Quarantined? Here Are Some Ways to Expand Your Event and Festival Knowledge While You Wait It Out


While we all safely shelter-in-place during this pandemic, here is a list of ways you can enrich your understanding of various aspects of event and festival production, management, and safety.  

I have personally read all of the books listed below (with the exception of the Risk and Hazard Mgmt book and the Video Production book; I will do that soon) and while some are a bit old, they all have good lessons that can still be applied today.   Anyone that is a manager (or wishes to be one), I highly recommend you start with Dare to Lead, then look at setting up surveys for your team from the Appreciation and Tendencies books to help you better understand how to lead them (and for your team to interact with each other).  

Below the books are some other resources, including podcasts, webinars, and e-magazines that I’ve found to be helpful.    The Event Safety Alliance, in particular, is full of wonderful information – and now is the perfect time to catch up on the latest in safety procedures.   

And finally, there’s a small list of video tutorials / examples – I highly recommend you watch the crowd surge videos; it will help you see just how powerful and hazardous a surge can be in a large crowd.   Note how they curved the pit barricade to help diffuse any surges rather than have it be a straight line (good thinking on their part).   

I’ll keep updating the links below as I find new books / resources / videos.  And while most of the links below are to Amazon, remember that there are also websites like https://bookshop.org which pledge to give a percentage of their sales back to your local bookstores.  

  •  Event and Festival Reading
    • General Festival / Event / Career Related
      • ESA’s Guide to Reopening – just released on May 11, 2020, “The Reopening Guide addresses health and sanitary issues that event and venue professionals need to consider in order to protect both patrons and workers.  Since there is still insufficient testing, no contact tracing, and no vaccine against COVID-19, this guidance is particularly detailed.  The first edition is tailored to be especially useful for event professionals reopening the smallest events with the fewest resources available to mitigate their risks, since in every municipal reopening plan these will be allowed to reopen first.”
         
      • Creating Enduring Festivals

      • Event Entertainment and Production
      • Festival and Events Management (International Focus) – 
        – this is a UK textbook that takes an international approach to explaining festival and event management, with several interesting case studies.
      • Backstage Handbook – an “illustrated almanac of technical information”, this book is essential for any theater stage manager, and is quite useful for concert stage managers as well.  Includes sections on knot tying, pictures of stage related tools, shop math, and much more.
      • This Business of Concert Promotion and Touring – this book is compact but full of pertinent information on how to best set up a concert and tour, both from the artist side and the promoter / venue side.
      • The Realist’s Guide to a Successful Music Career
        – co-written by Joel Cummins from the successful band Umphrey’s McGee, this is a fantastic resource that dives into all aspects of what life is like as an emerging, then touring, musician.  
    • Leadership Related