Welcome to Creative Insubordination!
I decided to start writing this blog because I got tired and angry.
For over seven years, I wrote the Theatre Ideas blog and wrote post after post trying to convince people working in the professional theatre that the current system wasn’t serving artists, audiences, or the art itself.
I wrote about the woeful employment figures and annual incomes of most of those involved. I wrote about the “Wal-Marting of the American Theatre” and the absurdities of the centralization of so much casting in NYC, and the culpability of university theatre departments across the country for supporting this system. I wrote about the inequities of the nonprofit funding system where the wealthiest 2% of arts organization receive 55% of charitable giving. I wrote about geographical discrimination and how non-urban areas were virtually ignored by the media, by government agencies, by charitable foundation.
But when all was said and done, nothing changed.
Young people kept graduating from universities and heading off to New York City having been told by their teachers and keynote speakers at ACTF and SETC that if they just “wanted it enough,” if they just “worked hard enough,” if they “had what it takes,” if they just “said yes,” they would succeed.
Most didn’t. Not because they weren’t talented and intelligent, but because opportunities were few and far between.
Most spent their time working low-paying, dead end jobs doing things for which they were much too intelligent. And because they lived in New York City (or Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Boston or some other thriving metropolis), they paid an enormous percentage of their measly income on rent for tiny apartments that they shared with other “aspiring artists.” But hey, they were living the dream.
They took the few bucks they managed to scrape together and gave them away to photographers to take their resume photos every year or two, to teachers to take classes where they could still get a faint whiff of the art they love, and to clothing stores to keep their wardrobe fresh. Or maybe they pooled their money with others to rent a space and produce a showcase that only their friends attended.
They desperately tried to get their union card, because they believed it was their ticket to a career, even though almost 60% of Actors Equity Association members didn’t make a dime in the theatre the previous year and 87% made less than someone wearing a polyester uniform flipping burgers 40 hrs a week. But you’re not a professional unless you have that card. Or so they had been told.
Worn out after a few years, they often struck on The Solution: graduate school. There, in exchange for the opportunity to spend two or three years “focusing on my art,” often while being abused by bitter martinets masquerading as teachers, they acquired so much student loan debt that when they graduated they couldn’t afford to take low-paying jobs or internships in their field because Uncle Sam was knocking at their door looking for them to start repayment.
And so it was back to the low-paying, dead end job and the tiny, expensive apartment.
Eventually, usually somewhere in their mid-30s, they give up. Maybe they want a house, maybe they want a family, maybe they want to stay in one place for a while instead of being on tour or shuttling from job to job, maybe they don’t want to live in NYC, maybe they want to have a reliable income. Maybe they want to have any income at all.
Maybe they’ve forgotten what it was they loved about the theatre, about the arts, about being creative.
So then they take their graduate degree, and their graduate school debt, and if they’re lucky they get a job at a college or university somewhere, where they teach their students the same Cinderella Myth that destroyed them.
And the cycle continues.
And I got tired of it.
This blog is about a New Way of Thinking and Doing.
It is about Creative Emancipation.
It is about Reclaiming the Means of Production.
It is about Leading a Creative Life.
Buckminster Fuller once said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”
That’s what this blog is about.
If you are coming here looking for advice on how to sustain yourself a bit more comfortably as you follow the traditional arts pathways, most of what I write here won’t be useful to you. If you “just want to act” (or design, or dance, or…), this blog isn’t for you. If you’re content with looking at yourself as a commodity to be sold to employers who control whether or not you are permitted to create, this blog isn’t for you. You’re welcome to look around for anything you can use, of course, but unless you are open to considering very new, untried, and perhaps slightly crazy ideas, unless you can free yourself from the concepts you have been taught during your life, this blog will probably seem “impractical.”
Because it is.
This blog is for the impractical, if by impractical you mean innovative. It’s for people who want to take control of their own creative lives, who don’t mind thinking like an entrepreneur, who are willing to broaden their concept of how they interact with others, who aren’t afraid of doing more than one thing, who put doing the work above all else, who don’t want anyone to tell them where they can live and when they can create, who are fed up with being told “thank you, we’ll let you know,” and who are willing to take a risk in order to use their talents to make the world a little bit better place.
If that’s you, then I hope you will continue to visit, and most importantly, leave comments. I deeply value your input.
Sounds good. Ready to hear the new plan!
Thank you!
I’m in! Can’t wait to discover more along with you and hopefully contribute to the process along the way …
Thank you for sharing Scott. I spent my 20’s (during the 90’s) working a 50-60 hour a week corporate HR job while pursuing standup comedy and acting (I started in theatre in high school). I was born and raised in the Los Angeles area and knew lots of people who took the low-paying jobs to get by, but I needed my day job in order to pay to live in LA and afford endless classes, pictures, etc, etc etc. Pursuing the arts for me meant doing everything from writing, directing and producing my own shows and content to auditioning, working in community theatre and gigs as a extra just to get the experience and meet people.
I am also in search of those weird and crazy ideas because one day I will get back onstage (and backstage!) and I need all the help I can get !! 🙂
Thanks again and have a spectacular day!
~Alex
Sounds good.
Yes, yes and yes. Bring it on. Let’s talk about new models, new mindset, new ways to make art and life work.
