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Professional(ism)

Monday, February 21st, 2011

This past summer I was visiting my sister and her family. My niece and nephew were in a community theater production of The Wizard of Oz. I got to see the final performance of their run. There was much excitement from the kids as they were each payed $150 for the run of the show and could not wait to variously save it for a future big purchase or buy some toys right away. My brother-in-law turned to me at one point in this monetary feeding frenzy and asked, with a wry smile, “Does this make them professional actors?”

“Absolutely,” I replied.

But what does that word professional mean? Certainly getting paid for work is one commonly used definition of professional. But I have a hunch most people would see a slight difference between my niece and Idina Menzel. What does it mean to be a professional?

I know a lot of so called professionals, with memberships to their respective unions, working in the theater and making most of their money from other sources. Some are fortunate enough to teach, or assist more advanced professionals, but others wait tables, drive cabs, build websites, or assemble electronics. Clearly then making money can not be the only limiting factor when determining whether one is a professional.

Perhaps then we should look to something more ephemeral. Dedication could be one way of looking at a professional. Many professionals have dedicated all their time and energy to perfecting their craft and pursuing a career.

This line of reasoning only goes so far. We are left with the issue of those untalented yet dedicated folks who never get work but persist nonetheless and have more tenacity than many working professionals. At the same time, dedication becomes complicated by those who have the right connections to regularly get work despite a lack of interest or talent.

So dedication then, and even talent, are not enough to make one a professional.

Perhaps this question is being asked in the wrong fashion. Perhaps the issue is not about defining whether one is a professional or not. Perhaps a more interesting question is “What is professionalism?”

Perhaps being a professional is one of attitude and approach. Are you one time? Do you complete your work to the best of your ability and resources? Are you polite and courteous? Do you work towards the common goal of creating strong work? Do you make agreements and stick with them? Do you follow accepted industry practices? Do you set standards for your work and seek to exceed them? Are you constantly striving to improve your craft?

In the end, being a professional is something one self identifies as. It is not an absolute. It is a way of being. A state of mind.

Many people in the theater, especially outside major theater towns like New York, are talented amateurs. They might have one or two companies they work with regularly and they may do good work, but they are not professionals. This does not mean they are better or worse than anyone else. It simply means the center of gravity for their life is somewhere else. The work is community theater. I do not mean this in a pejorative or diminutive sense. I mean it is theater for the community of which these actors, directors, and designers are a part. That is a very valuable thing, but I am not certain it is professional.

Companies which refuse standard contract clauses like right of first refusal for a designer on a world premier are not playing hardball. They are demonstrating a lack of professionalism. A designer who imposes their “ideas” on a reluctant director and creative team who do not understand the design is not clever or innovative, they are displaying a lack of professionalism.

A professional, in a collaborative art form, must play well with others, deliver their work on time and be complete. They must be creative, if not innovative, and never stop trying to improve. Perhaps defining a professional is like defining pornography. I can’t give you a list of adjectives, but I know it when I see it.

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at the end of the tunnel

Monday, February 14th, 2011

During the Passover Seder participants relate the liberation of Jews from Egypt to their own lives. The word for Egypt is Mitzrayyim. While used to refer to the Egypt of Jewish enslavement, Mitzrayyim translates into English as “a narrow or tight place.” During the Seder you examine your life and your own Mitzrayyim and how you have been liberated.

Over the past few weeks we have repeatedly heard the phrase “witness to history” with regards to events in present day Egypt. Since January 25th the common people gathered in Tahrir Square, itself a literal narrow place, in protest of their totalitarian government. This weekend they were delivered from that modern day Pharaoh. How appropriate then that Tahrir translated into English means “Liberation.”

The value of spirituality lies in the ability of metaphor to shed a light on aspects of our lives which are lacking or perhaps, more importantly, on aspects of our life where we lack gratitude. Far and away the situation of most Jews on the planet today is so far removed from the situation dealt with in Exodus as to bear a kinship in name alone. Yet even sixty years ago things did not look so good.

Times change.

The darkness of a tunnel can be foreboding when looking to the side at the imprisoning walls or backwards at the evidence of a long journey. Yet like that narrow place in Egypt it is only temporary. Up ahead shines a light. Outside the tunnel it is a clear and beautiful day.

