A friend of mine is at the very start of her journey into the priesthood. She realised, over a number of years, that this was her calling and, hopefully, if the leaders within her Diocese agree, soon she will be handing in her notice to her current, non-faith related job, and beginning to study full time. Becoming a priest will involve a level of sacrifice - it will pay less, it might involve moving somewhere else. But my friend is prepared to do these things, because it is her calling.
For some within the arts sector, their job is also a calling of sorts. They cannot imagine doing anything else, they may have had to make sacrifices, both financially and practically to sustain their career, and ultimately, doing this work is something that they love. Whilst there are people in salaried jobs that some or all of this might apply to, I’m mostly thinking about freelancers whose primary practice is artistic - writing, directing, designing, performing. We know that these careers are hard to get into and hard to sustain - many people have a side hustle that helps them pay the bills, not just when they’re starting out but many years into their careers - and many who identify in this way might consider their artistic work their calling.
Consequently, there can be a frisson between people that fall into this category and people who earn a regular income from working in the arts, often people who are on salary and often people who are in a role that is not directly linked to creating and performing the artistic work. As an arts leader with a producing background, I would fall into this category. I would probably describe the arts as my calling, in as much as I’ve devoted a lot of my life to it and, ideally, would like to stay in this sector for the whole of my career. But, certainly in comparison to others in much more precarious financial situations, it’s also allowed me to make a decent living, and, in its later stages, I haven’t had to make huge personal sacrifices to facilitate my career. I’m in the privileged position of getting paid to do something that I love.
There is an irony here that it is the people who are most directly responsible for the creation of the artistic work on which the industry is built that often need to sacrifice the most in order to pursue their chosen career. This was starkly highlighted in the pandemic, where financial support for freelancers was slower to arrive and more complicated to claim, in contrast to the relatively early announcement of the furlough scheme which applied to most people who were on salary. Often, people that sit in positions of power within both organisations and the sector as a whole have spent the majority of their careers in salaried rather than freelance positions, meaning that the freelance voice can be absent from industry wide conversations - making organisations that represent freelancers, such as Equity or Freelancers Make Theatre Work, all the more important.
There are, of course, many differences between being on salary and being a freelancer, the primary one being that if you’re on salary, you work for your organisation, and if you’re a freelancer, you work for yourself. A freelance artist’s responsibility when they are creating a project for an organisation is first and foremost to the project itself, whereas someone who is on salary (the in-house producer for that project, for example) has a wider responsibility to the organisation. A freelance designer might ask for more money for a set budget - a salaried producer might have five such requests from different people on different projects and have to figure out whether to say yes to any or all of these requests, in part by asking themselves what is in the best interests of the organisation overall.
This is a reductive way of viewing the way people work together on artistic projects - freelancers will frequently have consideration for the overall aims of a venue or organisation, and people on salary will fight tooth and nail to make the shows they work on as good as they can be. But I think it’s a useful distinction in part to illuminate a difference between being a leading freelancer and being a leader of an organisation - the latter group take on the responsibility of employing or contracting people, and, consequently, we are responsible not only for the artistic work that the organisation does but for people’s livelihoods (freelancers included). I love the arts and it’s a huge privilege to spend my days getting paid to do what I love, but for many of those days, that responsibility weighs heavy, as it does for any leader.
I was thinking about this when reading a new report conducted by the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama and Tonic Theatre about the impact of the pandemic on early career theatre workers. It’s excellent, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who works with this group (defined in the report as under 28). There are number of quotes from early career workers throughout the report, and one of them particularly struck me, made by a freelance producer: “I worry that we are more worried about saving institutions than embracing…change as part of how we save them, and that by the time we’ve saved the bricks and mortar institutions there will be no artists to left to bring them to life again”.
I’ve thought about this provocation a lot since reading it, and it brings to light one of the tensions at the heart of a leadership job - I want to be part of a positive change within the sector, but a big part of my responsibility is for the health and survival of the organisation that I run. Leaders want their organisations to be around in ten years time, because they believe their organisation is doing work that matters and because, if it disappears, the people who benefit from its work and who are employed or contracted by it will all have to find somewhere else to go. For me, anything to do with people’s livelihoods feels incredibly weighty - and I’d include my own in this. I’ve certainly read accusations levelled at arts leaders that we’re primarily interested in protecting our own jobs at the expense of the health of the sector. Whilst this is of course a problematic attitude if taken to an extreme, I think it’s also reasonable to accept that leaders are human, that we care about our jobs, and that, like everyone else, losing it would create a considerable amount of upheaval to both us and anyone who lives with or depends on us. Part of the work that we have to do is to separate our personal circumstances and anxiety around this particular issue when making organisational decisions - not an easy thing to do, but an important one.
This, I think, is why, in the subsidised bit of the arts sector, a good Board of Trustees is so important. Trustees are not being paid and they are the difference between being solely a company and being a charity. A good Board will be able to ask objective questions about why a particular decision is being made, and help the leadership team to lift their heads and take a long term view. Whilst a Board’s primary responsibility is still to the organisation itself, I think good Boards will have their eyes on the industry as a whole and will be able to challenge a leadership team to make decisions that consider wider sector interests. I’m planning a separate post on Boards at a later date - particularly in a tough economic environment, the difference a great Board can make cannot be underestimated.
As always, it’s money that complicates things and, in a time when money is scarce, it puts many people (freelancers, those on salaries, leaders, Boards) in positions where they are having to make impossible choices. I have no answers to this gnarly issue but three things do feel clear to me. We shouldn’t put the blame on each other - almost always, everyone is doing their best to navigate a broken system. We should be as honest as we can about our finances, whether that’s the realities of a freelance career or the realities of running a venue. And any solution will lie in something that is collective rather than individual - we should look not to the white knight to charge in and save us, but the tenacity, imagination and intelligence of the vast numbers of people that care passionately about the arts sector as a whole - perhaps, because, on some level, it is their calling.