Thank you!! This is what I have been doing my entire artistic career! I have never believed I was going to “make it.” I think I believed that for about a minute until I realized it is the cruelest of illusions and then I took my control back. My husband and I have built a theatre company in Texas (Stark Naked Theatre Company) with a mission to pay artists – NOT Administrators, they are second to artists in our budget – and we work other jobs to pay bills at home and we do any job and every job that is necessary to run out company – but most of all we push the agenda of pay for artists and will close our doors before we cut pay for artists off our budget. I am also a paymaster and run a payroll company and have created a billing structure for hiring AEA artists that is easier for small companies to hire AEA artists so that more of us can work (I am an AEA member since 1996). I believe in the union and its benefits for actors with healthcare and pension options, etc. Stark Naked hires no less than 3 AEA artists per production and we have since our inception. Every company can make paying artists a priority if they change the traditional operating structure of the non-profit and put artists first. It works for us and we are making a difference for artists and are successful! It is a matter of priorities and getting your audience and board members on board and creating awareness in what actually makes your company what it is – a partnership between your audience and board and artists – we have to take care of each other like any other corporation and if one part of the organization fails the whole company goes under! Our audience/donor base understands they are the reason we succeed and know that the work and love we put into what we do is because of their financial support and what they donate to keep us afloat and if they stop we will cease to exist because we will not meet payroll – simple as that. We have accountability to each other and if one part of the engine fails the whole ship goes down.
YESSSSS! And Thank you!!
You’re welcome! I hope you find the ideas inspiring!
I’m moving to LA from New York. This will be an interesting read
I am ready. I want to take my students to the NEW place.
We do Meisner. We do Viewpoints. We don’t need a stage. We have a story to tell.
Why do we need permission?
We have a voice that needs to be heard — a tale that needs to be told.
It is you and your students that this is for!
Everything you have said, I have lived!
Thank you, Scott. As a theater educator and artist, I have found it becoming more difficult to support my student’s decisions to continue in the arts knowing the difficulties that lie ahead. I am very open to beginning a new conversation about the future of theater and how we can grow it in a way that it is accessible to anyone who has the passion and the desire!
Yes, it is hard to look young people in the eye. We have to develop a strong counter-narrative — an Artistic Reformation — that can point toward a healthier path!
This is great. I drank the Kool-aid and was splitting time between DC and NY with an MFA, loans to pay off, a good body of work, and an AEA card at 30. I was working, and had worked consistently as an actor from the age of 9 almost non-stop. Experience, working with a broad range of directors, passion, commitment and practice (above all else) made me a strong actor and great theater practitioner. But then I got very sick. It changed everything about the way I looked at my creative life. I realized I was more unhappy trying to fit myself into commercially driven and often pandering project’s and stressing out about my next job than I was happy about the work. The suffering in no way outweighed the rewards. Even having worked consistently, I felt thoroughly uninspired and insecure. I wanted to be happy and I was afaid I might die never knowing what that felt like without relying on my art as a part of that definition. My art, as an actress, was dangerously dependent on the gaze and vision of a culture that seemed at odds with my creative values. I quit and learned how to be happy. I could not do that as a working actor. Maybe it was because I was sick, but there was so much more to it than that. I was also a woman moving out of the ingenue stage who was ready to take on great, three-dimensional roles. I saw very few. It took me ten years to get healthy and happy. I have had a solid career as a teacher and in theater education but even that has been frought with artistic compromise for me. Mainly because it seems like the theater practitioners who have been highly educated and highly experienced, either quit to make good money in their mid-30s like you said, or achieve some version of success and end up in academia. Not working with kids trying to teach REAL theater. So I am working with people who think “good” work is something very different from the collaborative, communal, culturally subversive and transcendent art that I know it theater to be. It becomes about ego, competition and opinion. I took time out from being the part-time working mom of a young child to return to the stage in DC for a world premiere play written by an old friend. I had not been on stage in 10 years. Many of my old frustrations surfaced again working on that unusual piece. But I caught a glimpse of some incredible practitioners while working again. I just wonder how long they will be able to survive ou there…I will have to write more about that experience in response to this great piece you have written! Clearly, it inspired me! Thank you!
Thank you for sharing your experience. It is difficult – I would never argue that it will be otherwise. But the alternative is worse, in my opinion.
Love this. I’d be interested in reading about examples you find that adhere to this ideal.
This is exactly the type of forum people need to kearn how to move forward. Screw the Actor’s Equity Association. Like most unions it is only interested in doing one thing: namely, collecting dues. It cares nothing for the actual institution it claims to support. Like most tired out systems it has been corrupted by its own complcency and forgotten about the joy of art. Only one solution here; branch out with others. Work to find independent sources of funding and finance. Why most don’t do this….it is f**king difficult. This is what true starving artistry is. Building something from the ground up. Where to start?? Start in school. Talk to your classmates about this issue. Help each other network. Not for the purpose of being accepted by the status quo, but to start a new order. Why this is difficult?? Most in school are there for a variety of personal reasons. Bringing each other together for this task is difficult enough, too, while studying for midterms, stamping out your generals, learning lines for university stage productions, and going out and being a college kid from time-to-time. But if you want to “make-it,” then you need the support of your peers and they need yours. I hope you include at least some of this post in your future blogs. And I hope some found it helpful. Forget Broadway. Find your own way!
I agree with this 100%! I hope some college students start following this blog and start insisting the professors start teaching them differently!