In 2008 I watched as project after project I had been asked to light lost its funding and either cancelled entirely or reduced from an Off-Broadway to a Showcase contract. Projects fell apart and companies cut seasons. It was not a fun period. By the end of the year I felt brutalized by the economics of theater. Not one year before I was riding high on a fully booked schedule that had me darting back and forth across the country and across the Atlantic. I had no idea what was to come next.

At the end of 2008 I made a rather rash decision. The pretext I used was one of optimism, but the real cause was far from that. My career, it appeared from where I stood, had fallen apart. Time to put down the cards, round up the remaining chips, and go home. There was an air of defeat that I felt which was honestly a quite novel experience for me. Or at least it had been so long it felt new.

Needless to say, the proximate cause of my return to California dissolved in a blaze of glory in rather short order. Add to that a continuing downward trend in the economics of art and things looked bleak. Companies were scaling back on travel expenses. What had made my first year on the West Coast financially viable, the fact that I was for all intents and purposes not working on the West Coast, was now gone. 2010 was going to be rough.

2010, much to my surprise, was far more interesting than I would have first expected.

My friend Mark took over as Artistic Director of a small opera company in the area. We had met a few years before when I was the lighting assistant at SF Opera and he was an assistant director. We had done one show together since that time. As he took over the company he asked if I would light their season. The company was traveling through its own narrow place when Mark took over. The budgets were tightened to the breaking point and they had just lost their long time venue.

Mark found a new venue, twice the size of their last one, and took the reigns of the company directing a new production of Don Giovanni. The show was a hit selling out its brief run and, as if rounding that last corner in a dark tunnel, light began to shine in. I lit three more shows for Mark’s company that year.

The end of the year brought another interesting collaboration. Director Jon Tracy, who had seen my work several times through projects I had done with his fiancee, asked me to light his newest work. The sequel to his, then running, outdoor adaptation of The Iliad. This would be the second chapter, The Odyssey. It was a phenomenal project both on purely artistic merits and for the quality of the collaboration. Of The Earth finished out the year to raving critical success.

While not the best year by economic standards it was quite satisfying creatively.

Finding myself in a bit of a narrow place financially, my deliverance came through creativity. What saved me was, quite literally, the light at the end of the tunnel. A 2K Fresnel perhaps, gelled in L201.

While the financial trials of an American pale next to the struggles of the oppressed to speak freely, they are for each a Mitzrayyim. We can only observe our fellow humans in their tunnels lost in the darkness. It up to each of us, as individuals, to turn our heads away from the past and look up.

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Death and Taxes, OK just taxes

Monday, February 7th, 2011

I filed my taxes this weekend. Well, rather I sent all my financial info off to my accountant and he compiled it and let me know how much I owe. A very pleasant number by the way. The whole process took me less than an hour. It was not always this easy.

The first time I freelanced full time, well half a year to be honest, was 2005, the year after I finished gradschool. Half a year at SF Opera and half a year freelancing. I did my taxes myself. Mixed income sources from two states. It was a mess. Having never had most of my income from 1099 sources before I was not prepared for how much I needed to have saved in order to pay the taxes. W2s are easy. Money is withheld at each paycheck and at tax time you settle up the balance. For me I had the whole bill all at once. Yikes!

I spent the next few months stashing everything away until I had enough to pay my, what felt to me, rather large tax bill. There must be an easier way.

The next year I got myself an accountant. Nice guy. Treats his clients on a sliding scale based on income and takes on a lot of artists. “Don’t worry,” he said when I first met with him, “I make my money with investment bankers so I can help guys like you out.” Awesome.

It took me a couple of years to really get my system down in terms of breaking up expenses into categories that make sense, how to notate per diem and travel days for him and so forth. By 2008 I had my system in place.

Now it’s easy. I just email him a text file with all my numbers and he sends me back a dollar amount to be made out to state and/or federal tax boards.

While I said it takes me less than an hour there, in truth, there is a bit more work than that. Sure the final compiling of numbers takes almost no time at all, but I enter data regularly, all year long.

I maintain a spreadsheet to track all my expenses, personal and business. Yes I know I could use quicken or quickbooks or any number of software programs. I like my spreadsheet. I set it up to do various totals and calculations that I find useful or interesting. And the layout works really well for me. Sure it is missing a few bells and whistles and may not be the prettiest of things, but it gets the job done. And done well.

