Brotherston said that while full-time technical posts in theatres have reduced, the number of staff in administration and management roles was increasing.
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Lez Brotherston: admin jobs have taken toll on technical theatre
Brotherston said that while full-time technical posts in theatres have reduced, the number of staff in administration and management roles was increasing.
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3 comments:
After taking Molly’s class I was interested in reading this article. After reading it I both agree and disagree with Lez Brotherston. On one hand I agree that the positions of designers and technicians should be filled before a theatre can even open; as Lez says: “We have endless management and actually the core backbone of producing theatre is disappearing... It doesn't matter how many administrators you have, if you've got no one to paint the scenery and no carpenters, you're not going to have a show,". It doesn’t make sense to hire another administrator over a scenic artist. However, administration is usually in charge of making sure that the funding to pay for the designers and technicians. Without the administration the structure of the theatre would fall apart. This is a weird and hard balance to strike, but I do think that overall, there needs to be less admin in the theatre world.
Having seen this fact in in my own experience in theater I would have to agree. It seems more and more often in regional theaters production staff is being asked to wear more and more hats, while those on aminstative staff constantly grow. This in part I feel is due to the idea in aminstrative managment that thinks if ever thing is plan and scheduled it will find a way to happen with minimal staffing. While this can be true I find that it has the effect of burning through ones production staff in a extremely quick fashion.
I had no idea this was such an issue, but now that it's brought up, I can definitely see where Brotherston is coming from. However, I think that it can go the other way too. If you have all this administrative staff, you can use your design team to work on design elements and not do things like stuff envelopes or any other "jobs as needed" that could just be done as an administrative person. One reason I see such a high spike in the administrative theater jobs is that they're a lot more secure and dependable than freelancing. Therefore, people who have theater backgrounds tend to be attracted to jobs where they are working in theater but not in the creative process. If we want to change though, then I think we have to creative more stable, design-centric jobs starting in regional theater. Once the jobs are available, they will be filled. If you build it, they will come.
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