president's corner

Hello All,

Well, officially we have ended another FEDEC year; I will not go into all of our accomplishments from 2012 as you will have certainly read them in our Annual Report and the wonderful piece I wrote for the preface to that (Moral report). However, it is important now for me to let you know what big plans we have for 2013 and 2014.

But before I do, I would like to say thank you to the Akademiet For Utæmmet kreativitet – AFUK, our member in Copenhagen – for hosting our 2013 annual conference. The entire team was wonderful and the hospitality was generous. Thank you to everybody that made it happens and we have all come away with warm memories and cold feet (that last bit was not their fault; it was very cold in Copenhagen). Thanks again AFUK.

We have submitted a grant application for our second project in the framework of the Leonardo Da Vinci programme, called INTENTS, and are anxiously awaiting the reply to that for July 2013. We will then be able to set into motion a series of workshops geared to providing a wide range of approaches to teaching circus arts. We have moved on from purely technical aspects of disciplines and are now looking to further the requests of our members and their staff for more conceptual notions and a better understanding of what it means to teach in an arts institution. Fingers crossed for that one.

We are also going to continue the series of MAILLONS-workshops that address the needs of the pedagogical and artistic directors of our schools. We are currently undergoing a mapping exercise, which we refined during our session in Copenhagen, regarding all the different artistic initiatives we undertake throughout the year and hopefully that will enable members to better understand what initiatives are useful across our organisation and which may be possible to implement in their schools.

I would like to remind everybody how important it is to fill out the questionnaire that will be sent around, without it we will not be able to provide a quality analysis of our activities. That’s really essential.

Once that is done we will be looking into possibilities of discussing insurance and other matters that concern us all.

Also, while there are forms to fill out, please do not forget to reply to our “ESCALES” survey. This is a survey that is part of our on-going service to the sector and will allow us to gain more insight as to the amount of mobility that our students undertake in a given year. This is important as it will allow us to lobby for better ERASMUS conditions and help us develop support that is more adapted to the types of mobility we undertake. So please, don’t forget “Escales”.

I would also like to add, as a final hip-hip hooray that our next annual conference will be held at Circus Space in London in April 2014. That should be a great time.

We all know that this last term is a busy one for us all, so I wish you all the best for your end of year activities, performances and auditions.

Signing off,

Tim Roberts, President

April 2013