By entering the information regularly, I try to do end of each day, but on busy tech schedules it often gets relegated to Mondays, I only ever have five or ten minutes of work at a time. Usually less.

Spreading the work out over the course of the year was one of the best choices I ever made with managing money. No one likes a huge pile of work. Certainly not me. Yet that was what I faced that first year, and a not-insignificant pile the year or two after as I smoothed out my system. It is no fun. It leads me to waiting until the last minute, because really, sifting through a huge pile of receipts is a fucking pain in the ass. Ten minutes, five minutes, two minutes, no problem.

Learning what is an expense and what is not has been a huge lesson. I am very conservative with my numbers. If there is a grey area I tend to err on the side of not counting it. But one of the best tricks I learned was to organize my life in such a way that I could maximize my expenses.

When I lived in New York nearly all of my friends were business colleagues, designers, directors, choreographers, producers, and a few actors, etc. As such my social life revolved around work and nearly every dinner party, round of drinks, and so on was in the context of talking about one project or another. Nailing down design details or finishing up a few last bits of production meeting at the restaurant or bar was a typical evening. After all, this is New York where most business of this kind happens in public.

California has been quite a bit different. A smaller percentage of my social life is inherently work related. There are fewer late night, post-tech, restaurant excursions. The relative percentage of the categories of expenses has shifted dramatically. A lot are quite a bit less. But then, when I work in New York, I get the highest daily travel allowance the IRS allows. It all balances out.

Navigating taxes is certainly not fun but I have learned quite a bit through trial and error. The most important thing I learned was to get an accountant. In matters of great importance there is no suitable replacement for a professional.

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It’s all in the timing

Monday, June 7th, 2010

I have a lot of friends who are freelancers. Obviously there are my friends who are designers and directors. I also have a lot of friends in the tech industry; programmers, web developers, graphic designers, and so forth. While we all work under the title of “freelancer” what this means in practical terms varies dramatically.

One of the key differences between being a freelancer and being an employee is that a freelancer is typically given a deadline on a project but is not specified when and where they are supposed to work. In exchange for this freedom of working, there is the uncertainty of when and where new work will arrive to fill in the gaps. The employee takes on an imposed work schedule and place of working for the security of a steady paycheck.

For those of us who work in live performance, the realities of our work is more of a hybrid. While the prep work can be done on our own schedule, the real work of lighting the show happens in a prescribed time and location that we have no choice over. At the same time there is no guarantee of ongoing employment. Should we not find work we have not been employees and are thus not eligible for unemployment insurance and other benefits that regular employees have. This is why I am strong proponent of building a solid financial foundation to your freelance career.

These unfortunate realities are outweighed by a love of the work. If that is not the case I would encourage you to find alternate means of employment immediately. For those of us who love the work enough to overcome these concerns we must put our focus on scheduling and picking projects that make the sacrifices worth it.

I have been offered several pieces to consider designing for next year. It is very flattering to be asked to light these rather interesting projects. 5 operas, 3 plays, and a couple of dance pieces thus far. While this is nothing approaching a full year’s employment, from the perspective of mid-June the year before, it is exciting. And all the projects are interesting. A rare occurrence to be perfectly honest.

I have been finding myself wanting to design more opera recently and the universe appears to be providing for that desire. Next month I will design my third opera of the year. There are a few more potentially happening before the year is out, but no signed contracts yet.

I find it fascinating that while I have been asked to light these rather interesting projects, there is no guarantee they will happen. It is the nature of freelancing. The companies could get into financial trouble, I could get an alternate offer for the same production schedule and have to balance out the two possibilities weighing artistic and financial considerations, or any number of other temporal concerns might arise.

The life of a freelancer is never easy. Even when all the projects are compelling there can still be scheduling and timing issues. When production schedules overlap you need to find a balance between satisfying all of your artistic collaborators, making a living, and creating good work. Being a freelance designer can be like putting together a 3 dimensional jigsaw puzzle where there is no guarantee that the pieces actually fit.

