Volunteer
Live shows do not happen without a crew. Colliding Lines runs on a small core team and a much larger group of people who turn up for a get-in, staff a door, carry a speaker up a staircase and stay for the get-out. If you want to learn how this work is actually made, this is the shortest route in.
What volunteers do
- Get-in and get-out — loading, rigging, setting seating and clearing a venue to the state we found it in. The least glamorous and most useful thing on the list.
- Front of house — box office, door, programmes, looking after audiences who have never been to a show like this before and need someone to tell them it is fine to move around.
- Stewarding — keeping sightlines and walkways clear at promenade and installation events, and knowing where the exits are before anyone asks.
- Documentation — photography, video and sound recording. If you are building a portfolio, our shows are unusual material and you keep your own images.
- Publishing days — folding, stapling, guillotining, packing and posting. Whole editions have been assembled in an afternoon by six people around a table.
What you get
Training on the job from people who do it for a living, a credit in the programme and on the show page, travel costs within the host city, and food on any day longer than four hours. You will also see how a production is budgeted, scheduled and rigged, which is knowledge that is otherwise hard to come by without paying for a course.
Several of our associate artists and current producers started on a volunteer crew. We say that not as a promise but because it keeps turning out to be true.
Who it is for
No experience is required for front of house, stewarding or publishing days. Technical roles need either some prior experience or a willingness to be shown once and then do it properly. You must be sixteen or over for venue work.
Volunteering with us is genuinely occasional: a single evening, a weekend, or a run of dates if a project suits you. We never ask for open-ended availability, and we never use volunteers to replace paid roles — performers, technicians and designers on our productions are paid.
Access
Tell us what you need and we will work with it. Venues vary and some of the buildings we use are old and awkward; we will be straight with you about stairs, lifts, lighting and noise before you commit to a date rather than after.
Getting involved
Current crew calls are posted on the Open Calls page along with the dates and cities they cover. To go on the general list, send a note through the contact page saying roughly where you are based and what you would like to try. We come back to that list first every time a show goes into production.
