Transcripts: House Lights Up Series 2

Episode 7: INSIGHT

Anne: I certainly see some young performers coming into a show feeling that this is the answer to all their problems, or that this will fill some kind of emptiness they may be feeling in themselves, or this will give them a sense of validity. And I think that if we’re looking for self worth in the contract of a show, we’re barking up the wrong tree, and we’re going to be really disappointed. I think those kinds of things can only be found inside ourselves. We’re not going to find them in a musical. There are many other wonderful things to be found in a musical, but a sense of our own worth is not it.

This is House Lights Up – honest conversations with professional performing arts workers about how they make working in the arts work for them.

The Australian arts industry is a unique business – unlike any other in the opportunities and challenges it presents for its workers. Its difference is intrinsic to the work it produces – the point of which is connection, experience, to move and to change and to question. And of course to entertain.

So we know the particularity of the arts and entertainment industries isn’t going to change. Which means the myriad sources of stress to which arts industry workers are exposed are likely here to stay.

Monica: We’re all just making it up as we go along, we’re all fucking it up as we go along.

Susan: So the whole experience had actually crushed any sense I had that. I had a creative voice that was useful, and I left. I left music altogether.

Cristina: There can be such beautiful highs. And then there can be some great lows.

Chris: I sometimes talk about your arts career, it’s like a bad boyfriend: it doesn’t treat you well, but you stay in it because you love it.

Anne: It’s becoming more and more competitive…and I think it’s going to get harder, not easier.

Ian: We’ve thrown spanners at each other, we’ve done all sorts of things just out of stress.

Monica: …and if I was a better mother, then what I should do is put my own ambitions on hold and look after my children.

Rob:  Yo, that stuff isn’t actually real at the end of the day, it’s beautiful and it’s brilliant and it’s meaningful for the people watching. But it’s not the core of who you are. And it can’t be, you have to be comfortable with who you are outside of that

Deone: There’s passion, and there’s pain. I think a lot of us in the industry think that we need the pain to be passionate. That is absolute bullshit.

So in this series we’re taking stock of the arts worker’s arsenal – we’re considering the cornerstone resources every person working in the arts can draw on as they navigate the particular challenges of this industry.

And just as a side note – this series was recorded under the conditions of the COVID-19 lockdown, so you’ll notice some variability in audio quality. And I’m sure you’ll appreciate why that is the case.

Something that struck me in almost all of my conversations for this series of House Lights Up is the incredible learning journey that unfolds in the early part of a creative career.

Off the top of the episode you heard from the remarkable stage performer Anne Wood. Over the course of her career, Anne has seen reality setting in for many early career performers.

Anne: I hear lots of stories. And I talked to lots of people who come into the performing arts and then find that it’s not what they expected that it was going to be. And it’s much harder than they expected and a lot less glamorous than they expected.

The sense that I get speaking to people from the industry is that the graduates who are coming up and not necessarily prepared for the reality of what it’s like. That they do have a glamorised romanticised idea of what the business is and what it’s like to be doing eight shows a week, or working in that capacity in the performing arts. I think that they don’t have a good idea of what it’s like, and it can be incredibly disillusioning very quickly.                

Co-founder of the Australian Road Crew Association and long-time roadie Ian Peel sees people coming in to road crew work expecting that this line of work will get them hanging out with famous people and partying round the clock – an image of glamour he says is far from reality.

Ian: Well that’s not what the industry is about. The industry is so diversified you may end up working for anyone, anywhere at any time, no glamour. You don’t treat it as glamour because all the musicians want to be treated as normal people and that’s it.

An area of the live performance industry often associated with a sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle, Ian tells me that road crew work is actually characterised by tenacity, work ethic, problem solving and bloody hard slog.

Ian: We were always working when everyone else was having a party. So people don’t sort of realise that, you’re working. You’re working flat out to get gigs up and down.

You would probably start at 10 in the morning, eight in the morning, seven in the morning, finish six in the afternoon… then you’ll do the show and then you will do three or four hours bump out straight after that. So you could be doing 16-hour days. During the show you can sit down and have a bit of a relax. Hope that nothing goes wrong, but you just keep going until you get the job done. 

Imagine you have been training for years, since childhood, with dreams of becoming elite in your field. That might mean landing a coveted job in a full-time orchestra, or dance company, or your dream might be touring a mainstage musical, or performing your own original material in front of an audience.  And then you get there, you get the gig you’ve been visualising throughout your training. But you don’t feel quite like you’ve arrived at your destination. Instead you have a lingering sense of anticlimax, that something’s missing. Is this all there is? Here’s stage performer Deone Zanotto.

Deone: You start doing the job and you realise, I’m not happy. Why aren’t I happy right now? I’m achieving. I’ve ticked that goal. I’ve ticked the box that said I had to get a gig on West End and now I’m here and I’m not happy. Or after four weeks, you’re like, “Really? Why aren’t I happy? I’m doing it, but I’m not happy.

Anne: I often find that after a couple of months, they’re thinking is this it.

Anne Wood has seen plenty of performers – often who are in their first job on a mainstage musical, in the same awkward and unsettling position.

Anne: They’re finding the repetition very gruelling. And they’re realising that it’s maybe not what they thought it was going to be. I see that all the time… And then of course people often are concerned about having those feelings because they have an overriding pressure on themselves thinking, I don’t want to sound ungrateful. I’m so grateful to be here. And my partner, who I’m living with, isn’t doing a show and hasn’t gotten into a show yet. And I can’t complain to them about how hard this is and how I’m feeling and how I’m questioning everything. And so there’s always this pressure that everybody puts on themselves that, well I need to keep my mouth shut because I’m doing a show and this is what everybody wants to be doing. So let’s just get on with it.

Chris: But something really interesting happens as you become an adult, or as you actually become a professional musician, or you become a professional actor that you suddenly go, “Oh, okay. I am the thing, but I still don’t feel worthy,” or “I still don’t feel good enough.”

Chris Cheers is a psychologist with a performing arts background.

Chris: I think I’m one of the rare people to have a Bachelor in Neuroscience and Performance Studies as a minor.

Chris echoes something that all of the arts workers I spoke to for this series highlighted – the vital importance of knowing why you want a career as an artist. If you can arm yourself with the insight and self-knowledge that allows you to critically interrogate what is pulling in the direction of a creative career and what you’re aiming to get out of your work, you have a rudder to steer yourself through anything the industry can throw at you. An unexpected feeling of dissatisfaction with your work might indicate that you’ve yet to ask yourself these hard questions.

Chris: There’s a thing happens where the thing you were promised hasn’t really panned out that you still feel like you haven’t got the worth or you’re not valued. And that’s when you start to go, “Okay, well, what does bring my life value? What does bring my life worth?” And that’s a really interesting time where, I think some artists work that out and then change their practise to make it something that’s important to them. So you see actors move from doing shows that… They’re in shows that other people have written to making their own work, or you see musicians start to compose their own stuff or go on their own path.

For Anne, this self-interrogation is as much about resisting popular images of what being a performer is all about.

Anne: There are a lot of pictures and stories and romanticised beliefs around the performing arts that aren’t true. And I think to have longevity, it’s important that we really face up to those and really search ourselves to see if this is where we really want to be…

Chris: …maybe as artists get older, they get wiser, they make mistakes, they learn and they end up in a better place, so in many ways we’re talking about, “Well, if you could take out what you know at 50 and put it to yourself at 20, how much greater might your life be? And when you talk to people who’ve been through it, the one thing that they tend to have come to is a real understanding of what’s important to them and why they’re doing what they’re doing.

Someone who takes a measured approach to the fulfilment they expect from their career is stage performer Deone Zanotto. Deone has hit the highs of performing coveted roles on Broadway and the West End. But she has a really conscious approach to finding fulfilment within and outside of her work.

Deone: And this has been a change for me and a big shift, and it’s been a conscious shift, not putting my happiness eggs in my work basket. My happiness eggs are definitely not in my work basket. That’s not to say that I don’t get happiness from work. Absolutely. I love it. I love kicking the leg on stage, for sure. But, my happiness eggs come from somewhere else. They come from family time, they come from all the stuff like going for bike rides, and hiking, and seeing Hudson, and playing, and mucking around and playing with Plato, which you never do when you’re an adult, and other things, spending quality time, having good conversations with friends, and that sort of stuff. Because putting happiness eggs in your work basket is, I think it’s detrimental….” So, your happiness has to come from in you. It can’t come from the things.

Chris: Being able to step away from everything and going, “What’s important to me? What are my values? What’s important to me? What do I want to do with my life? And then how do I knock that? How do I do that?” And parts of you, parts of those values will be enacted through the arts, through the job, and other parts of what’s important to you will be enacted through family, and through friends, and through other connections as well.

According to Chris, there’s often a point in a creative career at which the artist’s relationship with the arts changes.

Chris: I think that’s a really interesting, important point that I think artists always to get to is where they start to lose the sense of that they’re doing art in order to become a celebrity, or to become famous, whatever are the kind of beliefs that somehow inserted into their mind as they were growing up, they get left behind and what the arts become is a place to enact what is important to you. It’s not what is important to you, it’s a place where you enact what is important to you. And you have to work that out in order, I think for the arts to work for you, and also in order for you to be able to persevere in the arts, even when every piece of evidence is telling you that it’s a hopeless task. And if you can really hold… Some people call it passion, some people call it values, some people call it what’s meaningful, whatever you call that thing, you’ve got to know why you’re doing it, and that’s what helps you get through when it’s really, really difficult.

So when you have a clear view of your values and motivations, you can start to think about your goals – a surprisingly controversial topic! Chris Cheers points out that there are different types of goals – some are more helpful than others.

Chris: I am a huge fan of a short term, measurable, realistic, achievable goal.. Goals become an issue when they are long-term and they’re not really clear what they are, or they’re not really specific. And I guess the issue with a whole lot of energy towards longterm goals is there’s often a million things that are out of your control on the way to that long term goal. So you’ll start feeling guilty or you haven’t worked hard enough if you’re not getting to that goal without maybe recognising all the things that are out of your control between you and that goal.

Monica Davidson runs an organisation called Creative Plus Business which helps creative practitioners build their business savvy, including identifying and planning for goals that will move their career forward.

Key to this is a focus on what Monica calls intrinsic goals – those goals over which you can exert some degree of influence.

Monica: Measurements of success that you actually have some dominion over, so for example, if your goal was to get funding for a project, that would be an external goal. And we would actually either discount that, and say, well, we’re not going to talk about that because you don’t have any control over whether or not that happens, or how can we turn that into an intrinsic goal?

So the extrinsic goal would be get the money to do the thing. The intrinsic goal would be put together a kick-ass application, don’t sabotage it by leaving it to the last minute, make sure you get some really great letters of support, make sure your budget isn’t full of shit. You know, there’s all those things you can have some control over. Whether or not you get the money, that’s none of your concern. You don’t get to exert any influence over that at all. All you can do is pick out the bits that you can do and do that, you know?

So yeah, we spend an enormous amount of time helping people to figure out what their goals are. We’ve got this whole online learning programme called Deadlines, Dreams and Goals, which we put together just for that purpose, to help people to identify what it is that they want, because sometimes people don’t know how to even vocalise that. But I mean, I have had some pretty emotional moments with clients and students and participants who suddenly realise that they’re holding themselves back from even imagining what it is that they want.

According to Monica, setting external or extrinsic goals can be a dangerous form of self-sabotage.