Last March I received more offers than I could take. At least three projects I was asked to design had perfectly overlapping production schedules. Even after eliminating the impossible, I ended up with a schedule where I was lighting a circus show during the day and cleaning up a play in previews at night.

This summer is rather light on the work front giving me a nice stretch of time to relax. I have an opera and a few special events to design. While I appreciate the time off, a luxury often passed up by many designers, I can only hope that I will not face the opposite problem when the projects start coming in and I find myself with five offers, all of which open the same weekend. I have been in that position before and it is not fun.

How the future shapes up is all in the timing. The only control I have over my calendar is the power to say no. Nothing about freelancing for live performance is easy. But I can’t think of another job whose payoff could be greater as far as I am concerned.

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Making a living – Making a life

Friday, May 14th, 2010

I had lunch recently with a friend of mine who is a lighting designer. He is probably one of the most talented designers I have come across, a powerful unique voice, meticulous, insightful dramaturgical understanding, and one of the nicest people you will ever meet. He is currently transitioning out of live entertainment and considering going the route of architectural lighting design, or possibly something else entirely. His reasons? In order to have enough time to enjoy his life, he can’t make a living. In order to make a living, he doesn’t have time to enjoy his life.

This can be a dilemma many people face but it is exacerbated in the fields of theater, opera, and dance. LORT, the bargaining organization for regional theaters, has the official position that they do not owe designers a living wage. The theaters, which are ostensibly in the business of making art, do not feel responsible for paying the artists they employ enough money to live reasonable lives. Leaving aside the issue that the upper management and staff of these organizations do typically make a good living wage, this idea is flawed to its very core. The artists, the people who actually make the art, are not expected to be able to live off the work. Something is wrong here.

The result of this brilliant financial strategy on the part of regional theaters is that not only will they save thousands of dollars each year (yes only thousands, and intended sarcastically) but they will drive talented people out of the industry. This friend of mine is no small potatoes. He is highly respected within the New York theater community, has won awards, gets flown around the world to light shows, and yet finds the economics so troubling that he can not both live well and do the work he loves. He is not alone.

Many people I know, some very talented designers, work in fields not of their choosing because the economics of the field they love are so terrible. The issue does not limit itself to designers. One of the best master electricians I have ever had the pleasure of working with left non-profit theater to go work in a more corporate setting because the administration would not consider giving him a raise. In most situations, a worker who delivered under budget and ahead of schedule, all while pleasing the clients he interfaced with would be rewarded. But then, he worked on the wrong side of the building. Art, it seems, is not valued by arts organizations. Yet the top paid administrators made easily five times his salary. And the theater community lost one of the best electricians I have known.

There comes a point when the question arises, is this worth it? Is it worth working 80+ hour weeks for months on end only to end up with barely enough money to cover rent and bills? There is a bit of mental psychology that must be done when working like this. There is a rule I once learned the hard way by breaking it myself. I fast realized if I wanted to keep going I could never do it again. Do not translate into an hourly wage. Typically the results, in our fee for hire work, are far below minimum wage. The show I calculated out for ended up somewhere around thirty cents an hour. And this is at a professional level.

At the Broadway level, the minimum rate for a lighting assistant comes out to just under twenty dollars per hour. Not terrible, but you are working 14 hour days for weeks at a time, so you can have no life while this is going on. At the low end of the scale people have no compunction asking someone with years of experience, an advanced degree, awards, and so on if they would give up two weeks of their life for a fee of a few hundred dollars. It doesn’t hurt to ask, but then if you accept, demands are made on your time that are beyond the pale of reason.

Making a living in the theater is possible. Making a life, not so much. The number of designers who wake up at 50 suddenly realizing they forgot to get married and have kids, or who send their kids off to college knowing less about them than about their assistants, or miss a major wedding anniversary for a technical rehearsal, is far far too much.

We are presented with a bit of a catch-22. The organizations which hire us have stated explicitly that they will not take care of us. It then becomes incumbent upon us to take care of ourselves. But if we do that, and allow ourselves to have a life, we are not working enough to support that life. Something has got to give. Too often, that means talent goes elsewhere.

Perhaps there was a time when the economics of it all were not so unfavorable. But looking around now at the state of the business it appears that the solution does not reside in the non-profit theater world.

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Tools of the Trade – What’s in your bag?

