Rosa Picard Guest Blog: My Internship at MAYK
Image by Paul Blakemore of Communion at Mayfest 204.
I’m writing from a quiet office, windows open, sun streaming. It’s lovely. There’s fruit on the table and evidence of the wonderful MAYK team’s movements around the office. Today is my last day of a 2 month internship with MAYK. The internship came from University of Bristol’s SME (small and medium enterprises) internship scheme. I started with MAYK just as I finished my undergraduate liberal arts degree, with a week of wild overlap.
I remember saying, during my interview with Kate and Matthew, something like ‘Look, I can’t offer experience, because I don’t have much yet, but I can offer blazing hunger and enthusiasm to learn’. That was true, so the job title MAYK gave their new and naive intern, ‘Assistant Producer’, seemed almost comically generous - but I quickly realised it was emblematic of the team’s genuine insistence on including me in their work and projects, nevermind my inexperience. This inclusion was a real pleasure and a golden opportunity, for which I am immensely grateful.
Working in the arts is a youthful fool’s fancy that ought to be discarded urgently in favour of corporate compromise - there’s an idea easily absorbed. You have to hold on tight to any conviction otherwise - the trickiness of finding experience in performance production makes the fanciful fool version of the story seem dishearteningly true. But at MAYK I met a team of poets, play-makers, writers, DJs, musicians who also make MAYK happen. They have flexible patterns of working I didn’t know were possible, and each seem to be exploring many creative worlds at once. It is brilliantly inspiring to witness. Since being at MAYK, paths (and the wigglier, less trimmed and trodden tracks in between) that have always seemed far-fetched and unreachable, have begun to feel imaginable, which is a step on the way to possible. For a brand new arts graduate, this is hugely inspiring and affirming.
At MAYK there’s a lot of talk about environmental policies, green riders and accessibility. MAYK takes seriously their responsibility to find ways of working that are sustainable and inclusive. They’re pretty restless in their efforts; theirs is an ongoing conversation, present in every meeting and every area of their work, involving everyone. I’ll find out through experience whether MAYK’s example paints a rosy picture of an industry standard - I suspect MAYK is rather remarkable in its genuine commitment to its values. Leaving MAYK, I feel equipped with new vocabulary, expectations and convictions that I’ll be able to bring to wherever I work next. That’s a gift I don’t take for granted, and (who am I to say this but), I think MAYK should feel very proud of themselves for remaining resolute in their commitments to sustainable and inclusive work. I’ll hold myself to higher standards too thanks to MAYK.
I’m moderately deaf, which makes some working environments feel particularly daunting at times, maybe more for me than they might for others. At MAYK I found an atmosphere where I could be candid about my own limits but also bold about taking on tasks I might not have thought I could do. A culture where talking about access needs is normal made conversations possible: through these I learned new ways of negotiating my accessibility needs, that I’ll take with me to future workplaces. I’ll leave with a renewed sense that accessibility, sustainability, diversity and inclusion is (whether or not anyone means it to be, it just is) at the heart of working in the arts - or at least it should be. I felt that intuitively before starting my internship, but my time at MAYK has confirmed that for me, decisively.
I got to be part of delivering Mayfest, which was madly exhilarating and very rewarding. MAYK had me running around the city, helping to host artists and set up venues, doing things I didn’t know I knew how to do. I’ve never seen a team work so hard while staying in high spirits. Then Mayfest evaluation got started, which was insistently rigorous and included everyone. MAYK’s everyday operations whirred with new projects underway and another Mayfest just beginning to twinkle.
My internship feels over too quickly! I can’t wait to see where MAYK goes next. Thank you all!