Monica: If you have entirely extrinsic goals, which ultimately you can have no control over, then it actually doesn’t matter how hard you work or how talented you are or how pretty you are or how well you’ve prepared for that audition or whether or not you showed up to that audition with a hangover. It doesn’t matter, because the goal will ultimately not be decided by you anyway. So you’ve always got a scapegoat. It’s like, well, I didn’t get that part because that casting director is a dickhead.

Whereas if all of your goals are intrinsic, then the only person you can really hold to account is yourself. Now, all of a sudden, it’s like, well, I can’t blame that funding body or that casting director or that producer or that external person for not granting me my three wishes.. So when you have to hold yourself to account and be accountable to yourself and yourself only, then we start getting into really interesting self-sabotage land. And the problem with being a highly intelligent, well-educated creative person is that you probably developed some incredibly sophisticated methodologies for self sabotage. So sophisticated, in fact, that you may not actually even be aware of the fact that you’re doing it.

According to Chris Cheers, another trap of long-term, external or non-specific goals is that it can be difficult to know when you’ve achieved them.

Chris: So you never feel like you’ve achieved anything. And what I see all the time with artists, because I see people at the beginning of their career, I think teenagers who want to get into musical theatre all the way up to people who are in main stage musicals and they both feel like they haven’t achieved anything, they haven’t achieved what they wanted yet. They haven’t reached their goals.

And I sometimes refer to that as the Judy Garland syndrome, the sense that you never get to where you want to go, because there’s always another place you’re meant to be, or there’s always another goal.

So, yeah, goals can be problematic. Not having them can be even worse. Here’s Chris again with an alternative suggestion about how you can ensure you get fulfilment from your creative career. 

Chris: I think what I would suggest is a focus on what I call values or what you might call what’s important to you. And knowing that no matter your circumstance, you can live by your values every day. And just look at each day about how do I live by values of connection and creativity and beauty and health, or whatever’s important to you? How do I do that today? And then the day ends, and then you wake up and you’re like, how do I do that today? And you keep living by what’s important to you and your values, it might be that you end up winning an Oscar. But the path to get there is going to be incredibly different than if you set a goal to win an Oscar and that’s all you put your energy towards. And if you don’t end up winning an Oscar, you won’t really care because you’ve spent every day living by what’s important to you. And you will feel like you’re living a life of meaning rather than feeling like you’re just not achieving goals.

According to Monica Davidson, goals and values are all for naught if you don’t know how to be accountable to yourself. And this is something Monica says so many early career artists and arts practitioners are really unprepared for.

Monica: This will always be a path that requires you to hold yourself to account. Otherwise you are not going to be able to keep up with everybody else. This is an industry that is entirely full of people who spend their every waking moment trying to be the best that they can be for no other reason than to hold themselves to account to that goal. Because none of us have been promised anything. We all just want to be as good as we can be so that we can look at ourselves in the mirror and say, “I am as good as I can be.”

We are all the embodiment of what self accountability looks like. And that has to be learned. It doesn’t come naturally. Being accountable to yourself is not a part of how people are raised. It’s not a part of how people are trained. And the legacy of that will be in people respond extremely well to deadlines, but really poorly to establishing their own goals. And if you want to make it in whatever part of this industry you’ve picked, you are going to have to figure out how to kick yourself up the bum and how to get yourself out of bed and how to get yourself motivated towards pursuing that intrinsic goal. That is one of the hardest things that you’ll have to do, and it might take you the rest of your life to learn how to do it well. It’s an ongoing learning experience, but I think that is the measure of the people who make it and the people who don’t.

For some of our performers, the level of satisfaction they expect to get out of a job depends on how well that job aligns to particular priorities.  Here’s stage performer Deone Zanotto.

Deone: There three main things that I think about when I get a job, and that it has to tick at least one of these boxes. It has to either be really challenging. Like, it has to be a role that I’ve wanted to do forever, and that’s incredibly challenging. Or it has to be financially viable. If it’s paying me a bazillion dollars, hell yes, let’s do it, whether it’s challenging or not. Great, we’ll particularly do it because of that box. Or it has to be something that I’m incredibly passionate about.

So, if it doesn’t tick the challenge box, or the financial box or the passion box, and they’re just random order, they’re not in any particular order, if it’s not ticking any of the boxes, then that’s not good. But, if it’s ticking one of them, then I have to make the decision, “Yeah, I could do this because it’s ticking my passion box.” Now, am I getting paid 50 bucks a week? Yeah, but it’s okay because it’s ticking my passion box. Great. Let’s do it. If it’s not, if it’s kind of in the middle, if it’s running at a five with all of those things, then, I don’t think you’re going to feel satisfied with it.

Susan: For me, music is all about participating in community, much less about the kind of classical music witnessing model.

For classical musician Susan Eldridge, there’s an interesting tension between her traditional classical musical training and the satisfaction she looks for in her creative practice.

Susan: And it surprises people a lot when I say to them, so I’m a professional French horn player, right? And every Thursday night I go play until recently I was going to play with a community band. And they are maybe not the highest class musical ensemble in the city, but they are the most glorious bunch of humans and they live for Thursday nights. If… for me creative satisfaction so that the three things I have to have is great people, great music. And the third thing is pay, right? But it’s got… anything I say, yes, has got to have two of those three things. So what makes me much happier than a $220 paycheck is taking my kids. So we have two teenage sons and my wife was the conductor of this ensemble. So every Thursday night, like The Brady Bunch, we’d get in the station wagon with the tuba and the baritone sax and the bassoon and the two French horns in the conductor’s podium. And we truck on out and we’d go to rehearsal and it was just awesome.

Susan runs a business called Notable Values in which she helps other classical musicians to develop viable careers, harnessing her own business acumen to provide advice and coaching to a segment of arts workers whose training has traditionally not incorporated these vital aspects of business knowledge. Susan’s work coaching other musicians often emphasises a search for joy.

Susan: So it’s really about helping them to understand what creative fulfilment looks like for them individually, and what is a sustainable economic model that’s going to allow them to do that. And so helping people also get to actually, where are you joyful in your music making?

Susan says these conversations can involve active resistance of traditional images of what a successful classical musician looks like.

Susan: And understanding you can play with the community band if you want to. Like there’s expectations we have about what success looks like or what good is. We can rewrite those for ourselves, right? And we can decide to say very proudly, I’m a professional French horn player and I play with a community band and I love every minute of it. And it’s one of the highlights of my week. Because the people are awesome. I know the music that’s chosen is high quality for that group. It’s musical vegetables, it’s not musical candy. And I have my kids with me and I love it when the tuba-playing-son gives the bassoon-playing-son a ribbing, because he missed his cue. Like it doesn’t get any better. So how do we have this? How do we get back to a place where our music making is about joyfulness and about connection to people? So that’s where I help them to start to unlock that.

A word that gets thrown about a lot in the arts is passion. This supposed driving force of creative endeavour gets mixed reviews from our arts workers. Here’s Anne Wood’s thoughts:

Anne: I guess now, after more than 30 years in the business, I have a different idea of what passion is. And I think it’s a kind of misunderstood term. We think that passion is what drives us. And often it is. But behind the passion, what is it really? What does drive us to do what we are doing and what we want to do in the performing arts? I feel like true passion is an understanding of what we can bring to the table and a desire to bring it to the table. I think as long as we know that we have something to bring and a desire to bring it, then we’ve got an opportunity to make a difference. And we’ve got an opportunity to learn and grow. And we can make any job interesting in that way.

Chris Cheers says that passion should be the compass, not the destination. So you may be a passionate actor, but you won’t necessarily be passionate about acting…

Chris: Your passion isn’t to act, your passion is to, you know, I don’t know inspire people. Or your passion is to connect with an audience or your passion is to use your words to inspire ideas of change in people. Your passion isn’t to be something it’s the things that are driving your actions. And I think that’s the kind of passions that are useful. When passion is kind of being used as almost a façade of kind of a goal, that’s when it, I guess becomes an issue where you feel like I’m not able to live my passion because I don’t have any funding is at one time an absolutely true statement, but in another way, not really a helpful statement because it negates the idea that you can live by your passion no matter the circumstance you’re in. It just might look a little different than you had imagined, but you can do it because you get to define your passions and how to enact them. 

Following your passion can expose you to some pretty tough realities. Like when stage performer Deone Zanotto followed her passion to New York.

Deone: New York for me is, that was … it’s such an amazing place to live. It feeds you in terms of your art, but it also eats you alive if you are not ready for it. There were days where I got eaten alive, and there were days when I was fed and felt so full for love of the art and for what I was doing. There were other times where I wanted to literally crawl under buildings and hide. I felt my most connected and social and loved and happy in New York, and I felt the most depressed and lonely. I don’t think I felt loneliness like that. It’s a place that you feel like you want to be a part of as much as you want to escape it. It’s got this crazy yin and yang to it. It’s really, yeah, it’s palpable. I think you can really feel that when you’re there.

One of my first auditions was for A Chorus Line. I had dreamt about that audition, and I remember the feeling of that happening when I was auditioning for A Chorus Line. I was in Time Square, and I could see the billboard of A Chorus Line. It was like, this is happening. This is your eight-year-old self standing in this place that you’ve dreamed of for so many years, and you’re doing it. You’re absolutely doing your eight-year-old dream right now.

Then, on the flip side of that… it was a year later probably, telling my eight-year-old self that I’ve done it. I’m not holding onto that dream anymore and feeling the heartbreak of going to audition after audition after audition and not getting it and not getting the gigs…. I remember feeling so broken. I think I’d been told … Three of my real heart jobs I’d auditioned for and I’d missed out, and this was in a period of days, they told me, “No, no. Really sorry. No, no, no.” I had to step back and think, I need a break from this. I actually need a break from this and not a pretend break. Not just like, “I’m not doing this anymore,” and being flippant about it. I actually really needed to step back from it because I felt so … had been so beaten. I was broken. I didn’t know how to put my pieces back together to go on and jump into another audition. I was like, no, no. I need to actually step away from this for a minute, and I did for nearly three years.

So Deone was in LA, dealing in a different kind of theatrics as a personal trainer to movie stars – when she got a call from an agent back in Australia. The Gordon Frost Organisation production of Chicago was recasting Velma, and they wanted to know if Deone was interested.

Deone: … I really had to stop and go. Yeah. Oh God, first of all, can I still do this? Do I have it in me? Do I have it … Can I do this role justice because it’s such a role that I hold so close to my heart? Yeah, then I jumped in. I threw myself back in the pool. That’s how I threw myself back in the pool, and it was fantastic. The more I thought about it, the more I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve missed this. My heart has missed this.” So, I’m not sure if my body had missed it, but a few massages, and we were okay.

Passions change – they evolve and mature over time. Hip hop artist Rob Tremlett (Mantra) had very simple motivations when he first started his creative practice.

Rob: I think my goals early on obviously the driving force was just wanting to do music full time. Wanting to be an artist and wanting to be creative with as much of my time as possible… so earlier on that was like, I’ll work a dodgy job … job that was easy enough for me to do and easy enough for me to get and didn’t take too much of my brain space in my own creative energy so that I could devote enough of my time to music outside of that. Obviously that changed when I started doing the music education work.

For Rob, what started out as an income stream that was more fun than the part-time jobs he’d been working, and a better aligned to his pursuits in music, soon became something larger and more ambitious.

Rob: I realised that there were really, really deep outcomes that could be reached that weren’t music or art related. And they were probably more important than the music or art related outcomes. So that became something that I was more passionate about I think over time… When I first started doing that type of work, I was like, yo, we’re going to lay off these young peeps become rappers, and we’re going to show them how to rap. I don’t really care about that anymore. I don’t care if any of these young peeps start rapping or if they want to pursue rapping. But what I am interested in is maybe giving them a positive experience of a creative outlet that allows them to figure out what their pathway might be or what it might look like.