Monday, March 1st, 2010

I recently sent off design drawings for a project and was told by the Master Electrician that they did not have a copy of Lightwright and would I please send the paperwork in a different file format. I converted everything to PDFs of the Channel Hookup and Instrument Schedule and sent them along. This is not the first time such a situation has happened to me.

I am often amazed at the number of people who work as freelance Master Electricians who do not own their own copy of Lightwright. While the program is a bit pricey it has become a necessary tool for the job. The simple creation of an Instrument Schedule or Channel Hookup could be done with any spreadsheet or database program, the specific calculations made by LW allow the job of the ME to be infinitely easier. And given that nearly all lighting designers use it, having one’s own copy is necessary for working with your primary collaborator, the designer.

An electrician would not consider coming to a call without a wrench. It is seen as a necessary part of the job. Lightwirght, like email and a phone, should be considered necessary for anyone directly interfacing with designers. This includes MEs, assistants, and so forth.

The intent of this post is not to rag on a few individuals but to make a larger point. When working as a freelancer there are certain tools that are necessary to have for your job. What those are will vary depending upon what your position is, but none the less you must have the basic minimum necessary tools. Back when I worked as an electrician it was a wrench, a multi-tool, and a pair of gloves. Minimum. Many electricians carry around far more tools. You don’t want to be the electrician who borrows the designer’s wrench. It just looks bad.

I know designers who carry around a huge bag full of tools. I am not that extensive and prefer to keep my carried items as lightweight as possible. Here’s a quick list of what I consider the necessary minimum tools as a lighting designer.

  • Laptop

    • Lightwright

    • Vectorworks
    • All show files for currently active projects
    • An Office Suite that can open and save as XLS and DOC files (I prefer OpenOffice)
    • Photoshop (or equivalent)
    • Illustrator (or equivalent)
    • Desktop email client (the theater may not have wifi, so it’s best to carry your info with you)
    • Calendar
  • Multiple pads of paper for notes
  • Pens
  • Floppy disks and USB drives to back up show files
  • Scale rule
  • Tape measure
  • Pens
  • A light for your tech table
  • A Headset
  • Cell phone
  • A Water bottle
  • Wrench
  • Pens
  • Snacks (focus and tech can get exhausting and breaks are not always timed to your body’s rhythms. I prefer Clif bars and fruit)
  • A Book (sometimes you are just sitting around waiting for scenery to arrive, might as well learn something)

Like I said this is a small list and many designers carry quite a lot more than this but for me I find it to be about the minimum that I can not assume will be provided in adequate quantity or repair by the theater.

A quick note on disks and drives. I recently pulled floppy disks out of my necessary list to lower the weight I carry on my back. Poor choice. I just ran into a situation where the theater had misplaced their disks in a cleaning frenzy and the schedule was so tight no one was free to pick any up until three days of programming had gone by. And this was a complicated show to program. Not the best situation for the nerves.

I almost never have a need for tools like Photoshop or Illustrator, so I use open source alternatives GiMP and Inkscape, but I have the option should the need arise (I also keep a full set of audio manipulation programs on my computer for similar reasons).

You will not need all these tools every day. My tiny designer wrench that is small enough to go in my carryon for airplanes would hardly serve a professional electrician. But when I need to run up and adjust a boom, because the crew of one or two are on lunch, I can do the note.

The wrench I learned the hard way. Getting all high and mighty thinking that as designer boy I would never need to touch a light again in my life, I was left high and dry during one lunch break and the few simple notes did not get done until AFTER the run through. After that, I started carrying a wrench as part of my necessary tool kit. I am sure my list will continue to evolve over time but for now this is more or less what it looks like.

Everyone’s needs are different. What do you consider a necessary tool for your work?

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The Power of Networks

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

I used to think that work came about by talent alone. As if getting a gig were as simple as sending off a few resumes and portfolios and waiting for the phone to ring off the hook with offers. Clearly I knew how good my work was, so of course anyone who saw the work would think the same. While there is some objectivity and I have received a handful of gigs from the aforementioned method the vast majority of work I have had over the years came from my network of friends and colleagues. In fact, I can only think of two instances where I merely sent my resume and portfolio and was offered work.

