EDITORIAL
by Francisco Carrasco

We have had a very busy September with so much content delivery and exciting work produced by the team and collaborating artists. We now move onto October with so many uncertainties and Covid-19 still ruling our lives.

I hope you enjoy the contents of this month’s Revista Luma in between all the upheaval and continuous changes this pandemic keeps creating for us all. 

Let us know what you think and if you would like to contribute email:
betty@lumacreations.org

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The commission by LUMA to create a film of our work as artists’ and to portrait throughout  the film issues such as how we’ve continued to create through the global pandemic and how we are seeing  the future and our work going forward and developing post Covid-19 was a challenging but a very useful and important exercise to do at times like this.

For me firstly the commission gave the push to really think of what next and to feel hope again.


Also it forced me to look into the possibility of showing my work in a different way through film… which is something I have always been interested in doing and have never had the chance to explore so it was great in that sense but of course challenging … it was a learning experience. 

I think the focus of LUMA creations on facilitating and making it a goal to bring together cultural exchanges between Latin America artists living and working in the UK, showcasing a programme of music, storytelling, dance, puppetry and more it’s so important.

I feel that as a Latin American performing artist and a woman, our work is underrepresented in the UK and it is essential that we shed more light on this subject.

FERIA LATINA 2020 (Online) brought together artists from Peru, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and UK. By programming a diverse spectrum of work made by artists based in Latin America, as well as artists of Latin American heritage based in the U.K., the LUMA online festival stage shed light on theatre, dance, music, puppetry and films that might otherwise be left unseen by U.K. audiences specially in the North of England.

Supporting many productions by Latin American artists writers, directors and performers was so important, we need more acknowledgement and recognition on the importance and richness that other cultures bring to our societies and the work that many of us have been doing for so many years to contribute to make our society a better place, a place where integration, multiculturalism and diversity are celebrated.

Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of the LUMA creations online Feria Latina 2020 and thank you for all your hard work in making this event happened.

Tanya Cusan of Cusan Theatre
October 2020

Things were looking good. Xmas had not long disappeared around the corner of the New Year, and we were looking back on another successful year where we’d put on the fantastic Fiesta Latina  at Edge Hill University; toured our puppet show, Little Ears, to hundreds of children at community libraries across Liverpool and delivered the first part of our Creative Futures training programme for creative professionals. We were in the final planning stages of our second Cosmic Café event, which would see huge telescopes up in the roof of John Archer Hall, allowing people to see magnificent live images of the night sky, whilst sharing music, song, knowledge of the cosmos and food with a whole host of people wanting to come together and celebrate everything we are. And we had just started to deliver the second part of the Creative Futures at Liverpool Central Library.

And then it happened.


After weeks of mounting fear and tension, watching the entire world implode before our very eyes, Coronavirus, Covid-19, whatever you want to call it, arrived, and the country was thrown into lockdown.

As a creative community organisation, Luma Creations thrives on its ability to bring people together, to share and to listen, in creative spaces and in performance, and this was no longer possible for the foreseeable future. Would this mean the end of our creative output? The end of us meeting and sharing our different cultures? The end of us reaching out to those who were already marginalised in our communities? For some creative organisations, unfortunately it did mean the end.

Here at Luma, we immediately recognised the need to shift our thinking and approach and develop a way of working and connecting safely in this new-normal landscape. Following quick tutorials on this latest thing called Zoom, and after just a week of lockdown, we had our first online meeting with all Luma staff and volunteers, as we knew the importance of maintaining contact and being there to support everyone and ourselves. These meetings have continued every week, with a few exceptions, right up to now, and in some ways are even more important now than ever.

All around us, in those first couple of months, organisations everywhere were throwing out content to put online, desperate to show they were still here, still working, still surviving, and expressions like ‘all zoomed-out’ and ‘online fatigue’ were starting to pop their heads into everyone’s vocabulary. But we resisted this urge and chose to concentrate instead on what was the best thing to do to remain in the minds of all who know us. We were quick to receive the council’s rate relief, ensuring we had enough funds to keep our spaces and utilities going for at least a few months. But we still needed to be able to be creative and produce content in line with our overall mission, but which was of quality and the sort of thing people would want to actually engage with online.

With some luck, and a lot of hard work and diligence, we secured some emergency funding from Arts Council England, which gave us the opportunity to look at the best ways to improve our online output, reengage with some of our past work, and develop new work to take us through the next six months and beyond.

