ARTISTS have had a tough time during the hard lockdown, and so has the support team that supports and keeps them in the spotlight.
Bridgette Brukman is the woman behind many of Cape Town’s most talented and celebrated artists. She is the founder of Brukman Consulting, which provides artist management, brand management for singers and she is a booking agent and creator of bespoke musical events.
Brukman started the business in 2014 when she was working with actress Kim Cloete and singer Loukmaan Adams when she helped manage the Garden Court Theatre in Walmer Estate.
Brukman saw the opportunity to use her experience which back then was assisting non-profit groups raise funding - and she launched a business in the entertainment field.
“I started to engage with the artists and they said that they needed representation and someone to just help them get their name out there,” said Brukman. She began with a band called Signature SA and helped put together shows for Voice SA finalist Robin Pieters and steadily she grew her business. Her clients include artists Salome and Tye Platinum, comedian Carl Weber and actress Jill Levenberg.
When the hard lockdown was announced in March 2020, Brukman said: “I actually closed my business completely because it just didn’t make financial sense at all and at the time I had two staff members I had to let go.” She added: “I didn’t lose any of my clients because they said they have nowhere to go so they wanted to stick with me ...I had built very strong relationships with them.”
Her business model is personal when it comes to artist management and her clients are all extensions of her family, and she would often host dinner parties and get-togethers with them, which Brukman said was part and parcel of her business.
With online shows becoming a mainstay for artists last year, Brukman said they did these kind of shows, but many times it was not for huge profits, but just to keep the artists in the limelight.
“I must be honest, I’ve never walked away from an online show with a profit for Brukman Consulting necessarily, and I didn’t think that was the idea. It was really just to keep the artists relevant.”
Brukman is in the midst of a project named ArtsUnite, taking place at the Roxy Revue Bar at GrandWest, where she has organised for a diverse range of artists to take to the stage throughout the month. Each artist takes responsibility for promoting their show and filling the venue.
Brukman admitted that it’s these kinds of innovations that would keep business and the arts alive during the Covid-19 pandemic. She said: “There is no way to plan for even the immediate future because anything can happen … I just took on one of the staff members that I had to let go last year and it’s on a consultancy basis.”
She added: “Anything can happen and I don’t even have my vision board any more because it’s all so unpredictable at the moment that I just run the business from week till week.”