Right out of NYU I took a job as the lighting assistant at San Francisco Opera. I got the job through one of my mentors. There I met several directors who I have since worked with. Numerous projects I did in the first few years came through classmates of mine or other people I met through school. Of course as projects occur there is a whole new group to interact with. The director, for example, hires me for a show. Then the producers of that show enjoy my work enough to hire me for another project with them. The director on that show likes the work enough to bring me on to a third project. And so it goes.

I have seen many incredibly talented people sit by without work because they felt, as I once did, that it will suddenly appear. It might, but more than likely the next gig will come from a friend or colleague or mentor. Speaking with numerous freelancers across disciplines I have found this to be true although especially in collaborative art forms like theater, opera and dance. There are many mistakes that one could make but one of the most important things to do is simply get out there.

I often joke about how my job really breaks down to hanging out with people all day. While I say this in jest, there is a degree of truth to it. The social dynamic that goes into a work of performance is as important as the work itself. The relationships between the various artists forge insights into the piece at hand that makes the work itself stronger. The lunches and dinners between technical rehearsals are as vital as those rehearsals themselves.

Opening night parties, fundraisers, and so forth, all serve to bring people together and form relationships which thus create a kind of emotional shorthand that allows you, as artists, to cut past the superficialities and dive more fully into the piece at hand.

I know numerous people in the tech industries who swear by LinkedIn, Twitter and the like for networking for jobs. Perhaps that works in the performing arts, although I must say, as connected as I am on-line, by and large I have not known that to be the case. What I do know is that by maintaining and continually building relationships with my friends work comes my way. Networking is not a matter of asking everyone you know for work. It is simply a matter of spending time with people whose company you enjoy.

Perhaps networking as a verb is a misnomer. The network exists. We are simply actors within a preexisting network who, through our socializing, increase and expand that network. Occasionally the network drives work from one person to another within it.

Working in the arts is never easy and the money is rarely good. Just as doing work that you are not invested in is a waste of your, and everyone else’s, time, so too is working with people you do not enjoy. Because so much of the product is the process, to ignore that is to miss a major component of creating the work itself.

I hear people often speak in terms like “exploiting your social network” and other such things. My experience is much different. In fact if you feed your relationships and friendships your network will end up exploiting your talents and keep you busy with engaging and interesting projects. Nurturing those relationships is the key to a healthy career. But once you have the gig you need to prove your worth. That is where the talent comes in.

I am in a curious position right now. After building up my network for 7+ years in New York I suddenly found myself without it. Having relocated from one part of the country to another my network had to be rebuilt. It did not take long to notice its absence and begin working to fill that void.

While it could be said that I am networking, more to the point, I am finding interesting people to spend my time with. I am going out to look at work that appeals to and engages me artistically. While some projects have come my way through this of greater import is making new friends, deepening relationships, and finding interesting and engaging new art.

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The Uncertainty of the Freelance Career and a Love of the Game

Friday, November 20th, 2009

One of the hardest things to come to terms with in freelancing is the fundamental lack of job security. These days it seems like no one has much job security and while it is certainly true that the position of the American worker has become far more tenuous in general the impacts on the freelancer are even greater. As a general rule workers tend to keep their jobs so long as the company is doing well and they do their work. Not so with the freelancer. Organizations they have worked with for years might be doing even better and choose not to rehire them. While it might come down to money, it could just as easily be a matter of aesthetics, or simply the desire to try someone new. In short, contracts might disappear with no discernible cause.

This can be hard. Some version of this scenario often prevents people from taking on freelancing as a career path. They see the tumultuous nature of the work as an insurmountable psychological barrier. That barrier is real. It takes a certain strength to have faith that work will materialize as it is needed. Because, while sometimes one might find their calendar filled with projects a year or more out from the present, it is just as common to have vast stretches of no work ahead. Projects may come along to fill those gaps or they may not. There is no way of knowing, although one can get good at guessing after a while.

I have a certain envy for people with regular jobs. They know months from now, if not years, where they will be working and more importantly if they will be working. While it is always possible that the company will go under, or cut massive amounts of workers, the underlying assumption is that there will be work. Not so with freelancing. While one must take as an act of faith that things will work out, there can be no realistic assumptions about what work there will be, where it will come from, and how much there is.

