The Hooded Utilitarian: Here’s a story for you, and it’s a good one, an uplifting one in this time of constant headlines about this or that art form dying or being in yet another crisis. It’s about a little theater, a small off-off-Broadway space[1] towards the bottom of that Triangle Below Canal, a professional theatre well known for experimental work called The Flea. This little experimental theater nearly went out of business in the wake of 9/11, when Tribeca became a ruined, gray-dusted alien landscape. The Flea was only saved through a mixture of innovative fundraising and striking gold with a hit play called The Guys, a two-hander about a reporter and a firehouse hit hard by the WTC attacks that starred a roster of celebrities, ran for years and helped put the theater back on solid footing.
4 comments:
If a person is performing a service for you that results in you acquiring money, that person is working for you and should be paid. While the idea of exposure is great, it's not going to help put food on the table tonight. This whole concept of working for exposure can be justified, but if you look at it objectively it could easily be classified as exploitation. Asking people to work for you both by performing and by performing physical labor, with no tangible return for them, is ridiculous and a very dangerous concept. If this was a community theater and the tickets were free, it would be different, but this is a commercial theater that is making a lot of money off of ticket sales. You can't claim to be an educational theater and a professional theater at the same time, not when you don't pay your actors and you are actively avoiding hiring technicians by having the actors do their work for them. There is a reason we have the concept of a minimum wage- when a person gives you their time and labor and you directly benefit from it, you have to compensate them so that they can continue to survive. Imagine if a factory was going out of business, and their solution was to simply stop paying all the workers, and in addition to ask them to perform extra, unrelated, duties, for the privilege of "gaining experience." This wouldn't work in any other industry, and it shouldn't work in this one.
I don’t think that this company is doing something all that bad. Isn’t the goal to produce art that pleases both your artists and your community.
Nobody is forcing these artists to work there. They choose to stay.
I don’t see why this article is attacking the way this company operates. Obviously the theatre has managed to find a model that pleases those who run it, and they create enough good work that the community made it possible for them to build an entire theatre complex.
Lamp-less projectors seem to be the wave of the future. Brian Nadel’s article gives a good overview of the benefits of going lamp-free and also the different approaches to alternative technologies that are being developed. Nadel cites danger and cost as two main reasons for making the switch. Depending upon where a projector is installed, changing the lamp can be in some cases be a health risk. And with the approximate 3,000 hour bulb-life of conventional projectors, replacement bulb costs (Nadel states between $100 - $500), quickly add up. The three lamp-less technologies currently in development are lasers, LEDs, and a hybrid of the two. (For the details on how these work, read the article!) The lifespan of these alternative illumination sources are between 10,000 to 100,000 hours, ultimately winning in cost analysis over their conventional counterparts. While light output (lumens) still remains an issue, strides are being made in this arena of lamp-less technology. Other benefits include a wider range of colors, and less noise since fan-cooling a hot lamp is no longer an issue. The bottom line? While lamp-less projectors may not be the answer to every situation, they are now at the point to provide a solid alternative for most needs.
YIKES! I accidentally reposted my comment for lamp-less projectors here. What I actually meant to post is… According to Butler, “The Flea provides—real exposure, free rehearsal space, frequent opportunities to get up on stage and learn one’s craft through getting work up in front of an audience, a chance to produce work, connections, a real community of fellow artists, and the opportunity to learn various ancillary skills of theater without having to pay a dime.” Based on that alone – if we are analyzing The Flea based purely on an educational model – I would say it is hard to argue for the alternative of a costly graduate school. The question then becomes, when does paying for education cease and paid work begin? I suppose one way to measure the worth is to research if any of The Bats have gone on to receive adequately paid employment in either acting or show tech gigs based on their work with The Flea. However, as Butler points out, “the larger issues of how we value the people who actually create art in our culture remain.” And for this, I would agree with Sarah’s comment.
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