Save Yourself, Save The Industry

I hope by now the whole question of "should I self produce/publish my work" has been settled.

Of course you should.

Is there a catch?  Of course there is. 

Getting your work into the world is an entreprenuerial act and like any such act it requires a certain set of skills.

The ability to manage finances.

The ability to strategically plan and then execute the plan.

The ability to work with all sorts of artists, vendors and related folks.

You get the picture.

If you don't want to learn those skills, or even worse, consider your art to be so special that you don't need to learn those skills . . . then self producing is going to be like your own 8th circle of hell.

But you knew that right?

Right.

----------------------------

The part I find interesting is that people are talking about self producing in the context of leaving the mainstream industry behind.

So people are saying "screw institutional theatre, I'm going to do my own thing."

Or "forget the big record labels, I'm going to produce my own records."

I understand the impluse, but I want you to think about it in a different way.

Self producing your work isn't abandoning the "industry", it's what's going to save your industry.

I'll explain:

----------------------------------

I was flying home on Southwest airlines.  I asked for a cup of coffee.  The coffee was pretty darn good.

That got me to thinking:

You can get a pretty good cup of coffee almost anywhere now.  Gas stations, airlines, fast food joints.

How did that happen?

You know how.

Starbucks.

Starbucks arrival on the market and the innovations they used to grab a hold of the market forced everybody else to adjust.

Or to put it another way, if Starbucks had not come around, that cup of coffee I got on the airplane would have sucked.

--------------------------------

Great companies, great entreprenuers, force industries to change.

The best way for you to create a better, fairer, more robust theatre/visual arts/dance/indie film world is by building your own thing and building it well.

Your success will put pressure on the rest of the field.

They will change because you and your fellow entreprenuers have left them no other choice.

Comments

[Scott Walters]

Great post. Can I add to it? It isn't enough to create it, you have to promote it. Starbucks had little effect on coffee until it started to get buzz, then it started to be identified with hip people and a hip lifestyle.

So often in the arts, we DO the work, but when it is over, it is over. We need to write articles, blogs, books about what we've done and how we've done it. Share with the world. It should be regarded as a requirement right after strike!

[cgeye]

Well, that speaks to our last remaining phobia: Meaningful and available documentation.

Maybe watching the Method series on TCM brought this up, but before the Method produced actors who easily moved between film and stage, stage actors as Laurette Taylor had their performances exist only as memories -- powerful memories, but still transmissible only through hearsay.

We no longer have a meaningful system of play preservation through PBS Great Performances, or its successor HBO. A musical might come to film, but it's most likely so changed in cast and staging that it doesn't show what its audiences loved about it -- and knowing Broadway nowadays, the source content came from film/TV in the first place.

The mercenary system that demands actors and creative staff keep moving, auditioning to keep a steady flow of income is not going to encourage any self-documentary processes -- and if you're unemployed after that brilliant work you helped make, are you going to advertise that by posting extensive notes about it on your blog?

Until health insurance and basic human needs are delinked from constant searches for work, we won't have space for a culture that preserves or teaches the tacit knowledge of theatre craft. Until then, we'll have to depend on the charity of the underemployed, which is good enough, if consistent enough, to work out a test case for success.

[Tony Adams]

I think being willing to adapt is another necessity. Using the Starbucks example, I remember reading they didn't start out selling coffee. They had five stores selling coffee beans before they started just selling joe, if memory serves me right.

[Adam]

Your memory is accurate Tony, the actual selling of coffee didn't come until much later. Originally they sold the beans.

@ Cgeye

I don't see any correlation between the ability to share what you have learned while working and then having windows where you don't work. I'm with Scott, you really need to document our success and failures . . . and the lesson we learn. There is no reason not to do that, other then lack of interest.