I have had years where I knew, more or less, what the whole year would look like as early as January. At the same time I have had years that looked solid in January and yet by the end of the year 80% of my projects had fallen through to be replaced by other ones. There is no way to predict the trajectory of one’s work in a freelance environment.

Living with, and learning how to operate under, that level of uncertainty can be like a spiritual practice at times. One is compelled to find deep reserves of patience. Meditation is often a useful technique to allay the fears and uncertainties inherent in the work. It is not easy to live with but becomes easier over time.

By limiting the impact of the uncertainty freelancers can stop using their energy to diffuse stress and can put it towards the work. Many people who freelance do not do so exclusively. Balancing freelance work with some other regular income can minimize the emotional turbulence caused by freelance contract work. Some people marry money. It may sound silly, but having a spouse or partner who will support one’s foray into the world of contract employment can make it a much safer venture. Others are independently wealthy. Many successful freelancers I know come from money and as such the concern over how to pay rent or where the next meal will come from is not present.

There is a common problem which transcends money and that is the work itself. As a freelance artist you are not just providing a product or a service you are providing a piece of yourself. The financial concerns are only one aspect of the impacts of this kind of uncertainty. I know plenty of freelance artists who are independently wealthy, for whom the money is no concern, who still fret at the lack of work. For them, as for most of us, they do it out of a love for the work. One does not become a freelance designer out of a desire for wealth or fame. You become a freelance designer because you love the work.

In the end it is that love of the work which makes possible a career as a freelance designer. It is a love of the work which makes it possible to endure the psychological complexities of managing one’s career as an artist. It is a love of the work which makes it possible to put yourself out there, in front of total strangers, to be critiqued and criticized.

It is a love of the work which allows you to pass through the uncertainty and continue on the path.

Why do you have your job?

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Dirty Money, Starving Artists, and the need for new myths

Friday, November 6th, 2009

One of the most pervasive identity myths that haunts art worlds is that of the starving artist. There are countless examples in popular culture of this archetype including a very good opera about the subject. While the idea that a true artist suffers and through suffering art is born might have a degree of romantic mystique the truth of the matter is that all suffering creates is suffering. The archetype of the starving artist, and her condemnation of anyone who achieves any degree of success as “selling out,” does little more than provide limited solace to an otherwise unpleasant existence.

Archetypes are powerful things. Consciously or not, as beings in the world, we emulate strong and powerful archetypal roles. Not to get too Jungian but I see it as far too common to deny. Personality is performance. In the performance of personality we model our ‘character’ off of good actors (in real life or literature and pop-culture). The starving artist, through its romantic appeal, is a popularly recurring figure. Sadly this figure does more of a disservice to us in the long run, in the same way as the alcoholic writer generally creates alcoholics not writers.

The starving artist type gains value, to a greater or lesser degree, in the idea that money is somehow dirty. There is an air of superiority, by those who don the starving artist type, placed around obscurity. It is as though anyone whose work could be understood by, and thus appreciated and paid for by, more than a select inner cabal of followers is somehow flawed. Because popular/successful is read as bad, money, as a tangible proof of popularity of ones work, is also treated as bad or dirty. There is a belief that the work itself becomes sullied by making money off it.

This is as common in the performing arts as it is in any other medium. Many theater makers working on a small scale will deride the “commercialism” of Broadway plays or the work produced at regional theaters. Rather than examining the work itself the funding for the work comes under attack. Rigorous critique is replaced by a more general barrage against slick stagecraft and well rehearsed acting. Taken at their root these critiques are really about money and the relative access to, or paucity of, its presence in making the work.

While it is true that throwing money at a bad play will not make it better it does not follow from there that all plays with good funding are bad. It is true that people throw millions of dollars into producing total crap while others spend next to nothing to make a true gem. At the same time, those true gems, with a fully financed producer, would potentially become even greater while the well financed schlock would remain schlock.

The archetype of the starving artist and the myth of dirty money have created a false dichotomy between “uptown” and “downtown” theater. Between “indie” and “commercial” plays. Being poor does not inherently make one virtuous and even Jerzy Grotowski conceded that poor theater costs a lot of money. High budgets do not make one good or bad. Powerful authentic art can exist with no money or all the money in the world. But this is not the point. The focus of our critiques should center on the quality and effectiveness of the work itself rather than its funding.

