support often bring together different disciplines including theatre, visual arts, film, music, digital technology, and community engagement.
This broadens the creative scope of each project, and also invites new audiences, challenges our assumptions, and deepens our learning as producers.
In action…
In 2017, we partnered with award-winning photographer Jevan Chowdhury on Moving Cities North East, a photography series capturing dancers in urban, rural and coastal settings across the region. The resulting exhibition – still on permanent display at Dance City, Newcastle – merged choreography and city architecture, highlighting the movement embedded in everyday environments, and showing how dance can live far beyond the stage.
Projects like this have shown us how disciplines can meet and evolve together, and how the blend of artistic forms often leads to outcomes that are more surprising, more inclusive, and more impactful than any one medium alone.
As producers, our role is to create the conditions for this kind of rich, interdisciplinary work to thrive.
Moving Cities North East, photographer Jevan Chowdhury
Collaboration
Collaboration has been at the heart of everything we do.
It isn’t just a logistical decision or a way to pool resources. It’s about sharing ownership and recognising the unique contributions each partner brings to the table.
In action…
Projects like Blue Wave Green Leas, a community arts initiative with the National Trust, and Stronger Shores, highlighted how working with place-based partners allows us to connect with natural landscapes, local heritage and grassroots voices in meaningful ways. Through this project:
Partners No More Nowt, SeaScapes, and the Sunderland University CoLab allowed us to build creative bridges between academia and the local residents.
Long-term relationships with venues like Shotton Community Hub and Greenhills Centre have helped root our work in the communities we serve.
We worked with artists Constance Humphries, Stevie Ronnie and Toi Guy, whose practices span movement, writing, textile craft, visual art, and more.
In this project alone, we facilitated community walks, site-specific performances, poetry and movement workshops that celebrate the intersection of people and place.
Collaborating across sectors and disciplines allowed us to design work that is responsive, rooted and relational. It’s through these partnerships that we’ve made our boldest work and learned the most.
Participants at Crook Hall and Souter Lighthouse, photographer Colin Davison
Support Emerging Talent
Nurturing new artists and ideas is essential for any production company – not only to keep the creative ecosystem thriving, but to show that what we do can have a lasting, meaningful impact. Supporting emerging talent means investing in people early in their journeys, helping them develop skills, build networks, and gain the confidence to grow their practice.
In action…
Choreview was a project we developed in response to a noticeable gap in the region: high-quality, regionally rooted dance writing. It supported two emerging writers, Pagan Hunt and Donald Jenkins to develop their critical writing skills and work closely with experienced mentors. Pagan Hunt went on to launch her own Substack publication called COMMOTION, which has grown into a respected platform for dance writing and commentary, that bridges the art and the audience through words.
Over the years, we’ve worked with choreographers at the start of their careers. We’ve helped community artists making their first commissions. We’ve developed producers who’ve gone on to run their own projects. We've provided shadowing opportunities, bursaries, feedback sessions, paid roles, and inclusive pathways, making sure our programmes reach people from underrepresented backgrounds who may not see themselves reflected in the sector.
By backing emerging talent, we’re not just future-proofing the industry – we’re making space for new ideas, new energy and new leadership.
Images & graphic design by Erin McGrath
Access and Inclusion
Access and inclusion are not add-ons.
They are foundational principles that shape how we work, who we work with, and the kinds of projects we produce. In the creative industries, there is a growing recognition that equity must be actively embedded into every stage of the process. This has been central to MAM’s philosophy from the start.
In action…
We’ve spent over a decade working with the North East Inclusive Dance Network (NEIDN) as Development Coordinators, helping to support a community of artists, organisations, educators and advocates who are committed to inclusive practice in dance. NEIDN offers a vital platform for sharing knowledge, highlighting best practice, and making visible the incredible work of disabled and neurodivergent artists across the region. For anyone in the North East looking to learn more or get involved, we always recommend beginning at www.neidn.co.uk.
We stay curious and stay in dialogue with those who are leading this work. We’re not perfect, and we don’t claim to be. But we’re committed to learning and improving, because we’ve repeatedly seen that inclusion leads to better work.
Photo of NEIDN meet up in September 2025
Maintain a Clear Value Proposition
Being clear about what you produce and why creates your point of difference. At Moving Art Management, our value is our experience, agility, and strategic vision. These have made us exceptional in helping ambitious clients scale bold ideas – taking concepts from a spark through development, fundraising, and touring – to achieve real-world outcomes while maintaining artistic integrity.
In action…
One of the clearest expressions of this is our ongoing partnership with Rendez-Vous Dance on The Monocle, a vibrant dance theatre piece that explores themes of queer history, joy and resistance. We came on board at the very beginning, working closely with Artistic Director Mathieu Geffré to raise investment and take the show first on a North East tour.
Since its inception in 2022, The Monocle has grown into a national success story, touring widely across the UK to critical acclaim. What began as a brave, intimate idea has become a firm favourite with international interest.
That’s our value proposition in action: we help people take risks, build robust frameworks around their ideas, and make meaningful work that travels.
If you haven’t yet written your own value proposition as an artist or producer, now’s the time. Ask yourself:
What do I offer that others don’t?
What kind of work excites me?
What outcomes do I consistently deliver?
