All of the arts in one building
Welcome. Start work. Don't stop.
Imagine a building. It’s big. About a thousand people are working in it, including you. On your floor, there are a hundred or so people. You’re familiar with most of them. You’re also semi-familiar with the people just above you and below you. There’s a communal lunch room and you see each other at significant work events.
You get assigned to projects now and then. If you’re lucky, you work with people you jive with. But it’s a company that tends to work fast, and you cycle through a series of intensive projects. Some go on for months, but others only exist for a few days.
You like the work. You want a lot of the people. But there are a few problems.
There’s no HR.
You don’t get paid leave.
If someone acts as a predator - which has happened to you several times from your superiors (you’ve been yelled at and personally abused) - then there’s no protection. Those people tend to maintain their position.
If your work is successful and creates a profit, that doesn’t necessarily mean you will get more work or esteem in the company. If your work is critically acclaimed, that usually won’t matter either.
There is a broad policy around diversity inclusion, but it is vague and not understood by anyone working on your floor (which tends to be pretty homogenous, from what you can tell).
Most people work late. Most people don’t have friends who exist outside the building.
A board runs the company. Very few people on your floor have ever met or talked to anyone on the board or could even name them. Unlike almost any other sector, the board primarily comprises people with no experience in your industry. But they are apparently ‘passionate fans’ of it. Their decisions sometimes reflect this lack of experience.
You’ve worked here for over a decade. You’re puzzled at your anxious response to simple meetings or e-mail requests.
You’ve learned to trust no one, and there are certain corners of the office that you won’t go near. A few predators lurking about are downright dangerous.
Its hiring policy is bizarre. You walk in on the ground floor and start working. Hopefully, someone notices you.
We pretend the performing arts sector is fragmented into a handful of small to medium companies. In reality, it's a closed system—any shift, positive or negative, in one part of the sector ripples everywhere.
It's not the egalitarian ecosystem that is the artistic utopias of dreams. It's hierarchical, and changes move downstream. A decision at a board or leadership level has way more effect trickling down than a lowly working artist trying to make change in the opposite direction.
This means leadership is important. It's also impossible. How can you train for a job that's simultaneously commercial, managerial, operational, and creative?
At the other end, for the artist, once you’re inside the system, you can’t help but feel as though you’re being pushed upwards—as if the only sign of success is leadership or, at the very least, bigger projects.
However, this artistic cost is the mildest concern for working artists. The larger ones are the questions of well-being, fair pay, protection and safety. Many industrial reforms from the federal government generally miss the arts sector - because the arts sector doesn’t behave like others. COVID protection for gig workers was almost absent. The latest raft of reforms, including the ‘right-to-disconnect’ from work and employers, is laughable for working artists. Working artists are never not working. They’re constantly in a position of auditioning for potential work and pressured to be within distance of their phone and public life at all times.
An HR department in the building wouldn’t work, so some workers unionise. It’s their only hope of changing things upstream. Wonderfully, change does happen. But it’s hard work and slow.
Many days, the workers feel a sense of grief and anxiety.
Occasionally, they’ll find themselves at a lunch table with some of their favourite people. The sense of humour is dark, but the laughs are genuine. Even rarer - once every few years - there’ll be a project that feels joyful and fulfilling. The work is hard but satisfying. The response is positive.
And for many that is enough - just enough - to stay in the building.
For similar posts contemplating the performing arts industry, check out this, this or this.
In an adjacent building are an another group of people. The job of these people is to remind the rest of society of how vital the work happening in your building is to the functioning of society. It’s to inspire younger people to go work in your building. These people suffer many of the same problems the workers in your building do; they’ve only very recently learnt about “the right” to disconnect but in reality it’s simply not practical. Their deadlines are immovable and the amount of paperwork generated to prove they’re meeting them increases each cycle. So they pretend they’re disconnecting when instead they have learned to use the “schedule to send later” function in their emails. Governing bodies are happy; perception is reality. Within this building there are some workers, maybe on your floor, maybe on others, that are passionate and care deeply sometimes to their own detriment. Like many workers in your building, some in this one are in the building before the sun rises and don’t leave until after it sets. They have few friends not in the building. Those that aren’t in the building have almost always worked there previously. In fact it’s do all-consuming that they marry other people from the building. Like your building, this building’s administration often has little to no experience in what the workers do although, like you, they are “passionate” about the “vital” work being done. Like your building it doesn’t translate into better conditions or higher pay. On some floors the work is downright dangerous, but not all floors so it apparently balances out. The workers in this second building could not be prouder of or more excited by what happens in that first building, despite rarely being acknowledged by those workers; indeed sometimes they’re outright mocked. But sometimes someone comes along whose passion and desire to enter the closed system of the first building is so overwhelming that they are prepared to bang on the front door until they’re let in. And when they are, it’s enough—just enough—to keep the second building ticking over. They are the arts educators.