The following is from the final paper of a student of mine, who writes:
“I was working on a final project for XXXXX’s acting class, where we had to call a theatre company and find out the audition process and the workings of the company…When I was closing the interview, I was asking the Associate Artistic Director of the company if he had any final comments or advice to add to the paper. The Director …said, “if you don’t go to New York City in your 20s, your prime age, you’re not serious about this industry.”
This from a man who is making a living in Western North Carolina. Doesn’t he have any sense of the contradiction?
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From where I sit, I think this is measurably wrong. I’m seeing a buncha folks finally leaving their 20s and moving on from both NYC and Chicago, and they land in other spots and have to build their connections, body of work, and from scratch.
Even if you don’t use export as your measure of success, which is probably wise, it’s clear that to be ‘serious’ about this ‘industry,’ you need to build a financially sustainable enterprise (you don’t have to do this to work in theater, but that’s what ‘serious’ and ‘industry’ mean to me). The critical factor necessary for financial sustainability is a unique connection with the market you serve. That’s it.
So hard to get that unique connection in a saturated market. So much easier in a town that is underrepresented by artistic voices.
The percieved need to ‘hone our voices in the fires of competition’ is I think the reason that people say this crap – and developing a voice truly doesn’t happen in a vacuum – but if we’re honest with ourselves and our communities, we can do that far from developmental hubs like NYLACHI, and we can more rapidly achieve uniqueness and diversity without forces of conformity like this Associate Artistic Director here.
Obviously, I agree. And I think I agree more and more as the years go by and the Profession gets more and more dysfunctional.
From your mouth to God’s ear…
I don’t know. I think it’s hard to break out of our perspectives and our context to really see beyond what we already believe – thus this jerk’s NY-centric comment.
Perhaps it’s where I’m sitting, and the agenda that I carry with me, but I do see VERY FEW people looking to NY for career development, and more people looking towards less saturated markets. Chicagoans, when they move on from Chicaog, don’t look to NY for the next step anymore (I’m actually seeing a trickle of NYers look to Chicago increasingly for a more sustainable pace and cost of living). And Chicagoans are looking at where they came from – Nebraska and Iowa are getting back their artists after a few years of post-college work in Chicago. More often than that, however, is people leaving theater entirely.
In that sense I agree with you – the dysfunction that I see is that theater is not seen by many of its practictioners as valuable past the post-college years of radicalism and revolution. As artists age, existing institutions built for previous generations groom leaders to lead those institutions, and I think it’s there that the spirit of revolution in theater becomes incredibly valuable to explore new ways of operating. But no – what I see is artists shrinking away and rejecting that responsibility, and instead accepting the handbook of How Things Should Be Done from the previous generation – which actually was itself an effectively radical generation. That knowledge may be valuable to consider, but it’s not canonical, and everyone who’s been on facebook knows that.
So bizarre. I’m hoping that we see a shift in this next decade as the regional theater model of Doing Everything really begins to hit stress levels along the lines that the newspaper industry has seen this decade. I’d like to see that spirit of theatrical revolution that came out of the 90s and hit the amorphous pile of life that was the 00s create something that actually works and serves a real function for society. I’d like to end my career in a society that no longer questions the value or role of art – and I think that will mean building some new structures, organizations, and really reengaging every local community in the country.