So too our personal narratives would do well to be reoriented away from the damaging myth of the virtue of the starving artist and back towards the rigorous and devoted artists and craftsman. Even a cursory look at the Renaissance shows us that powerful and lasting works can be created from well funded origins. There are many people in pop-culture one might look to who are wildly successful and still maintain a high degree of artistic integrity. Danny Elfman comes readily to mind as one such example as does his regular collaborator Tim Burton. Many artists have made the transitions to the big leagues without sacrificing their artistic integrity.

Poverty is only romantic with distance. It is time to retire the Starving Artist as a myth of a bygone age. A romantic notion, well fit for literature, and hardly worth modeling one’s life after. The reality of the starving artist too easily winds up starved. We need new archetypes for a new millennium. Archetypes that empower us to live strongly and courageously as artists in our contemporary world and beyond.

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What we have here is a failure to communicate – Part 2

Friday, October 30th, 2009

In any interpersonal relationship the ability to clearly and accurately communicate is a necessary skill. When one gets into collaborative projects like theater the need for those skills increases exponentially. There is a degree to which everyone in a theatrical production must rely on and lean on everyone else in order for the whole to work. When any one individual does not live up to their end of the communicative deal the whole process can unravel.

I recently assisted a designer whose communication skills were insufficient at best. She would ask, for example, if something was possible, “Is it possible to print out the lighting cues?” and would get a response to her question, “Yes it is possible.” This is a different question than “Please print out the cues.” One day she threw a temper tantrum about how “nothing I ask for gets done. I have been asking for a cue printout for WEEKS.” Upon checking with with the electrician it was confirmed that in fact not once had the actual words “Print the Cue list” been said.

While this might sound like a minor issue it points to a much larger complex of issues. No one is a mind reader. As such it is only possible to know what is actually said. Working in theater, and lighting specifically, it becomes necessary to be precise with language when any given note may well cost hundreds to thousands of dollars in labor, parts, and so forth. Those carrying out the note need to be certain with regards to what exactly is wanted. Ambiguous requests, or requests for something other than what one wants, will only create conflict and confusion down the line.

Systems have been developed over years to allow for the precise giving of notes from a designer to an electrician such that exactly what is desired gets achieved. The precise type, placement, color, method of control, and so forth can all be described in exact detail so as to avoid any confusion. Part of why this system works is that it leaves nothing ambiguous. Because there is no ambiguity there is no room for misinterpretation.

Ambiguity and miscommunication do happen. But having a system that keeps information flowing without recourse to interpretive wizardry, or decoding efforts worthy of the greatest CIA Kremlinologists, allows for a minimum of miscommunication. One need not resort to temper tantrums over things never asked because everyone is speaking the same language and the same dialect of that language.

Asking for what one wants is the bedrock of good communication and, sadly, something far too many people lack. The equation is simple: use words to accurately describe what it is you would like to communicate. In far too many situations people are unable, or unwilling, to do this.

One factor I have found that contributes to poor communication are feelings of insecurity. Especially in the arts it seems that those who are unclear are also those who are uncertain in their ability or place. As such they use unclear communication as a way of shirking responsibility. If something goes wrong it is not their fault, but the fault of the person who misunderstood them.

While all this may explain why such things occur it does not get at the root problem. Poor communication and smokescreen tactics like tantrums will never compensate for hard work, diligence and competency. WIllful ignorance of how things are done does not absolve one of being unable to work in their chosen field.

Contrasting my recent disaster of a communicator with a designer I assisted a while ago is the difference between night and day. Working for Don Holder and Karen Spahn was a smooth and fluid experience. Notes and ideas were communicated effortlessly because they would follow the one rule of communication: say what you mean. Leaving aside their generally calm and easy going manner, the process was easy because there were no linguistic hurdles, there were only lighting problems.

By communicating clearly and directly they kept the focus on the lighting. Their energy could be fully devoted to the work in front of them on stage since they were not needlessly expending it in frustrated wonder at why no one could read their mind. There was no need for the Kremlinologist. They simply and clearly expressed what was needed and saw the notes carried out to the best of the ability of their crew.

Such a simple thing really. But then it is often the simple things that can trip you up if you are not aware.

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