For Anne Wood, too, motivation has changed over time.

Anne: I love telling stories. I love the opportunity that that affords, I think that that’s probably has what attracted me in the past, but I certainly now feel part of what motivates me is trying to learn and understand about what this beast is, what it is, what happens with this group of people who get together to do a show? What are we bringing in terms of the beliefs and stories that aren’t serving us?

For roadie Ian Peel, it’s always been about the people.

Ian: I never cared who I worked for or who I toured with, it was going on the road and working with a great bunch of people. So you’ve got to be happy with where you go and hope that the people that you are going to deal with are going to have the same emotional background as well as worldly knowledge and be able to communicate the same as you. But it’s not about the industry or the glamour it’s the people you work with.

So whatever your creative practice involves, don’t be afraid to really interrogate your motivations – it could be make all the difference in your creative career. Be mindful of your goals – think intrinsic and measurable – not long-term, vague or external. And spread those happiness eggs across as many baskets as you can get your metaphorical hands on.

Here’s a last thought on the search for fulfilment from Deone Zanotto.

Deone: Your mind naturally looks for joy, bliss, happiness, love. It’s in the sunsets, it’s in the movies you watch, it’s in the conversations we have, it’s in the jobs that we get. But, all of those things have an end date. The sun sets, the movie ends, the job finishes our jobs finish all the time.

So, where are we going to get this happiness? We’re just constantly searching, searching, searching, searching. It’s in you. It’s got to come from in you. So, it’s the one thing that you have to find that balance, you have to find that within yourself.

Next time on House Lights Up – adaptability and making the money stuff work. How to make a living from a creative career.

Episode 8: ADAPTABILITY

Anne: I never really think about not performing because I’m very good at being unemployed. And I think that’s the key.

This is House Lights Up – honest conversations with professional performing arts workers about how they make working in the arts work for them.

Today we’re getting down to brass tacks – we’re talking about money, finding out how our arts workers deal with the lean times, and what they think are the most important contributors to financial survival in this famously volatile and unpredictable industry.

And we’re starting off by asking our interviewees how they make the money stuff work.

Off the top of the episode you heard Anne Wood say that she’s very good at being unemployed. What she means by this is that she’s very good at planning for the inevitable lean periods that come with working in the arts industry.

Anne: I think when we’re working in the performing arts, no matter how big the contract that we have, we always have in the back of our minds that there will be a period of unemployment. There will be a period of no money. And we’re always… making sure that we’re remembering that we’re going to have to support ourselves through the leaner times.

This is something pretty much all of the arts workers I spoke to for this series of House Lights Up have in common – an awareness that rainy days are always on the horizon. 

Cristina: I have been a pretty religious saver for as long as I can remember.

For Christina D’Agostino and her husband and fellow theatre performer Jordan Pollard, saving is as much about maintaining mental wellbeing as it is about financial planning.

Cristina: I would always save for the rainy days when I’m in work, because I’d never want to feel like… Like work comes and goes and it’s just so hard to plan, and especially with both of us being performers, neither of us have a regular job. So because of that, too, and just not to feel super anxious in those downtimes, Jordan and I have established a system that when we are in work, we put aside money, we live within our means.. And that really works for us and especially for me. I know that I wouldn’t manage as well if I didn’t save..

Freelance orchestral musician Susan Eldridge and her wife Ingrid are likewise both engaged full time in the performing arts – a financial and logistical juggling act supported by complimentary approaches to the industry and their work.

Susan: We’ve been really lucky, we both have a very similar mindset that we are ultimately responsible and in control of our lives. And we both are very able to understand what the system offers and what the system doesn’t offer. So, and I think that comes for both of us from having both had a life outside of music. So I had a business career. And my wife before she was a full time conductor was a doctor in specialising in emergency medicine. If you went to go get some stitches at the hospital on a Sunday night, it probably would have been her stitching you. So we’re in the system but not of the system, if that makes sense. Because we’ve both had a life that sits outside it.

I asked Anne Wood how she has dealt in the past with the time between jobs, when maybe there was some uncertainty about where the next gig would come from. And she said part of being good at dealing with down-time was simply not panicking.

Anne: I’m not a panicker, I’m not somebody who … I have a very strong sense that if I’m going for a role and I don’t get it, there’s a reason that, that happened. And there was somebody who was better for that role.
I auditioned for something a year or so ago, which was a very long, drawn out audition process and required a lot of work. It was a big learn and there was a lot involved. I think I was in there four times. And I remember, I think this probably the third time I went in, I thought, “Yeah, I’m not going to get this.”

But in the meantime, I still turned up every time and gave the best that I could. There has to be a degree of realism to it and understanding. Because if you have anything else bubbling away in you, any kind of fear or tension or expectation or you’re terrified if I don’t get this job, then how the hell am I going to pay the bills? That’s going to inform your audition. You’re walking in with all of that. And it’s going to stop you from bringing everything that you can bring on the day. It’s so important to be able to identify all of that and leave it at the door, so you can walk in free of it and just be able to show what the panel will get if they employ you. Rather than the bag of nerves because of your bank account.

Like many performing arts workers, Cristina D’Agostino likes to be a few steps ahead on finding the next job before the current gig finishes up.

Cristina: So if I know that this show’s only going for this period of time, I will start to put feelers out there and do what I can to establish something in between and especially now with a family who are dependent on me, like little one, and whatnot. I have to keep my mind and body moving.

When it comes to finding work as a roadie, Australian Road Crew Association co-founder Ian Peel says that if you work hard and work well, you’ll always find a gig.

Ian: …a lot of people just think that it will fall at your feet. Well you’ve got to prove yourself. You’ve got to be a good person and communicate and have a good work ethic and that’s the bottom line. You’ll get work as long as you’re good at it you’ll get work hopefully.

Anne: I didn’t really ever think that working in the performing arts was actually something you would aspire to or would be a proper job, I guess.

Anne Wood’s first job in musical theatre was in the original Melbourne production of Cats – a gig that came when she was studying science at Melbourne State College. And because Anne didn’t think a career in the performing arts was actually a viable option, she equipped herself with others.

Anne: And I think I always had another plan A. And I think that that’s the key really to have a couple of plan As. And to be aware that working in the performing arts in Australia and in most countries, you’re going to have a lot of time when you’re unemployed and you need to be good at being unemployed, or you need to have another plan A. And that’s really, I think the key to not going down the rabbit hole when you are unemployed financially and also mentally.

So another Plan A. Something not to fall back on, necessarily, but to which you can turn your considerable skills and experience to maintain income, productivity and – really – your sense of worth when things aren’t going so smoothly with your creative practice. Sounds simple, but where do you start?

Something that may surprise some arts workers, but really shouldn’t, is the highly adaptable mindset they’re already bringing to their work.

Anne: I think working in the performing arts, every job we do is different to the last one. So whether we know it or not were accruing all of these different skills and this really wonderful level of responsivity to anything that’s thrown our way. And I think that makes us incredibly employable in lots and lots of walks of life.

People who work in the performing arts, you have to be open to learning. Because every single job is different from the last. We’re constantly learning new skills. We’re constantly developing our ability to respond to new things, which makes us infinitely employable.

The remarkable adaptability of the road crew isn’t lost on old-school roadie Ian Peel.

Ian: At the end of the day if you want something fixed and done and organised get a roadie to do it. Roadies should run the planet because at the end of the day, I never did a show where the show didn’t go on. We always managed to resolve all issues.

Of course when it comes to the physically gruelling work that goes into setting up live shows, age does become a factor – as Ian Peel explains, the roadie’s adaptability is put to the test sooner or later.

Ian: Working in the industry for a 60-year-old is not that easy to get hold of. People can struggle, you’ve got to be able to work out what you want to do, where you fit in, what you are going to do. So you’ve got to be able to adapt and work out, don’t fall in a heap in the middle.

Hopefully you would hope that someone would come and pick you up, dust you off and go right, come on let’s go, we’re going to find something to do.

Roadies are good at a lot of things. So they’ve got to utilise what they’re good at to then go onto the next step and hopefully that the people that they work with when they take that next step are going to have the same camaraderie as you’ve had when you are touring the world with a bunch of people.

Ian and his co-founder Adrian Anderson started the Australian Road Crew Association specifically to harness that comradery, and the power of social connection to combat the isolation from which many former roadies can suffer when they leave full-time crewing. We’ll have more about that coming up in a later episode.

When it came time for Ian himself to leave full-time road crew work, he found that same comradery and fulfilment in a tuna fishing enterprise – ichiban tuna.

Ian: It was like rock and roll you’re going out on a boat with the guys, three guys, you’re out with the team and we’re killing it. We’re having a ball, it’s fantastic, sending stuff to Japan and you go, Jesus Christ, you buy it for a Dollar a kilo in Sydney for that we just got $10.00 a kilo in Japan. So stuff Sydney, we’ll send it all to Japan. So yeah we did really well with fishing, caught some massive fish.

In episode one we heard about the importance of gaining insight into why we want to do this work, and the double-edged sword of passion. Anne Wood tells me that interrogating why we’re drawn to working in the arts may help us identify our other Plan As. The idea that our work must be driven by some divine source of passion, meanwhile, can really work against you.

Anne: I think passion’s just a bit of bullshit that we sell ourselves, and in actual fact, it is about we have the feeling inside ourselves that we have something to bring to the table… as I said earlier, we have to be so adaptable as people working in the performing arts that we actually have a whole raft of things that we can bring to any table. We just have to recognise them and harness them.

Cristina D’Agostino is a stage performer who earlier this year had her first creative team job as resident choreographer for Shrek the Musical. This has led her to identify her other Plan A.

Cristina: I’m going to start my Master’s in counselling next month. Yeah, because I feel like even coming from being a resident choreographer, how beautifully like counselling and what we do as an art form, have a really nice relationship and I think they really compliment each other. So for me, it’s really interesting to gain just a little bit more knowledge, and I guess some tools that will help me in my career but also gives me another avenue now moving forward in life. Counselling and helping people through things has always been something I’ve really enjoyed the idea of.

Rob: Colleagues of mine within the hip hop world were putting me forward for these mentor programmes they were involved in or education programmes and hip hop song writing workshops.

When hip hop artist Rob Tremlett (Mantra) got involved in delivering hip hop programs to school-aged children, he found not only that it could replace the part time jobs he was doing to support his music making, but also that it would enhance his creative practice.

Rob: And so I started doing those and that was like, “Oh, wow. This pays so much better than the other work that I was doing, and it’s actually utilising my real skill base.” But also it’s work that I would happily do for free. It was like it was rewarding and enjoyable work.

That essentially just became part of my music practise. You know what I’m saying? I considered it one and the same. Working with young people and helping them to create their own music and their own pathways into the industry, that became just kind of as important to me as my own music was. And it meant that I always had that to fall back on, even if we weren’t on the road or if we were having quiet time or if I needed to go into the studio for six months or whatever.

Musician and business owner Susan Eldridge coaches other musicians on creating viable careers for themselves. And when it comes to adaptability, Susan points out that it’s not just about transferring existing skills to diverse work sources – but it can also be about finding alternative funding opportunities for one’s creative practice. And Susan says the key to this is often identifying the problem your creative practice is helping to solve.

