Butts In the Seats: Last month the LA Stage Times had a two part series on work and the arts. One was on jobs at alternative theatres, but the one that piqued my interest was about the benefits former arts managers felt their arts experiences brought to their for profit finance jobs.
As much as I am sad to hear that people can’t support themselves in arts related jobs, I am always interested in information that makes a case for the value of the arts. Whole entries can be devoted to the brain and talent drain the arts sector suffers due to inability to pay a living wage, but I won’t delve into that here since the two profiled who left for the for profit sector are still very invested in the organizations they left.
6 comments:
I am so sick of people who know very little about what we actually do saying that the arts are not a REAL JOB. What makes your job any more real than my job? What makes being a CEO any more real than being a production manager, or even a janitor for that matter? If the job exists, if the job pays, it's a real job. And if it's making you happy, WHO FREAKING CARES? If this is truly all we get, why would one waste their time finding something that doesn't make them happy just so they can gain the satisfaction of everyone else recognizing their position as important. Everyone else is not important. You, what you love, and what you want, are the only important things. And if you have enough passion, you can always find a way to make that pay the bills. To quote Little Miss Sunshine, "Do what you love and fuck the rest."
I'm always interested to learn of all of the jobs that involve that arts but aren't directly linked to the arts. Until this summer I had no idea that there accountants whose only customers were actors and directors. I imagine there have to be other positions like that, such as this article suggests. There are people on theater Boards that have to have knowledge in the arts in order to effectively advise theaters. People have to work in management, and marketing, etc. Sometimes you never think of how widespread the arts can be. You can also take a lot of knowledge from our training in the arts and apply them to any number of other professions: creative thinking, problem solving, thinking on your feet, and communication, just to name a few.
I think this article is absolutely accurate, but leaves unsaid just how valuable the experience from the arts is when applying it to other industries. Those "people skills" and relationship building experiences that this article talks about are what sets us apart from others- we do better at figuring out what the problem is by talking to people. I would go even further to say that training in the arts makes you a better, more creative problem solver, which is something that is easily applied to every other industry.
I agree with Brian. I was hoping this article would highlight a little more the skills that we learn in this industry and how applicable those skills are in so many different places. The arts is a place where so many specialized people from different fields work together, and this requires each and every one of those people to have skills that would be applicable elsewhere. I think that an arts education that can be applied later in a different field can be more beneficial than just learning about that field because it teaches so many skills that cannot be measured, like creativity and communication with others.
I have always thought that the skills I have learned as an arts management student could help me to gain a management position in a more convention field some day. This article has helped to confirm that, though it hasn't necessarily helped me to confirm that people outside of the arts truly understand that skills I can bring to the table from a BFA in Drama. I would love to know how the people interviewed for this article came to gain their new positions in non-arts organizations- did they have to fight to get the positions and to prove that they had the necessary skills? I can't help but think that, unfortunately, they might have had to try a little harder to prove themselves because they came from an arts background. On another note, I appreciate this article for pointing out that taking a non-arts related job can actually give you more skills to take back to the arts, and vise versa. We don't have to be locked into the arts, and there is value in both arts and non-arts work. There's a choice to be made there that many of us will have to make some day, not without much tribulation, I'm sure.
This reminds me of the last professional prep class we had. It was about people who had graduated from this program, but did not go into theater. The differences between the theater culture and other people out there. The main ones were that people dont always fallow deadlines, that our humor tends to be dirtier, and that in theater we tend to be more direct and a lot better with constructive criticism and that to other people would be rude.
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