At the end of April, we moved the Creative Futures training programme online, and whilst we lost some of the participants, we soldiered on and completed the course with the second cohort.

In May , following all current advice and social distancing protocols, we rehearsed and filmed Little Ears, allowing us to put this extremely successful performance out to significantly more people than the live events, as well as being able to use it as promotional material to tour the piece live to venues across the North West when, and if, this pandemic should end.

Also in May, we filmed and recorded Luma Trio doing a ‘live’ set, as well as taking part in a Zoom panel session with Colombian artists and activists discussing the intersections of community-based art, exile, human rights, and Liverpool’s unique character as a site of cultural output and political activism for the University of Liverpool’s Culture Unconfined online festival.

From June, we started planning the Feria Latina, our online replacement for the Latin Festival we normally deliver at the end of the summer. This involved commissioning Latin American artists based in Latin America and the UK, creating and filming a range of content from Luma, which included storytelling, making, music and in-conversation events with some of the best Latin American artists from around the world and then putting it into an exciting and dynamic programme for a week of online work from the 14th to the 19th of September. We had massive support from all the team at Luma, with our volunteers making a magnificent contribution to the whole project, and something we couldn’t have done without them. In the end, we made and edited over forty different films for the festival and made contact with over 14,000 people over the course of the week – a truly epic achievement.

As we head into October, we have managed to complete our third and final cohort for Creative Futures and are now planning for delivery of a whole new training programme, having recently received funding from the European Social Fund through the Workers’ Educational Association.

So, what is our overall assessment of working through the Covid pandemic? It has not been easy: having to rapidly adjust the way we work and connect to people; working hard to secure funding so that we could develop and deliver the work we wanted to; developing new work alongside the other work commitments we have from projects which started well before Coronavirus heed even peaked it’s head above the parapet. But one thing has remained; the importance of creativity and connecting to people to give them new experiences and opportunities to create for themselves.

P. Max Alder
October 2020

It was an amazing and inspiring week at Luma Creations with Feria Latina 2020. We would never had believed we could create 40 different programmes across 6 days of online content pre-lockdown  and reach over 14,000 people via our live streaming – However that’s what we achieved as we celebrated, promoted and created music, storytelling, travel, crafts sessions and conversations about Latin America.
 
We brought together Artists, Cultural Activists and Friends from across Latin America, including: Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru as well as UK and Spanish Artists. An inspirational week of sharing, laughter, in depth conversations and beautiful creativity.


When we first discussed the idea of an online Latin American festival, we felt it would be a day or so, with some musical performances, maybe an interview or two and some online workshops. It quickly became clear that one of our jobs was to support artists and the other was to give them a platform to speak about what they were experiencing and how the lockdown and Covid-19 was affecting them. It was clear those were our priorities as well as presenting something that spoke from different sides of our culture.
 
Thanks to funding from Arts Council England we were able to commission several Latin American artists to create online content that spoke of their experiences and how they were continuing to create and reflect on the situation. Some excellent work was created with thoughtful feedback from both audiences and the artists themselves.
 
Thanks to funding from Community Fund (Big Lottery), through our Amistad programme we were able to create a project to involve participants to create the storytelling and making corners for the online festival. With excellent results and input from many volunteers.
 
I have been asked what the highlights for me were. Without a doubt it was the way we pulled together as a team and created an amazing range of online content and brought together some wonderful artists. How, through the festival we enabled them to have some support and a chance to share how they were doing both psychologically and creatively. The journey was at times more important than the end result; however, the end result was wondrous and the challenge was more than met.
 
Jose Navarro from Peru and one of our Commissioned Artists had this to say, “Feria Latina came at the right time, from everything cultural that was frozen during this difficult times, it became a force and inspiration that enable me to not only become active creatively; but adapt to the circumstances and manage to produce a work on a new format. It was a challenge as an artist to produce and create a work and digitalise. I am grateful for this opportunity to give me a high motivation to keep going with my art and be able to share to a wider audience. I would like to congratulate the organisers for such an effort to bring us many artists together and provided us with a platform to exchange and meet via other mediums. I have managed to see other colleagues work and exchange ideas and views for future collaborative work. Thanks!!!"

Francisco Carrasco
October 2020