Making time to play can boost your creativity, lift you out of your creative block and open up a whole range of new ideas. Experimenting and exploring also stops your work falling into a routine and keeps your creative practice enjoyable and fresh, even if it’s your day job, too.

As creatives, play is at the core of our work. Spending time experimenting and trying out new ideas – without the expectations of getting it wrong – is what leads us to do our best work. Creative work doesn’t always feel that playful though. What started out as a passion or or side hustle, can start to lose its spark when it becomes the daily grind of admin. Once deadlines and commissions pile up, creative blocks can kick in as well, leading to us doing whatever we can come up with, just to pay the bills.

This session, facilitated by Victoria Melody, will give you the tools and permission to play and create. Having worked across a range of artforms including performance, film and stand-up comedy, Victoria knows the power of play and fun. In this session, she’ll show you how playing can help improve your practice, how to play properly, invite you to silence your inner critic and work out how to put play back into your creative practice. There’ll also be time for a Q&A at the end.

In this session Victoria will:

• Ease people into the process of play
• Offer ways to get rid of your inner critic
• Give an overview of the power of play and what it can do for us
• Allow for plenty of peer conversation
• Perform a comedy set!

More about Victoria Melody

Victoria Melody is an award-winning British artist with a fine art and performance background and a passion for other people’s passions. She works across art forms, theatre, film and stand-up, with and about Britain’s lesser-known tribes. Fascinated by anthropology, she immerses herself into communities, becoming an active participant in their rituals as research for her work.

She has presented her work nationally and internationally at venues including the Victoria & Albert Museum, Soho Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, Battersea Arts Centre, Summerhalland Pleasance (Edinburgh Festival Fringe), Cherry Lane Theatre (New York), Virginia Art Festival, Push Festival (Canada), Aarhus Festival (Denmark) and Brisbane Festival (Australia).

More about Rife’s The Link

Rife’s The Link events are a series of online gatherings and workshops for 18 – 30-year-old creatives in the West of England wanting to further their professional practice and connect with their peers. They’ve been curated to give participants the opportunity to develop key skills that will support their work and will be run by experienced facilitators. The Link events have been made possible by Arts Council England, DCMS’ Cultural Recovery Fund and Bristol Festival of Ideas.

These events are delivered in collaboration with Bristol Ideas. They are part of the A Poetic City season of events commemorating 250 years since the death of Bristol-born poet Thomas Chatterton. A Poetic City is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund using money raised by National Lottery players.

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