Hey, I’m Jelka, a second year Theatre and Performance Studies student at the University of Warwick and have recently finished my work experience placement with Motionhouse.
I’ve wanted to do a placement with Motionhouse ever since I saw Nobody at Warwick Arts Centre last year. I was so excited after seeing it for the first time that I booked another ticket that same night and dragged a friend along to their second show at the venue. I had never seen a dance-circus show like it before and would have also happily just looked at the projections for the entirety of the show!
My aims for this placement were to increase my organisational awareness by working with most of the teams for at least a day and to gain an understanding of how Motionhouse operates on a day-to-day basis and to understand their different strands of income and engagement.
During my time with the company so far, amongst a myriad of other things, I explored some ways Motionhouse is investing in our planet. For Earth Day 2023, I would like to share with you some of the things I’ve worked on in the past couple of weeks.
As an NPO, Motionhouse is committed to consider their environmental impact. To allow for an informed planning process, I was set the task to develop an emissions calculator for travel, which Motionhouse can use to determine the impact, and keep track of emissions when touring. It was also meant to be used to decide on a case-by-case basis, whether emissions could be reduced by taking the train instead of using a van. And doing these calculations wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be!
Instead of just looking up a report about the comparison of rail emissions and car emissions online and inputting the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, I had to do some digging to understand the documents we had for the Motionhouse van and call a family member, who works at a train company in Germany, to get the figures I needed for a meaningful comparison. This task really showed me the importance of some things I never thought would come in useful working for an arts organisation: having contacts at a train company, being able to translate a German emissions report or a formula I learned in year 7 maths.
Another thing I have worked on during my placement is what previously was their Green Rider. This document has been sent out to venues for some time now, but Motionhouse was keen to have more meaningful conversations with their partners about the environmental impact their touring has. Therefore, we created an interactive Green Agreement to engage in further conversations with other arts organisations and encourage them to make a commitment to help Motionhouse become a more environmentally friendly company. I hope that this document will be the foundation for greener partnerships and can be updated whenever new steps are taken. We included a list of options for venues to select what is applicable to them and also outlined the things that Motionhouse aims to do.
One of the actions Motionhouse takes that surprised me, and which I found to be quite a challenge myself when researching accommodation for upcoming touring, is booking an accommodation in walking distance to the venue whenever possible and favouring houses or apartments over of hotels. And these are just two of the many criteria one must remember while trying to stay on budget!
I believe that these things are important tools for the company’s planning process and will help to implement further changes. Change always starts with action, however big or small it may be.
As part of Earth Day 2023, A Billion Acts of Green are taking place across the globe and Motionhouse is part of it. You can also add your act and join the movement – this way, the number of small acts will quickly add up!