Susan: So imagine there’s loads of organisations doing this around the world, where they’re partnering with aged care homes, they’re partnering with community organisations, and they’re looking at where there’s a need. So, and then also the funding, if we need additional funding it’s not necessarily coming from the participants of the music as well. That’s the other challenge we’ve got is where all the industry is kind of stuck in asking the Australia council for money that, you know, 900 applicants for a hundred grants. It’s not going to happen, but instead, if you build a programme that is solving a problem for somebody else through your art, then there’s loads of other ways of getting funding for that.

It’s something Susan teaches a Masters subject on called music outreach and social entrepreneurship. To hear more about that, keep an eye on the House Lights Up feed where we’ll be releasing some bonus episodes on this and other meaty topics.

Susan’s own adaptability is pretty remarkable. When she failed her first attempt at her music degree, Susan pulled off a pretty remarkable career change. Not so much a career pivot, more of a full pirouette. I asked her how she’d managed it.

Susan: Don’t get me wrong. I did cry for a month and goodness knows I must’ve eaten, the 55 kilos that I weigh. I must’ve eaten in Tim Tams, then plus some. So, it was quite a bit of grieving went on, but I was lucky.

Lucky is probably the wrong word. Susan was tenacious and hard working, and very observant. At university with no government or parental assistance, she’d worked in the box office and in stage management to fund her life while she studied. And throughout her community music upbringing, she’d watched her mother – the non-musician of the family – manage all aspects of the band as treasurer, secretary, president, music librarian, photocopy mistress – the list goes on.

Susan: So I, even though I failed my music degree, I knew that the organising of things was something that I could do and had done in a part time capacity. And I’d seen my mum do it, you know? So I knew it was possible.

It was a skillset that led her to event production. Susan became east coast managing producer for the Rock Eisteddfod Challenge in Sydney. Eventually the UK came calling –Susan found the prospect of a change in hemispheres really appealing.

Susan: So I went to the UK to run that event and to be GM of that event and introduce it into Northern Ireland.

After a couple of years on the road, Susan needed a bit more stability. So she teamed up with fellow running a fledgling tech consultancy company.

Susan: And they had six staff, and he was just running it out of his back bedroom. And he said, look, I know you can organise things. Do you want to come on? And I know, you know about touring and logistics. And when you work with a company of consultants, it’s the same thing. They need a bed to sleep in. They need a flight to get to the gig, contracts need to be sorted out. So it was exactly the same stuff as I’ve been doing event production. Just with people doing, their services were there tech consulting, not the performance part of it.

So I just basically replaced the word, get performing arts with business. It was, it’s the same, it’s really the same job.

So the fact that arts workers and creatives tend to be flexible, adaptable problem solvers, highly intelligent and enterprising individuals, in theory means they can turn their hand to any number of jobs.

But when it comes to making a living from creative practice, there’s a lot working against the arts worker too. Not least the deep chasm that has developed between arts education and business training.

Monica: We learn about how to do the creative part of it, but we never learn about how to do the other part of it.

Monica Davidson is a writer and filmmaker who realised – when she began her own production company in the early 1990s – that there weren’t many resources available to creative practitioners wanting to develop their business skills

Monica: And one of the unfortunate legacies of the way most of us have been taught is that we’re frequently being taught by people who don’t know how to do that either. They don’t know how to freelance or how to set up or run their own businesses, or they have been freelancing, but they feel like they’ve just been making it up as they go along because they never got taught. So everybody’s just making it up as they go along. Everybody’s making lots of mistakes.

Monica says there’s a divide between arts subjects and business subjects which starts in high school.

Monica: Because of the way that those elective subjects are streamed, it’s almost impossible to choose an arts subject and a business subject. So we’ve been forced, from the beginning to go, “Oh, I have to do this or this.” Not, “I’m going to do this and this.”

Fed up with the little information available on the practicalities of running a freelance creative business, Monica engaged a couple of speakers and started running her own workshops. An informal networking and advisory practice soon developed and evolved into Creative Plus Business – a social enterprise dedicated to empowering self-employed creative practitioners to take control of their freelance businesses.

Monica: A lot of people will sort of report to us that business has always felt like this special club that they’re not allowed to be a part of. Or that maths is too hard, and you should just go over there and be an artist. Or that’s something my manager will deal with, or my agent will deal with, or my gallery will deal with. It’s not for me to worry about. My job is art, not this. And there’s so many, it’s just layered within professional practise at every level that this is somehow not something that we should be bothering ourselves with.

And so I think this world, this really unsexy world of business that I live in, has been showcased as a world that creatives are not welcome in. And so once you open the door and say, well, you’re welcome in. I mean, it’s boring in here, but welcome. And people get in and go, oh, it’s… It’s boring, and some of it’s hard, and it’s quite yucky, but it’s not unmanageable. It’s not like this super secret club that only people wearing suits are allowed to have. It’s actually pretty straightforward stuff.

And again, when you’re talking about creative professionals, you’re talking about an incredibly intelligent, extremely well-educated group of people with a love of learning who kind of go, oh, that wasn’t so hard. That’s all right.

So while not having the knowledge can cause a lot of stress and anxiety for arts workers, these people tend to already have the basics in place to quickly build the business knowledge they need in order to close that gap – intelligence, adaptability, and a certain sponginess.

Monica: It’s really quite extraordinary how nervous people are about making mistakes or looking stupid, and so we do quite a lot of work around that with individual clients, but also in workshops to just try and make people feel a bit safer. Because some practises are different to others, but if you are going to be using your creative process to forward yourself professionally, you do have to be vulnerable, and you have to be spongy as well. You have to absorb what’s happening around you…

So one of the things we’re always talking about, again, in workshops or advice sessions or across the board, is trying to find that balance between the spongy, vulnerable, subjective, emotional place that you need to be in order to access your inspiration and your creativity and get yourself into that zone, and all that kind of magical aspect of what it is that we do, with the objective, logical, rational kind of business mind that we need to have in order to think about ourselves in that businesslike way, manage our financial situation, think strategically about marketing. I mean, really most of the stuff that needs to be done in a business needs to be done with that kind of head on, but it’s really hard to move back and forward between those two states of being.

And we’re always talking about trying to find a balance there, because that’s another reason why people feel stress, is that I always describe it as saying that you’re kind of using the wrong tool for the job. If you’re approaching, say, the financial or the legal or the business or the marketing aspects of your practise with this spongy, subjective, vulnerable creative mindset, you’re actually using the wrong tool for the job. There’s nothing wrong with that tool. It’s a great tool, but it’s like trying to build a house with a feather duster. Feather dusters are very useful things, they’re just not designed for that job.

Nowhere is the chasm between the arts and business more pronounced than in classical music education. Susan Eldridge is agitating for change in the traditional classical music education model for this very reason. Susan says that the training and assessment processes that characterise the classical music training model value only a very narrow range of skills, and as a result, graduates aren’t gaining the skills and experience necessary to make a viable career outside of the orchestra setting.

Susan: So the current student journey is really all about being a boring cover band. … Look, if we were covering, ’80s disco one-hit wonders, that’s awesome. But what we’re covering is a very small slice of a very particular type of music genre from years ago. Okay? And if that’s all we’re doing, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the problem is that if that’s all we’re doing, there’s a small Canon of music, a small range of voices, who are acceptable to be heard in our art form. So what happens is, and especially in the training alley, in the training model of musicians, it’s a one-to-one model, it’s the master-apprentice model, right?

Usually, what happens in most education is, most music education lessons, is the teacher tells the student what was wrong. It’s actually error detection. Music education is mostly error detection.

And as a result, says Susan, classical music graduates leave their formal training with a very limited field of skills.

Susan: What happens is, the students are not being supported to be self-learning. You pick, for instance, if you play the violin, it might be four or five years, or three or four years into your violin lessons, before you’re allowed to tune, to learn how to tune your own instrument.

And so, when you go to beginner string orchestras, the teacher is often walking around individually, tuning every student’s instrument. How is that helping them to learn? And my understanding of that situation is, it’s to avoid string breakage.

Well, break a damn string. Then they’re going to have the opportunity to learn how to replace the string. So the problem is the model of instruction being one to one, that the teacher is the expert, and knows everything. And they error detect everything I do. And also, because classical music, particularly, is a game of replication, perfection and replication. You’re either, it’s either perfect, or it’s wrong. There’s little space for recreation of the Canon of music.

What this leads to with our graduates coming out of music schools is, they live in a world of ones and zeros. “I’m either perfect,” or, “Yeah, it’s perfection or death.” “It’s job in an opera company, or job in orchestra, or failure.” And they have really, really low resilience to uncertainty. And they have really very low ability to come up with creative solutions to things for themselves.

So, and I’m not saying this, I’m saying this from having worked with, in the last couple of years, I’ve individually coached over 1,000 young musicians. Through the job I had at the school of music, I individually coached over 650. And I’m working with musicians right from high school grade, nine, 10, right through to performing professionals working in orchestras. So this is not coming from a place of an echo chamber of my experience. This is what I’ve observed and learned from working with 1,000 people, that their ability to come up to be generators of ideas, to be creative and confident in their own voice, is really low, because of the way the model’s working, of the master-apprentice error detection.

So what needs to change so that classical music graduates leave their training and begin their careers in an empowered position?

Susan: The most important thing we’d need to do is equip musicians with the mindset that they are in control, that they are responsible, and they are in control their lives,

One way of doing this, says Susan, is through a hybrid model that embeds ideas like economic sustainability into the existing curriculum.

Susan: For instance, if you were doing a music history subject, instead of just studying the compositional output of Beethoven, what if we did a business model canvas? What if we understand, how did his economic engine work? What were his annual report, what was his gross and net earnings?

So if we actually understood the mechanics of the career of Beethoven, then that might also help them to understand, “Oh, it’s not just the playing that matters.” So we can do that. Yeah, so we can start to embed some of these ideas about audience engagement, relevance to your community, taking responsibility for yourself. We can start to thread those into the existing curriculum. We don’t need to, we don’t necessarily need to undertake massive change in the structure of the typical music degree.

While future generations of classical musicians could benefit greatly from these kinds of changes to the training syllabus, Susan helps currently practicing musicians tackle the challenges they face through her business, Notable Values.

Susan: So when I work with musicians, one-to-one, I tend to think of myself. I’m a bit of a… I’m a bit of a trauma specialist. They often come because their model is not working for them. And it’s, I mean, that’s typical change management. When any of us, whatever it is, like, I’m going to go on a diet or I’m going to do some exercise. You know, we only ever change when the pain of staying where we are is too great. So I tend to work with people in periods of transition, which is a real gift. And I feel so, so grateful for being able to help people, to unlock them to what might be possible. So the work I tend to do tends to be about changing the model for the individual, and then drilling down on that might be about, “I want more work”, or “I want a different kind of work”. I need to build an audience for my work and around the economics and the impact of what that change is going to look like.

And when it comes to running a freelance creative business, as a performer, or a producer, or any number of other roles in the arts and entertainment industries, there’s the added complication of instability – a greater number of unknowns than in most other areas of business. Meaning business planning processes as they’re traditionally taught aren’t all that helpful for a freelance creative worker, as Monica Davidson explains.

Monica: So for example, the traditional methodology for business planning is to encourage people to have like a five-year plan. We encourage people to have a 12-week plan, because after 12 weeks, who the fuck knows what’s going to happen? Like, there’s no one in the arts who knows what’s going to happen three months from now. The idea that you could be able to have a five-year plan, I think that’s hilarious. What a funny idea. I’ve been doing this for 30 years, I’ve never had a five-year plan. If I’ve got a five-month plan, I feel like I’m really nailing it, oh my god, you know?

What Monica hopes people will gain through her work at with Creative Plus Business is greater mastery over the aspects of their business that they can control, and as a result, less stress and anxiety about the things they can’t control.

