I am a producer. I think. by Sophie Akbar

I have produced two children, regular meals twice daily, a mown garden, the occasional vomit, an annoyed husband (many times) lots of merriment and a good amount of tears in my life thus far. I have also commissioned, produced and programmed multi-disciplinary, international arts festivals, plays, corporate events, music festivals and globally televised moments.

And recently I have begun programming and producing festivals aimed at attracting Pakistani Kashmiri audiences to mainstream outdoor arts events. The Pakistani Kashmiri community constitutes 70% of the Pakistani population in the UK and being from this community myself I feel really lucky to have had the opportunity to come full circle and use my professional experience to create inclusive and relevant cultural experiences for them.

I am also development producer for Without Walls, before which I was long term producer of Greenwich + Docklands Festivals, and even before that I was founder and producer of my own touring theatre company in Barcelona. 

Each one of these jobs has brought out and honed different skill sets and aspects of my character I didn’t think existed. I can be organised, methodical, creative, decisive, bold, strategic, meticulous, a driver or a listener. I can also be indecisive, distracted, cautious, scattergun, rambling and airy-fairy. I have been a producer in many different forms.

As a ‘creative producer’ what drives me is vision, it can stem from my idea or someone else’s, but it sparks something in me and I see something that I want to share with others. I want it to be the best it can be. This is what drove me, a 21 year old non-Spanish speaking graduate of Political Science to set up a theatre company in Barcelona. I saw someone execute a great idea badly and I became intent on making it much much better. So with vengeance in my heart, zero theatrical background and no money I co-wrote a play and luckily got an amazing director over from England who cleaned up the mess of the script we had handed him. I pulled a professional creative team together, I did a budget on the back of an A4 envelope (no excel sheets back then) and raised money to pay our creatives. I got a wonderful 300-seater theatre in Gracia, Teatreneu to give us an office as a base, a rehearsal room and their theatre to do our performances. And I went up on stage to perform, which I absolutely hated doing. I had to be aware of everything that was going on and join all the dots for everyone else. We attracted 60,000 people to our first show and many more to subsequent ones which was extremely rewarding and still to this day remains one of the highlights of my career. 

I had no idea I had it in me and I still have to keep reminding myself that the qualities of belief, tenacity, drive, resilience, creativity, problem solving, relationship management, leadership as well as the ability to inspire are all part of me. It’s difficult to write those things about myself, it feels egotistical, but also very necessary to remember when I start doubting myself. 

As ‘producer’ of Greenwich and Docklands Festivals for almost 14 years, people would get confused as to my remit, was I ‘Head of Production’ or ‘Executive Producer’ or ‘Onsite Crew’  or ‘Fundraiser’ or ‘Production Manager’ or ‘Programmer’ or ‘Administrator’? As you’ve guessed I was all of those things. As shiny as our festival seemed on the outside we were a tiny team on the inside and my job included budgeting, client, venue and stakeholder relations, production management, booking infrastructure, artist liaison, contracting, health and safety, recruitment, festival scheduling and siting, programming, licencing, security and staffing, and oversight of volunteering.

In large part with creativity all around me, my job was logistical and required an attention to detail that remains unmatched in the rest of my career. I controlled budgets tightly, problem-solved and crisis-managed every other day, and had to be tenacious, resilient, pushy and diplomatic. I understood the value of every person on site, having loaded vans at 4am and set up sites myself, so humility and empathy were drilled into my DNA. I was approachable, warm and smiley but a ruthless perfectionist, which people were ok with generally even if I was a bit annoying. I cried a lot at our festivals because they made me feel so happy and hopeful.

Today I work with Without Walls as ‘Development Producer’ where I develop relationships and strategies to help overcome inequities in the outdoor arts world, specifically Global Majority under-representation in our programme and our workforce. I talk to artists and professionals everyday about what we do and how to access our support. I discuss their creative ideas with them and, where invited, try to use my knowledge and expertise to support them. I work closely with the rest of the Without Walls team to create and implement our Anti-Racism Action Plan, looking at and addressing some of the systemic obstacles to creating equity in our organisation and hopefully a little wider.

I mentor professionals from the Global Majority who are striving to move forward in their outdoors careers and I relay to artists some of the things that might be going on in the mind of a programmer. In this producers role I am strategic thinking, partnership-building, bigger picture-led, approachable, empathetic and sensitive. I hope I am a change-maker and I am most certainly an advocate for the power of outdoor arts experiences to create communal joy and a sense of belonging.

In essence it comes full circle, a Producer is ‘one who produces’. A really happy producer (in my opinion) is ‘one who produces what they believe in’. 

Image credits © Jayne Jackson Photography