Tuesday, April 26, 2016
Why I Will Never Be a Starving Artist
HowlRound: I graduated from college with a playwriting degree, and one year later, I hadn’t written a single new play. I was ready to call myself a failure as a playwright. Get up, move on. My inspiration had dried up, my motivation was gone and I couldn’t have come up with a decent idea for a new piece if you paid me. And I certainly needed the money.
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3 comments:
This article annoys me, yet I feel so compelled to comment on it.
I too am worried about the days post being graduated from CMU. Having a theatre degree, even from CMU can only get you so far. I am worried about not having a job, not making it in the field, and not having a back-up plan. This article did not change my opinion on my ideas of life post graduation but it did tell me a story of a girl who's writing ideas went dry. I appreciated her asking people to create art the way they want whether that be around a nice to five job or with a cheap handle of vodka and a guitar. What this author does well is detail her ideas inspiration or lack there of. Though I do not write plays there are still days that I feel uncreative and uninspired. What makes feeling uninspired in school more difficult than when you are graduated is that a product is still expected and necessary. Not having an obligation to create art, but a yearning is freeing and less intimidating than a due date and expectation. This article touched on an idea that is real for all of us. Failure. But I feel that like the wording of this comment, it could have been better.
I do not think that this is a common problem for CMU students, but I do think that this is an extremely important article that plenty of young artists in the country would benefit from. I think it is a question we all face at one point or another, in varying degrees. For example, last summer I had some trouble finding a theatre internship. I had really wanted to do something exciting that I would learn a lot from and have the opportunity to meet great people in the business. However, things don't usually go that way for a design/production freshman. I ended up taking a position at an extreme pogo company, doing something totally unrelated to theatre that still used my skill set incredibly well. At night and on the weekends, I saw theatre. I entered lotteries and showed up for rush tickets. And most importantly, I went out and met Broadway stage managers. I shadowed the SM teams of Wicked, Curious Incident, and Gentleman's Guide, and those are the experiences that kept me fulfilled and nurtured my love for theatre. While my example has much lesser consequences than the author's, I still feel that I made a similar decision in allowing myself to take an unrelated internship for the sake of work experience and honing some skills, while simultaneously experiencing incredible things in my field that I never would have if I had just stayed home and never moved to New York.
The trope of the “starving artists” is something I know that almost everyone in this school who I’ve talked to worries about. While I know a lot of people who secretly have these glamorous ideas of “making it” and having studios and NYC openings and assistants, I know our whole class can agree that we do not have any glamorous ideas for what our lives will look like the first few years of college, even at CMU where we are constantly being told how good this school will look on our resumes. I don’t think this article is the most applicable to designers, managers and technicians, however, since at the very least I think our skills and abilities are applicable to more than just theater, and we also are probably slightly more “marketable” (in terms of how every show needs a lighting designer, but a theater company could survive for years upon years without a playwright since there are so many plays out in the open already (even though I think playwright’s jobs are super important and we need to have more socially- relevant and interesting work to perform and design, not every producing company agrees).
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