Healthy Touring And The Back Lounge Launch Resilience Workshop Series For Touring Professionals

Healthy Touring And The Back Lounge Launch Resilience Workshop Series For Touring Professionals posted: 21/06/2021

Health and wellbeing Tour Manager and The Back Lounge Founder Suzi Green has commissioned a series of resilience workshops for the live music industry as the touring sector begins its transition back into the demands of event production.

The three free sessions will cover: Mindfulness for Touring with Craig Ali (Monday 21st June 6pm), Healthy Boundaries with Laura Ferguson (Wednesday 14th July), and Sleep & Jet Lag with Matt Kansy (Wednesday 4th August).

The workshops will explore a range of topics from coping strategies for dealing with heated moments in high pressure situations, how to naturally wind down at the end of an intense day, rate negotiation, managing workload and effective communication, maximising the quality of your sleep and techniques to combat jet lag and shift work.

The workshops were made possible through the Culture Recovery Fund and, although open to anyone in the music industry, will benefit the freelance touring community by equipping them with fundamental tools in resilience before returning to tough scheduling.

Brought to the community by The Back Lounge, an online support group for out of work touring professionals which Green created during the height of the pandemic, the wider live music industry is now invited to sign up to the workshops.

A seasoned Tour Manager herself, whose clients include Placebo, PJ Harvey, Katie Melua and Wolf Alice to name a few, Green is passionate about wellbeing on and off the road. Having experienced her own debilitating episode of burnout, she left touring for 10 years. I thought my touring days were over. The industry simply didn't work for me.

Since retraining in various modalities, she later returned to touring with new skills in wellbeing to the benefit of artists and crew.

Green believes training in resilience will help to guide performers and music crews, live events and festival workers - who have suffered collective and prolonged unemployment due to the pandemic - make healthier decisions as they begin to book more regular jobs.

People now have the opportunity to learn how to develop better coping strategies, highlights Green. We will all need to take our health seriously to survive long periods during busy touring schedules in the future.

The first workshop will take place later this month with Craig Ali, a Wellbeing Consultant, Health Coach & Mindfulness Facilitator.

He says: Everyone in the music industry is going back into an intense, fast paced environment after having so much time off. Whilst this is exciting for the industry, it will be a shock to the system and may create some tension and anxiety. In these environments it is important to have trained skills to help manage energy, regulate emotions and decompress at the end of the day.

The Mindfulness for Touring workshop will train people in some of the most effective ways to do this on the go. Breathing and posture techniques will be taught to train the participants on how to stay calm, not be in reactive mode, create space in the moment and wind down the nervous system to promote recovery.

About Suzi Green Healthy Touring

Suzi Green is a Tour Manager with 25 years' experience in live music. Her approach to tour managing is centred around wellbeing and nutrition. She has worked with artists including Placebo, Katie Melua and most recently, Wolf Alice for their Live at Worthy Farm Glastonbury performance.

About The Back Lounge

The Back Lounge is a private group centred around a weekly Zoom for those working, or currently not working in events, primarily encompassing touring music crew, but open to anyone working in the wider events industry including performers, management, booking agents, venue staff etc. A peer support group without clinicians - not formal therapy but a friendly online group - geared towards pooling resources and coping together during the uncertainty of current times.

About TPG

The Tour Production Group (TPG) is an independent, UK-based and internationally attended association of live music touring professionals. The association is dedicated to enhancing professionalism in the touring industry through education, best practice and advice.

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