Monica: So it’s even little things like that, of saying, all right, well, you can really only exert a degree of influence over some things. And really, you can only do that for about 12 weeks, in our experience. So let’s pick out the things that are important for you. What are your priorities in terms of where you feel that your lack of knowledge is actually negatively impacting on you? Because you can have a lack of knowledge about stuff and it doesn’t matter.

So you work out the bits where your lack of knowledge is negatively impacting on you, and that’s what we’ll talk about. And we’ll work out, out of that, what do you have some control over? What can you actually exert some influence over?

Forget about the outside world for a second, what can you do? And if people walk away from that with a clear idea of what they can actually have some power over, and a little bit of a timeline and some activities that they can do during that timeline that will help them to move forward, that’s a good day. Then I’m happy. I’m a happy camper.

So creative practitioners working on a freelance basis often suffer from a significant knowledge gap. This can cause a large amount of stress as mistake are inevitable. But working in the arts and entertainment industries demands adaptability, so arts workers tend to come equipped with the basic tools which – with a little guidance – can allow them to overcome this problem and move their freelance businesses forward with confidence. Under normal circumstances. But as the conversations for this series of House Lights Up take place, the world’s circumstances are far from normal.

So what happens when the live performance industry just stops? That’s next time on House Lights Up.

Episode 9: EXPERIENCE

Monica: And really, if you’re going to punch an industry in the face. You should really punch the arts, because we know how to do this. I had a bit of a shout at a public servant recently, who was telling me that what the arts really needs to do is pivot. And I said, “Darling, the arts can not only pivot. They can give you a step ball change and a jazz hand, at the same time. What’s wrong with you? We pivot all fucking day. Okay. And we can do it with style, in heels backwards. So shush, shush with your pivoting please. You’ve no idea what you’re talking about, you silly man.”

This is House Lights Up, honest conversations with professional performing arts workers about how they’ve made working in the arts work for them.

We spend a lot of time here on House Lights Up talking about the particular challenges of working in the arts and entertainment industries. The impact of those challenges on the mental health and wellbeing of arts workers can be so acute that in 2017 Arts Centre Melbourne launched The Arts Wellbeing Collective. This initiative actively works to empower and upskill organisations and individuals to address the problematic features of the sector, like high pressure environments, constant deadlines, touring and the prevailing competitive tone of the industry. The agenda was full to bursting. 

Then in March 2020, the live performance industry – with all of its inherent challenges – was flipped completely on its head.

The Australian government’s mid-March ban on non-essential public gatherings effectively cancelled the live performance industry indefinitely. At the time of recording this podcast, this ban had been in place for more than three months.

Deone: It’s very difficult to see all your friends who were in work suddenly be not in work, people who were about to start working, myself included, that’s not happening anymore. It’s being postponed

Chris: It’s just like a communal sense of hopelessness as everyone tries to trudge through this place at the moment

Cristina: But it was only about a couple of weeks ago that I had a moment and I just I broke down and I cried and it’s almost like I grieved what had just happened and that it all hit me

Ian: I mean I got told on Friday the 13th, we’ve got no work until September and you go, shit, yeah right,

Susan: We’re both pretty much unemployed and have been since March when all of our work fell over. So in a very similar situation to many other listeners that we’ve fallen through the JobKeeper cracks as well.

Rob: And that was quite overwhelming and kind of scary. It was like, “Damn man, I haven’t ever seen the world in the grips of something like this before. And it looks like this is going to hit us soon.”

Anne: One of the things that I have seen is people’s ability to respond to whatever they’re given. To respond to the challenge of all work being withdrawn.

Monica: I’ve been really amazed by how many clients have actually snatched some degree of victory, from the jaws of defeat.

On Friday 13 March, co-founder of the Australian Road Crew Association Ian Peel and his colleagues were told they had no work until September.

Ian: Luckily it wasn’t April the 1st because everyone would have been laughing going yeah, ha, ha, ha, but as it turns out hey…

So mass gatherings is out the window, it just happens to be one of those viruses you’ve got to be careful. So, yes, this is all well and good, there’s a lot of people that have just done their arse with money

For Cristina D’Agostino, the shutdown brought an abrupt end to her first resident choreographer job with Shrek the Musical.

Cristina: … it was a really beautiful introduction to that side of our world. And I was thoroughly enjoying it. And then it just finished.

The shutdown came just after Shrek had opened in Melbourne.

Cristina: We had been running for about four weeks. But I think it was probably around the three-week mark that things were just starting to become a little bit … There was a bit of uncertainty. There was obviously the news and everything around us was getting quite heightened and I found myself especially in that position as resident choreographer to just try and remain positive, keep active, and and act as though nothing was changing. Like we were still producing a beautiful show, there were audiences coming along… But it did feel like all of a sudden it just stopped.

When the plug was eventually pulled on live performance, what Cristina observed was the company’s immense capacity for solidarity.

Cristina: I found it’s so impressive how everybody was just all hands on deck and really unified and that for me, I was like, “Oh, you know what? We are really lucky to do what we do.” I found from the production team, to the crew to the management, everybody… It was so wonderful as a company, we were so united

But for Cristina, when the shock wore off, and the rallying subsided, that early positivity turned to sorrow.

Cristina:… it’s almost like I grieved what had just happened and that it all hit me because I was really just trying to go, “Okay, all right, compute, move forward.” But I will admit, it did hit me and I was really sad about what had happened to so many of us in industry and just how differently it is affecting everybody. So because of that, too, I think it’s hard to navigate this time

Deone: I think when it first happened, I’m actually finding it more difficult now, not then.

Stage performer Deone Zanotto has likewise found the hardest part of the shutdown has been in the months after the initial shock. Here she tells me of her experience as restrictions in Victoria began to lift.

Now, everyone around me is going back to work, to some sense of normality. Whatever that new normal is, people are going back to it. But we aren’t. We are still not sure of when theatre will go back, possibly the end of the year. I’m hoping, fingers crossed, that Frozen opens. I’m crossing everything for them. So, I’m finding it more difficult now. I think when everyone was all together, and everyone was in their little ISO bubble, and we were all just dealing with it, it was like, “Okay, now we’re doing this. Now we’re just taking all the steps.”
But, now that you see everything trickle… You drive past the cafes, people are in there, people are shopping, people are doing things that they normally do, but we aren’t. That feels odd. It feels wrong. But, I also understand. I mean, I get it. We can’t have 2,000 people in a space right now. So, it’s been that this is the part that I’m finding tricky now I think.

For musician Susan Eldridge, the timing of the shutdown couldn’t have been worse.

Susan: So I left to go freelance this year. And boy… Is that interesting. So, I did have quite a lot of work lined up and that all fell through. And my wife also had 18 months worth of conducting work, wiped off the books in the space of a week. We’d been working hard for the last two years. Knowing that this year was the year I was going to likely be going freelance and for her conducting work building to better work. And this was kind of the first year that things were really solid financially for us, both freelance and also that the quality of the work we were doing and the people we were working for was really where we wanted to be. So there was quite a bit of grief went on around that.

Rob Tremlett’s (Mantra’s) first thoughts were genuine fear about the public health ramifications.

Rob:  No one really knew what was going to happen in Australia in terms of the fallout of COVID. And so when they brought in kind of pretty prompt lockdown measures and stuff, I was kind of like, “Yo, bring it on.” Even though I didn’t know what that would mean for me personally, I was just like, “Yeah, well, let’s do it. We just need to work together to make sure that this doesn’t hit us like it’s hitting some of these other countries.”
But then very shortly after that, I was like, “Oh, hang on. If mass gatherings are not possible, and schools are closing and indoor gathering’s kind of not possible, that’s all of my income is completely cancelled until further notice.” So I went very quickly from being this concerned social citizen to being like, “Oh shit, I don’t know if I’m going to have any money ever again,” and then so yeah, I went into kind of panic mode and I just kind of started taking every measure I could to protect what income I had to figure out alternate ways of generating income, ways of protecting kind of some of the programmes or the jobs that I was already involved in. And thankfully, a lot of them were able to pivot and become online kind of options or whatever.

Rob tells me he saw a lot of empathy and compassion amongst creative workers during the initial shut down period, but something else that struck him was a perverse, almost competitive pressure, spread mainly via social media by people who seemed to be viewing the shutdown as an opportunity for one-upmanship.  

Rob: I just hated this prevailing sentiment that was coming out of some creative people, which was like, “Yo, if you’re not using this time to develop a new skill or to learn a new thing or to increase your knowledge or to get your side hustle started, then…” There was literally memes going out like that. And it was like, “If you don’t do all these things while you’re in lockdown, then you didn’t lack the time before you lack the discipline,” and stuff like that.

And I’m just like, “What kind of bullshit is that? What kind of self-serving bullshit is that, that you’re going to come and aggressively challenge a person to utilise their time in quarantine or utilise their time in lockdown to build their brand or build their practise or whatever?” It’s like, what kind of self-respecting creative person thinks that the way to get creative outcomes and projects or ideas out of people is to just berate them for not doing enough, and to put this unnecessary pressure on them?” I was dumbfounded.

Further to that, I just think it’s really, really disrespectful to be confronting anyone about how they’re choosing to respond to a literally unprecedented event. You don’t know what people’s circumstances are. And so how they’re dealing with this is completely personal to them. It has nothing to do with you. Also, let’s not forget there’s hundreds of thousands of people dying all over the world and some people actually give a real personal shit about that. And that’s not a nice thing to be dealing with for these people. So the idea of use your time better, and get your side hustle started. It’s like, “Yo, you start your side hustle. Let other people deal with their own lives”. It was just completely naive and ignorant, I thought.

Amid the uncertainty for the future of live performance, and the anxiety brought about by the coronavirus crisis more generally, my interviewees shared with me some stories of remarkable adaptability and compassion.

Anne: I’m watching some colleagues responding incredibly to this time during COVID-19. All of our work has gone for the time being, and I’m watching how some colleagues are really standing up and grabbing other opportunities and finding joy in completely new things that they may not have considered a year ago.

Deone: There’ve been some amazing things. Like, there’ve been people producing shows online. A show’s about to open next week that’s filmed in four different rooms in a house and edited on the fly. The stuff that has come out of this is amazing.

Rob: I was extremely impressed with my peers and contemporaries in creative industries who were able to just immediately adapt their way of thinking, their way of working to not only kind of keep themselves in some kind of a position of employment, but also to be able to look out for each other. Like I think a lot of people in creative industries were looking out for each other and keeping each other in work and keeping each other’s spirits up

Monica: I’m just mad impressed, at how clever we’ve all been. And how empathetic everybody’s being and how resilient people are being.

Monica Davidson runs Creative Plus Business, a coaching resource helping creative navigate the practicalities of running a freelance business. Monica tells me her team has been really busy during the COVID crisis.

Monica: I prepare myself before I walk into client meetings, for the worst. And it’s really quite extraordinary, how many are figuring out how to survive… My heart sings in a weird way, at just this incredible care, that we are taking with each other. I am still wondering when the farmers are going to put on a concert for us, because I think it’s time.

Susan Eldridge is working to reimagine classical music training and practice. Susan and her conductor wife Ingrid have very consciously approached the pandemic situation from the perspective of abundance – perhaps not an abundance of employment, but certainly an abundance of time and of need.

Susan: What do people need? What does that audience need from us right now? And how can we take the gift of this time when people are thinking more radically about what’s possible, to advance the conversations in the two areas of work that we do.
So, we’ve both just been pumping out content, anything that has our name attached to it is originated from us. It’s for you for free to help unlock you, musically in your life and in your career.