Who benefits most from working with me?
Your value proposition is a statement of intent. Let it guide how you talk about your work and shape your producing approach.
The Monocle, by Rendez-Vous dance, 2022.
Back the Artistic Vision
Staying true to artistic vision ensures authenticity.
At MAM, we don’t follow trends. We follow ideas with integrity. We work with artists and organisations who come to us with a whole range of creative visions, backgrounds, and ambitions, but the most important thing is always the strength and clarity of the idea. That’s what allows us to fully understand and champion our clients as we help bring their work to life.
In action…
Rob Anderson’s Triple Threat is a unique celebration of dance culture and community building. Originally commissioned by NOVUM Festival, Triple Threat brings together break battle culture, workshops, and peer exchange with a sharp focus on youth development and cross-cultural dialogue. What started as a regional experiment has evolved into a platform for national connection and international ambition.
Payal Ramchandani’s solo work Just Enough Madness is a compelling blend of Kuchipudi dance and Carnatic music, which explores mental health through a South Asian lens, drawing on mythology, lived experience and traditional form. This work demonstrates how classical dance can be both deeply specific and universally relevant.
These are just two examples of how we support artists who are clear about what they want to say and why they want to say it. Our job as producers isn’t to mould or reshape that vision. It’s to help connect it with the right partners, audiences and opportunities.
Backing the artistic vision means investing in people, stories, and processes that allow for experimentation and growth.
Triple Threat 2025. Credit: Scott Akoz
Just Enough Madness, by Payal Ramchandani, 2025
Involve the Community
In every community we’ve worked, they need to know we’re working with, not just delivering work to them. Through research and participatory approaches, we ensure that the work we produce is relevant, responsive and rooted in real lived experience for the community involved.
In action…
Our community-rooted work includes: Hand in Hand (2019): A project with Surface Area Dance Theatre and Paul Miller led by deaf choreographer Chisato Minaminura, featuring a diverse cast of professional and non-professional performers, many of whom identified as D/deaf and/or disabled.
In 2022, we partnered with Rendez-Vous dance and Creative UK for The Queers Support Ukraine fundraiser at Dance City. The event celebrated queer artistry, brought the community together, and raised vital funds for Ukrainian refugees.
Dancing in the City and by the Sea (2024) co-created with the Ukrainian community and Create North, invited refugees to explore their practices. We worked with Ukrainian artists Alla Maistrenko, Jane Lozova, and Aliya Klochko culminating in a public photo exhibition at Newcastle City Library.
As participant Olha Yashkina shared:
“My experience with the ‘Dancing in the City and by the Sea’ project was deeply enriching. I’ve learned new movements and enjoyed the process through Ukrainian dance and photography.This project showed how great it can be to collaborate with people from different countries and to help Ukrainian artists open up and show their talented work in Britain.”
These projects are about listening first, then building together, so the outcomes feel shared, not imposed. Whether we’re working with local residents, young people, new migrants or intergenerational groups, we remain committed to creative processes that empower, connect and include.
Dancers Fran Willow & Andrew Wilkinson, photo by Paul Miller
Photo by Alla Maistrenko, featuring Jane Lozova and Sarah Jane Dobbs
Adaptation
Since we started MAM, things have changed in how we work and what we need to prioritise as a sector. Our team set up has made us incredibly agile and flexible, able to respond to shifts in the landscape.
From responding to the pandemic, to navigating current funding and cost-of-living challenges, our agility has been key.
In action…
In 2020 we managed to adapt our scratch platform format to present RE:FRESH, featuring work by artists Dora Rubenstein and Jane Park. This socially distanced version of FRESH North East went ahead in October that year and was one of the very rare live performance events in the region at the time, delivering on our commitment to support artists and their practice even in the toughest of circumstances.
Today we still ask deeper questions about how we produce: how can we minimise our environmental impact, collaborate more locally, and use our platforms to inspire positive change? We don’t have all the answers, but adaptation has become a constant thread – not as a compromise, but as a creative superpower.
Artists Dora Rubenstein and Jane Park, presenting work in progress at RE:FRESH our adapted and socially distanced version of FRESH North East that went ahead live in October 2020. Image by Anna Miller Photographer.
Celebrate Achievements
Recognising and celebrating milestones – both for ourselves as producers and for the artists and organisations we support – is vital. It’s easy to move from one project to the next without taking time to acknowledge the wins, but celebrating successes builds confidence, reinforces values, and inspires future work.
Over the past 10 years, we’ve collaborated with hundreds of artists to deliver projects across the UK, and helped secure over £3 million in public and private funding to support creative work. We’ve seen ideas go from notes on a page to national tours, from scratch nights to published writing, from community workshops to public exhibitions that live on long after the project ends.
We’ve watched emerging artists develop their voices, seen community participants grow in confidence, and worked alongside partners who share our belief in the power of creativity to transform spaces and spark connections.
Every project, no matter the scale, holds meaning. We’re proud to have played a role in bringing so many bold, thoughtful, and important works into the world.
As we mark a decade of Moving Art Management, we’re taking this moment to pause and celebrate the collective effort behind every achievement… because producing isn’t just about getting things done. It’s about building something that lasts.
The MAM team at the 2025 North East Culture Awards!