Among Susan’s and Ingrid’s output have been webinars and workshops for conductors tackling questions the pandemic has thrown up about rehearsal – how does an orchestra rehearse during lockdown, and to what end? And how does a conductor facilitate that? Also a podcast series about innovation in music education. And Susan has even put together an online summit on the topic of reimagining musician training.

For Susan – the turmoil brings with it limitless new possibilities.

Susan: So we’re just trying to remain confident that people are now much more open to our ideas about change and transformation than they were maybe six months ago. And so if we can stay steady, keep lentils in the cupboard, keep the kids in school shoes. If we can just tread it out, if we can stay calm and kind and loving to each other and our community, that things are going to be okay.

And that’s not from a woo hoo, if I think of a Lamborghini, a Lamborghini will magically come in my life kind of way. But just in a very, if it’s the strategically about the work we do is needed, it has value and we’ve got to remain committed. If we haven’t got skin in the game, we won’t get the work when the work comes back.

Each arts worker living through this crisis will emerge on the other side with their own unique and valuable experience. So at this early stage, what have we learned about the industry and its people?

Here’s stage performer Anne Wood.

Anne: There’s been a lot of stuff exposed about where we sit in the minds of the government, where we sit in the minds of some producers, some companies, so I would love to think that there will be something positive that comes out of all of this, that we’re able to move forward, acting on this understanding.

I wonder whether this is a great time for us to actually be looking at the way we view ourselves within the industry and maybe trying to make some changes at the very bedrock of what the performing arts is all about. What our values are. How we value ourselves within the industry. Whether we do really buy into the pictures of the fact that we are lucky to be working in this industry in a job that we love. As long as we cling on to those ideas, I think there’s always the opportunity for us to not be taken seriously by the wider community.

Monica Davidson is likewise concerned about what she sees as a general disregard of the value of creative practice.

Monica: The whole experience I think, is highlighting the systemic de-valuing of creative practise. That’s happening from when you’re in mid-high school and you have to choose between art and small business. All the way through to a Prime Minister, who apparently thinks that television doesn’t make jobs. The things that people are watching on TV, are just put in the box by magic fairies. That’s something that’s probably upsetting people and impacting on people’s wellbeing. In a way more than the virus.

Psychologist Chris Cheers says that, while it might not be news within the sector, the COVID crisis has really exposed the precariousness of funding for independents.

Chris: I think about the independent to middle sector, I think have been the hardest hit in many ways because I think it’s made very clear that their funding is not long-term if really from anywhere. And it’s something that has to continue to be fought for every year, if not every month. Or it’s funded by the general public or by artists, or kind of working for free. And I think this has really shown that industry was on such a fragile kind of space to survive already. And now it’s a lot of that even minimal funding has just gone. …

Pretty much all of the arts workers I spoke to told me that the coronavirus crisis is and should be a time for soul searching. A time to ask difficult questions, and find new and better ways of doing things. As Chris Cheers points out, the crisis has shown that huge, systemic changes are possible, and that should prompt new ideas about the way the arts could be funded.

Chris: And I think this is maybe got us to step back and go, you know these structures that aren’t working can change. Money can be funded into completely different areas. Millions, billions of dollars government has put into different areas, it is possible to change these structures and obviously, unfortunately it was in response to a global pandemic, but… It often makes me think about, I guess the way top tier is funded compared to the middle and independent tier. When you step away and look at arts funding as a general, the arts is funded in Australia. It is. There’s millions of dollars going into it, but I think the next step down is going, where is that money going? And are we getting bang for our buck in terms of giving money towards excellent new and vital kind of Australian artistic work across a range of different modalities.

Susan Eldridge too takes heart from the forced innovation of recent months which has seen performing arts organisations throwing themselves into online delivery.  

Susan: We have completely pivoted a part of our business in the last two or three months, and it’s not been easy, but it’s been effective and our audience has come with us. So what else might we now address that we thought was too hard and take, I think, particularly take this opportunity of, like I would love for the opera companies and the orchestra companies to ask themselves, “Well, what are we now for if we are not for lots of people making noise at lots of other people?” Which is like the traditional concert model, right? If that’s no longer, and accepting that that’s no longer possible as well. And that’s out of our control as much as we can carry the battle cry, “But live music matters! And we need to be in front of an audience!”

It’s just accepting, it’s out of our control and asking ourselves, well, what might we be for now? How might our music change our community in other ways? And when the next pandemic comes or when the next massive disruption comes, which it will, how is our business model and our output resistant to these big disruptions? How are we so important to our community that we will be fine when the next change happens?

According to Susan, who is herself an orchestral musician, this innovation is sorely needed in her corner of the industry, where a traditional devotion to the accepted canon of music and standard modes of presentation threatens the relevance of the artform.

Susan: I was in Adelaide last year and we pulled out a, I’m not going to name the orchestra. We were in this old bookshop. And we pulled out the season catalogue for an orchestra that was from 1977. It was in this gorgeous old bookshop in a little house in Adelaide. And we played musical bingo. And we were able to name every, almost every piece that were playing that year. And it was 80% the same content that’s being played this year.
So I, yeah, I just, I hope that we, what we learn is that our audience must be the primary focus of our work. And whether that work is performance or it’s education or it’s outreach or it’s therapy or whatever it is we do. But it must be for someone. There must be a who, and there hasn’t been a who really and clearly, in our world. So, that’s what I’m hoping that the connection is what comes out of this work. How do we retain that?

This soul searching is happening at the level of individuals as well. Psychologist Chris Cheers has seen many clients – especially those who have missed out on emergency funding and are not eligible for government support – questioning their future in the industry. 

Chris: Some of the clients I see, it’s this real sense now of…it’s almost like, this arts career… I sometimes talk about your arts career, it’s like a bad boyfriend that it doesn’t treat you well and it’s just not there for you when you need it, and it’s just hard, but you stay in it because you love it. Corona’s like your bad boyfriend going out to Europe for three months…  And I think now is a bit of a process where that bad boyfriend is coming back and people are going, “Do I really want to do this thing that was so hard? The arts thing that was so challenging, do I want to do this again?” Or “Is there other people out there for me? Is there other relationships where I might like to put my energy towards?”

And I think it’s okay that some people are in that spot, it’s okay to question the arts, it’s okay to question is this what you want to do. It’s great if you’re sure of it, and you’re fine, and you’re going to work through it no matter what, and those people are pivoting, and adapting, and putting the 14-person stage work, converting it to a one person, Instagram Live feed. Great. But I think it’s ok to allow space for people that are questioning whether they want to do this again and go back into this again when they’ve had this moment to consider and reflect on it.

For Anne Wood, the opportunity for individuals to reflect on their motivations and their place within the industry should be seized with both hands.

Anne: I do feel this is an amazing time for everybody to really reflect on why we are attracted to the industry, why performers in particular, are constantly held by society is being lucky to be working in this industry, and also why there is such a prevailing feeling that it is a hobby. I think even amongst the people who are performing, who know how hard it is, there’s this sense that, “Oh, I mustn’t complain, and I’m so fortunate to be here.” Whereas in actual fact, we’re a multibillion dollar industry who employs many, many, many people, and we deserve more. We deserve for the industry to be of the highest standard that it can be and taking care of its employees to the highest standard that it possibly can. The highest principles of the corporate world. I feel like this time where the industry is not operating on any level is a great time for us to be reflecting on this and thinking about how we’re going to move forward.

Amidst the uncertainty of the industry’s immediate future, Monica Davidson takes heart from the resilience she has observed throughout the COVID crisis.

Monica: Although I don’t love the fact, that we have such a resilient industry. We’re resilient for a reason and none of its good. We will prevail. We will figure it out. And if you’re listening to this and thinking, “Well, I haven’t been resilient. I’ve been shit.” That’s okay, too. I think if anything, we have to remind ourselves that it’s okay to fall apart. And it’s okay to have bad days and I’ve been very clear about that. That I have been having lots of mental health days, which require me to basically lie in bed. And watch Nicholas Sparks movies and eat a lot of chocolate. And that’s fine. Self care is fine.

So the arts industry is in the throws of a crisis that will forever change it. The future of arts organisations and individual creative workers will be informed by their experience of the COVID19 shutdown for decades to come. How the systems and structures that shape the industry will change is at this stage anyone’s guess. As is the length of time we will be kept apart.

But audiences will gather again – eventually. And when they do, how will their experience of live performance have changed because of our ability to now imagine innovations and situations we previously never thought possible.

Here’s one last thought on the crisis from stage performer Deone Zanotto.  

Deone: We haven’t been in a large crowd for such a long time. I look forward to feeling like we can do that safely. There’s a part of me that right, right now, doesn’t want to sit in a theatre and I hate saying that, because it’s my industry. It’s what we do. It’s going to be really, really interesting. I’m trying to think about the first time I might be doing that. It will feel so strange. It will feel new. Maybe it will be like a really great new experience that we all have been craving and that we all really, really need. I know when I’m in an audience and I’m watching, and 2,000 people are clapping or 2,000 people being really quiet listening to a scene, it’s so moving and you feel really a part of something. I look forward to audiences being able to feel a part of that again.

Episode 10: COURAGE

Chris: This is an industry that is an agitator and does act against the system, that’s kind of the whole point of a lot of arts. And sometimes that means you’re outside of the system that your kid might go to school in, or you’re outside of the system that childcare is offered in and all these sort of things. So you’ve kind of got to make systems for yourself that work for you.

This is House Lights Up, honest conversations with professional performing arts workers about how they’ve made working in the arts work for them.

An arts career can take a lot of independent wayfinding. Research shows that professional creative environments tend to reject the traditional hierarchical, promotion-driven workplace model. Instead, advancement of a creative career relies on self-governance and intrinsic motivation.

So arts workers tend not to have clear road maps when it comes to their careers. Even Less clear are the ways in which they can successfully balance their arts career with a personal life. The prospect of becoming a parent, for example, on top of being a performer can be impossible for some arts workers to comprehend.

This means that working in the arts requires you to write your own rules about what is and isn’t possible. And that takes a whole lot of courage.

Just a reminder – this series of House Lights Up was recorded under the conditions of the COVID19 lock-down. So you’ll notice some variability in audio quality.

At the top of the episode you heard from psychologist Chris Cheers who says the nature of the arts industry tends to situate its workers outside of the systems that structure and support personal life, so they have to create their own. According to Chris, it helps if you avoid making comparisons with other people.                                                                                                     

Chris: I think comparison is really something to work away from as an artist when it comes to comparison to other people’s finances, to other people’s houses, but also to the way other people can maybe spend time with their family. And just because you’re doing it differently doesn’t make it less than.

Anne: And what I started noticing after I had my daughter was that a lot of women who have children leave the industry because there is so little support as far as childcare is concerned. You know, we’re shift workers basically, and there’s no childcare for shift workers.

The logistical and financial juggle of family life is challenging enough when the parents work a predictable eight-hour day and five-day week. But the unsociable hours that working in the arts can require of you presents a whole new raft of challenges for family life.

For musical theatre actor Anne Wood, touring as a single parent was a leap of faith that she had to make on her own.

Anne: I really noticed how there was nobody who could talk to me about their experiences of touring with a child. I was a single parent. And so, yeah. I had to find all of that out for myself. I think I got much braver as my experience grew. The first nanny we had was really wonderful and she taught me how to do it really. She guided me through the whole process…

You need good people, and of course that means that you need a contract where they pay you enough to hire somebody as well, which is a different situation. It does change the kind of work you can say yes to I guess. You need to make sure that you’re going to be sufficiently remunerated to make it worthwhile for you going through all of that, and also so you can have enough bedrooms in your accommodation inside. You can employ somebody else to help you while you’re not there.

Deone: When I was pregnant lots of people said to me, “Oh my gosh, musical theatre, that’s the key job when you’re a parent…

Deone Zanotto is another stage performer who has found her way through the juggling act.

…because you work nights and you’re there in the day. And you might even fit bath time in and then you can just go to work.” And I’m thinking, “Yeah, this is going to be epic.” Yes, it is epic, and it is epic in ways you cannot even imagine. It’s epic in that you’re up at 6:00, you’re doing a full day of parenting and caring, you might get bath time in and then you leave and you go to the theatre and you start your day as your workday starts, your job starts. And then you go till 10:30, 11:00 at night and you get home and then you… Your day is… it’s an epic day, it’s a really long day.

Anne tells me that a lack of child care support can mean motherhood spells the end of a lot of women’s performing arts careers.

Anne: Women who are in relationships, if they have a family and their husbands don’t have the kind of job that can tour with them or it would be just too hard for the family to manage that she goes away, also just all the logistics, the kind of job that you need to get in order for it to be financially worthwhile actually touring, knowing that you’ve got extra costs on top of everything, so it’s very, very tricky I think.

This was definitely not the case for Cristina D’Agostino, who at 11 weeks pregnant, auditioned for Jersey Boys.

Cristina: And I have wanted to be in that show ever since I saw it 10 years ago. So I was like, “Okay, it’s not starting until after the baby would be born.” I was like, “you know what, I’ll give it a go. I’m 11 weeks.” That morning getting ready, unfortunately, I pass out. Jordan’s overseas. I was home by myself. Anyway, I got myself together, got myself to the audition. Had a good time. I was so fortunate that I got the show.

So Cristina started rehearsals just four months after the birth of baby Frankie – a remarkably short amount of time for the body to recover from pregnancy and childbirth.

Cristina: I knew I had this job that I needed to be physically able to do as well as mentally and emotionally. But I didn’t rush my body. I never ever pushed it. … I was shocked at just how smart the body is as well. And I was in rehearsals and I was feeling more like myself. I was also again going, “Oh my God, I’ve just given birth like four months ago and I’m, like, I’m strutting it out doing the opening number.” I was like, “Cool. This is actually awesome.”

Then came the tour. Cristina and her husband, fellow stage performer Jordan Pollard, had never done this before as parents. So they had to work their way through this brand new challenge together.

Cristina: We thought, “How do we navigate this? How will we make this work?” Jordi obviously had to … He’s so beautifully was like, “Okay, this is a dream role for you. We need to do this. We’re going, I’m not going to work for X amount of time so that we can do this together.” So we got to move to Sydney and we were genuinely just going through the motions, I guess, organically and just working off Frankie, do you know what I mean? So I’d be in rehearsals. He’d come to ABC Studios. I’d come down, I was breastfeeding her so I’d feed her in the breaks. We just had to be super organised. I was pumping when I wasn’t feeding, you know. It was epic but the production team was super, super encouraging and really supportive.

The experience inspired Cristina to start the Instagram account “The Show Can Go On” – where performing arts workers share their stories of combining parenthood and performing.

Cristina: Because I had a lot of questions coming out of that or throughout that time kind of going, “How did you do both?” Because I think there’s just this innate not misconception. It’s just this thing that we kind of go, “I don’t know how I can do both. How can I be a performer and be a parent at the same time? You know, it took a lot of organisation but that kid just loved being backstage and she was amongst all of these, again, this magic. And I remember being exhausted…, but I felt empowered at the same time.\

This empowerment, Cristina says, was also fuelled by the women she had seen doing it before her.

Christina: I remember back to my first show where Lisa McCune and Marina Pryor both had children and we’re both smashing it. They were like we just we travel home for the weekends, we see our kids, we make sure we do all of these things. And I held on to that information. And it’s kind of seen me through this process as well. And I don’t feel frightened by it or hesitant. And instead, it’s actually been really empowering. And Frankie has just loved every moment of it.

Cristina D’Agostino and Anne Wood both tell me how important it is for parenthood to be visible in the arts industry – for two main reasons: it can help empower others as they learn to combine family life with working life. But it can also stop parenthood feeling like a potential liability.

Anne: I certainly remember feeling when I started working, after having my daughter, wondering if maybe my agent shouldn’t mention that I had a child because it might complicate things. You get over that pretty quickly, but certainly… I remember wondering whether it would preclude me from being offered certain things and that maybe I should be proving that I was still able to do my job even though I’m parenting a small child, which is crazy thinking. It really is.

Cristina D’Agostino had similar feelings of reservation when she had to tell her new employers that she was expecting a child a few months before the start of rehearsals for Jersey Boys.

Cristina: I did, because naturally you kind of do, like “what are you going to think of me? Will you naturally go, “You know what, it’s probably a bit too hard. We’ll hire somebody who isn’t going to have a child,” all of those things run through your mind. And I had to really talk it out with my hubby and my agent and everybody and kind of go, “Hang on a minute. I shouldn’t really be apologising for wanting to start a family and having a child.” And it turns out yeah, like we had the conversation and it was all fine and they were nothing but supportive. “Cristina, if you need to have her backstage to breastfeed in between shows or this … How can we cater to what you need?” It became something like normal. I felt like this was totally achievable.

Deone was likewise welcomed back into performing by supportive and well-intentioned employers. However, Deone notes that becoming a parent is life-changing, and the workplace doesn’t necessarily change with you. So navigating long and varied working hours while breastfeeding an infant child can be a lonely endeavour.

Deone: I wish someone had had a conversation with me about that… Because it’s just like, “No, this is work. And it all goes ahead just as normal.” But it’s not as normal because you have this little cherub that you are keeping alive still, so something has to change, something has to be different. It would be lovely to have different support there, not just moral support, as in, “You’ve had a baby, that’s so great! Oh my God, he’s adorable.” End of sentence. End of conversation. Let’s go from act one, scene three. You know? I think there needs to be more in place. I think… I think the arts are probably… They need to get on board a little bit more with that.

In the 2016 study by Entertainment Assist and Victoria University titled Working in the Australian Entertainment Industry, researchers found that 58% of arts and entertainment workers felt they had trouble finding time to spend with their families.

I asked all of our performing arts parents if guilt ever figures in their work/life juggling act. While for most of them the answer is yes, they all have their own way of managing this. Deone Zanotto focusses on the bigger picture.

Deone: Gosh. I get strength from the fact that I want to teach Hudson that as a woman I work too. And I’m really happy when I’m working, and to be a happy mum, and to be present, and to have all the love when I’m being a mum, that I also need to work, and that’s really, really important… and he knows that and he thinks it’s awesome… He’s very open, he’s very connected to his emotions, he will tell you plain and simple how he’s feeling. And we really encourage that, and we really encourage to not just talk about all the good feelings, about the bad feelings, and to talk about everything. So you know … I have to be, I just be honest with Hudson and I have to say, “This is how it’s got to work.”

Cristina: So I auditioned for Jersey Boys and then got it and even up into signing I was like, “Oh my God, I feel guilty. I feel absolutely guilty.

Starting her first performing gig when her daughter Frankie was four months old, Cristina D’Agostino had to work through her guilt feelings very early on.

Christina: I feel like I’m the main carer. I should be at home. I shouldn’t be working.” No, it’s almost like I’ve gone … Who’s made me feel like this? And I think it’s just my inner dialogue and the thoughts inside my head because it’s not like anybody has said that to me that you should be staying at home. No one has said that to me. But for some reason and even starting the gig, it took me a couple of months to really let go of that. Jordan really had to pull me aside and go, “You need to stop because not for one second is anybody who love and care about you, is saying this or making you feel this  is what you’re perpetuating. And it’s not true.”

For hip hop artist Rob Tremlett (Mantra), making space for his creative practice is a completely new challenge after parenthood.

Rob: So it often means leaving the house. It means leaving, going to a studio or means leaving and going somewhere where I can write or whatever. But that also means that I’m doing that outside of my other work hours. And I need my partner to be with him at that time. Or I need him to be with someone. And that can be the challenge because it’s like, if I’m already relying on my partner or someone else to be doing that while I’m doing other work stuff, it can be really hard to justify on top of that creating this space for strict artistic endeavour. Yeah, it can be a real challenge and a real juggle. Last year I made music a priority for myself. So I kind of purposefully stepped back from some of the other work that I was doing that was taking me away from my own music. But also not in a way that took me away from my responsibilities as a parent.

Susan:  And I also made a decision that it was important for the kids to learn independence really early. So they were walking themselves home from school when they were in grade two and grade four, like it was 900 metres, it wasn’t massive. But to foster them a bit of a sense of independence as early as possible.

Orchestral musician and business owner Susan Eldridge has always been conscious that her children need more from her than just her constant physical presence.  

Susan: What is actually really, truly important to them? And it’s seeing a parent who is confident in the fact that their work makes a difference in the world, who cares for themself and who is joyful. So they’re the things that I get to… if it’s baked beans on toast night, because I’ve got to go do a speech somewhere. Then I talked to the kids about it and always been clear talking to them about why I was absent and saying to them, “Look, this group of people I’m going to speak to, they need to hear about my work for this reason.”

And it’s a really great opportunity and I’m so lucky to have the opportunity to go speak to 200 people and to help those other people think about themselves differently. So talking to them about the absence and why it mattered and thinking about particularly for them as young men, what kind of partner would I want them to choose for themselves? And how would I want them to treat their female colleagues in the workplace? So setting them up to know that women are equal and they have working responsibilities. So it was also thinking about the bigger picture of how I want them to be as men in the world, emotionally open, engaged, connected to their creative self, empathetic.

I thought, well, okay, the odd baked beans on toast is a fine compromise to make for the compensations that we can have about these… How they’re going to thrive as men in a world with women as equal colleagues in the workspace.

When it comes to fitting in practice around her parenting duties, Susan has a simple yet elegant prioritisation process.

Susan: My bottom line is, are they going to die…or, no, so when they were little it was, are they going to die? Until they were about five. And then when they got to the age of five the decision was, is there blood or teeth on the floor? Well, if no, they’re just going to have to wait.
And to say that, to set some boundaries about them to say, look, if I’m practising, I need to practise, It’s going to take me one hour to do that. I’ve set you up with a bowl of crackers and cheese and you’ve got your Lego. And if you are bleeding or dying, come find me otherwise you keep yourself occupied for one hour. And sometimes Ally I’d be practising  and it was a bit like Breaking Bad. I’d have the pair of them at the glass doors, one of them’s got a set of safety goggles on, the other’s got a hammer, goodness knows what they were doing.

And it was really good training for performance because I had to ignore the idiocy going on the other side of the glass and focus on the musical story I was telling through the instrument. So it meant that when I got in front of an audience I was like, I’ve dealt with toddler’s people.
Like there’s not much you can do, that’s going to distract me from giving you a musical story at this moment in time. So I thought about it, about the reversing the application of the skills to better my benefit not to my detriment as well.

So parenthood doesn’t need to place limits on one’s creative career. But according to filmmaker and business owner Monica Davidson, the real damage can happen when parental guilt starts to drive your decision making.

Monica is all too familiar with this particular variety of self-sabotage.

Monica: that can be very, very confronting. You know, I’m a mum, I’ve got three kids, and they were my main self-sabotage methodology. I used them. I threw my children into the path of my own ambition and then blamed the fact that I was a mother for not pursuing the things that I wanted to pursue. I never made my children feel guilty. I didn’t go that far, but acknowledging the fact that my biggest methodology for sabotaging myself was my kids, that’s a tough place to go.

For Monica, it all came to a head when a feature film she was working on came to a critical moment in its production.

Monica: We had been doing a huge amount of crowdfunding to send me to America to film for three or four weeks with U.S crews in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. I was directing this film that was bigger than Ben Hur, a huge amount of logistics and time and money and energy had gone into making all this happen for me. And then about six weeks before I was due to leave, I decided to not go because it would make me a really bad mother, and that I was being selfish, and if I was a better mother, then what I should do is put my own ambitions on hold and look after my children. To be kind to myself, that is…you know, there’s very little kind of conversation out there about mums being allowed to just follow their dreams, and forget about the kids and just do your own thing, mums. It’s not really the message that we get as mums. You know, just do your own shit, kids will be fine.

I actually started going through the process of cancelling things before I actually stopped myself and realised.

Monica says that self-sabotage, and its cousin imposter syndrome, are best tackled head on, out loud, with the people around you.

Monica: Naming it and calling it and talking to people about it is one of the best ways of dealing with it, because these are two thoughts that become more toxic in the dark and in silence. If we can talk to each other about imposter syndrome or not being valued or not valuing ourselves, all the different ways that we sabotage ourselves, whether it’s creatively or professionally or personally or whatever, I think we’ll get better at it. We’ll get better at just going, oh, I see that none of that makes me a bad person. It’s all perfectly understandable, and now I’m going to choose to not do it anymore, or to have those feelings and then move past them.
So in that particular example, I told my children. I sat my children down and said, I’ve decided to not go to America because it would make me a bad mother. And they yelled at me, which was really not what I was expecting. I was actually expecting them to say, Oh, but mummy, we love you. Please don’t leave us. When my son, who really is the child I deserve, his first words were, oh my god, Mum, we were so looking forward to you not being here. Because mum going away for a month is like the best thing that ever happened when you’re 13, you know? And my oldest daughter, who will hate me telling you this story but I’m going to tell it anyway …. She is a creative practitioner now. She had every intention of becoming a creative practitioner at the time.

She said to me, you have to go. You have to go, because you are teaching me that I can be a creative person and follow my heart and chase my dreams and be a mum and be somebody’s partner. You are showing me that I can do all the things, so you have to go because you’re my role model. And I burst into tears. That was the kick up the ass that I needed. And again, I think with both imposter syndrome and self sabotage,, like I said, they flourish in the dark, but they are also quite self centred thought processes. And by sharing them with other people, you can get a bit of an idea about how that same circumstance could be perceived by different people. In this particular example, what I was perceiving as me being a selfish person, my daughter was perceiving it as the hero’s journey, and it was exactly the same story.

So when you’re juggling a creative career with a family life, it’s important to be able to see past feelings of guilt and make objective decisions about what’s really important to you and to your family. But this is often easier said than done, particularly when children are young.

Here’s more from Chris Cheers with the psychologist’s perspective of what kids really need from their parents.

Chris: Kids want stability, but that doesn’t mean that stability has to look like what the neighbours have. What kids need is a sense that things are going to stay like this, how they are, whatever is happening for us, that they have to have a sense of safety in the knowledge that that is how it’s going to be.
And things really fall apart when kids start to not feel safe. When kids start to not feel like they don’t know where things are going to go, where they’re going to be next week. So it doesn’t matter what the structures are within your family. It just has to be clear that that’s what they are and what they’ll be. And if artists can work to create that sense within that family, it can do a lot to provide a sense of safety and a sense of, I guess, connection for the whole family.

Chris says that if work takes a parent out of the family environment evenings and weekends, that parent should design a family routine where that time together is created somewhere else – even if it may seem unconventional to some.

Chris: It does mean about breaking down the sense of expectation on what the kids should be doing or where the kids should be and going, well what’s going to work for us right now? And maybe it does mean a kid has a morning off school for you and your kid to spend some time together. And even though according to many other kind of maybe structures or expectations that would be a horrible thing to do. It’s stepping outside and going I’m the parent. I get to decide what is right for us as a family.

Chris says that sometimes, prioritising what is best for the family can mean making decisions the kids might not be happy with, like limiting extra-curricular activities to allow for adequate family time. And these can be really difficult, but also really important decisions to make.  

Chris: I think one of the hardest things about being a parent is learning how to make decisions that cause distress for your child, because, you know, they’re the important decision and that’s something that’s really difficult to learn, but a really important thing that I think all parents learn over time.
And I think working in the arts can mean sometimes you’re making those decisions that the kids won’t understand that will cause distress and you have to be really clear in yourself about why you’re making those decisions and knowing that it’s not your job to keep your kids happy. It’s not your job to make sure they never cry because feelings happen and feelings are normal. It’s your job to go as parents or as a family, what works for us and then providing that the sense of security and safety to a child. And sometimes that’s about saying no to a kid or saying that this isn’t going to happen because this is our time to spend time together. And that’s really important that we do that.

The systems you make to support your family life might mean the ways in which you engage with your work change. As co-founder of the Australian Road Crew Association Ian Peel tells me, many roadies redesign their working life after parenthood.

Ian: A lot of people struggle with the family things, if they’re touring all the time it becomes really difficult. I’ve got mates they are touring all the time and then they’ll have a year off. So back to the family and then they go on tour for a couple of months then back with the family you know. But then there’s also a lot of people that are single because family life has just never been that important. They enjoy the touring round the planet more than having a family. Off you go. What are you doing? You are touring with the family. You know, we’re just all grown up kids.

So there are plenty of challenges for parents working in the performing arts. But all of the parents I interviewed said that, ultimately, parenthood has changed their relationship with their work for the better. Here’s Anne Wood.

Anne: It does give you a grounded-ness that I might not otherwise have had. Before I had a child, I would … sleeping until 10 o’clock in the morning was probably an early start. You don’t have that luxury when you’ve got a baby and everything started changing then, I guess. And I started to realise how indulgent all of that was.

I remember when my daughter was first born and I was having interactions with people in my local community. It felt like a completely new sensation. After years and years of touring, suddenly I was much more aware of … I was meeting new mums. I was at home for longer periods. I was walking around the neighbourhood. I was checking out childcare. Then it was kindergarten. And suddenly, I felt like I was meeting many more people from different walks of life. And it was pretty liberating.

For Deone Zanotto, returning to performing a year or so after the birth of her son, Hudson, reinforced for her an important part of her identify and self-worth outside of motherhood.  

Deone: I remember we were in tech. And I remember someone saying to me, “Dee, how are you doing this? You must be exhausted being here all day and then having Hudson at home.” And I was just like, “Oh friends, being at the theatre this is like a holiday.” This is I want to come to the theatre every single day. I love my son, but this is like a holiday. I’m actually speaking to adults, I’m having adult conversations. I’m back in my own person, I feel like I know myself again.
I think there’s such a big shift for women after they’ve had children and coming back to their identity, and realising who they are, and knowing your own value as a human, you’re not just a feeding machine, you can do so much more, but you start to lose sense of that. It’s really…it’s quite…it’s really quite crazy. But the best thing that I ever did jump back in the work pool.

Hip hop artist Rob says that becoming a father has made him more efficient in his creative practice.

Rob: Because the allocated time that you can give to it is more condensed. And so you’re like, “All right. Well, if it doesn’t happen now, it’s not going to happen.” So last year, like I said, I kind of made more space for my music and I got heaps done and it’s because I knew where the windows were to do it. And I knew the way in which I was able to kind of do it. And so I kind of just did it and I squeezed it into every moment that I could, without…y’know trying as hard as possible not to take myself away from him as a parent, but also not away from my partner like as a co-parent, but also as a friend and just making sure that I was available to the people that needed me most, but still making these… I don’t know, these allocated spaces for making the music and it was good.

Being outside of mainstream employment systems can impact the ways in which arts workers make the simplest of things work for them – like holidays. Proper breaks from work have long been recognised as vital for good mental health and wellbeing. And when I asked my interviewees how they create holiday time in their schedule, the response was pretty consistent. Laughter, generally.

Ian: What’s a holiday? Well, have we got a gig next week, no. Well, okay I guess I’ll have that week off.

Anne: I reckon holidays…People in the performing arts don’t always think about holidays.

For Anne Wood, the stage performer’s opportunity for a holiday exists somewhere after the next job is locked in, but before it actually starts.

Anne: Holidays is something that you take after you finished the auditioning process and you’ve been offered the contract and it’s in that little window of time before you start the contract. You leave the holiday as late as you possibly can, because the contract may be cancelled and the show may be cancelled. And you want to make sure that you’re going to be able to pay off the credit card once the show starts. I think that, to me, has always felt like what a holiday is. Crazy.

Chris: If you don’t have an organisation around you that is making sure you have holidays or making sure you need to do it for yourself.

Chris Cheers suggests that arts workers treat their allocated holiday time like a confirmed job.

Chris: And it’s in the calendar like a show. So if something else comes up, you have to consider, is that more important than time with my family? Because this it’s already in the calendar and it’s there. And it’s not just time with family, it could be a holiday for yourself or a holiday with friends but put it in the calendar and come at it with the intention like you would a two week run of an important show. Because it’s the same thing, you are putting your intention and your energy towards something that’s meaningful to you. You have to mindfully decide where to put your energy.

So for some arts workers, taking a break can require diligent forward planning. For others, like the road crew, a holiday is a more fluid thing. It’s about taking time out when and where you can get it – and making the most of it when it’s there.

Ian: When you’re travelling the world and you’ve got a couple of days off you just go somewhere. Travelling in Europe is just fantastic, got plenty of places to go… If you are going to do and do a tour of the States, touring the States can go for six months and you still haven’t done a place twice. The shows are so vast, but you’ll get days off amongst the tour. It’s about all you’ve got.

So the marginal nature of the arts industry means arts workers can’t rely on mainstream rules and systems for balancing their work life with their personal life. Indeed, many arts workers don’t even distinguish between the two as observed in the 2016 study Working in the Australian Entertainment Industry, which highlights the passion and commitment with which the study’s participants tend to approach their work. Some even refer to it as their calling in life.

So maybe this passion can fuel the courage creative workers need to write rules for their lives – their work, and their families – that work for them.

Here’s one last thought on the subject from psychologist Chris Cheers.

Chris: But it can be easy to get caught up in expectations and shoulds, what I should do in both aspects, both family and friends, as well as the arts industry and your job. And it’s often a continuous, I guess, holding up of those, the shoulds or the things you feel like you should be doing and trying to almost hold that out at a distance and go, “Well, what do I believe to be true here? What is important to me here?”

There’s so many choices all the time that you can get caught up in, unless you’re mindfully actually thinking about the idea that you do have a choice… The only thing you have left always is a choice to do what you want with your life and your behaviour.

Episode 11: PEOPLE

[Do you hang out together on your days off or are you sick of the sight of each other?]

Ian:  No we usually hang out together because you’ve got a good bond otherwise you wouldn’t be touring together. Because you’re a good bunch of people generally.

[What about when the tour ends is that a bit sad?]

Ian: No, not really. No, see you later, I’ll see you in a couple of weeks. I’m going home, don’t ring me, don’t even email me, I don’t want to know.

This is House Lights Up – honest conversations with professional performing arts workers about how they make working in the arts work for them.

It’s a widely accepted notion that a strong social network is a significant protective factor for both mental and physical health and wellbeing. Social epidemiology research out of the US, the UK and elsewhere has found that social isolation is a key risk factor for disease and even premature death.

So in this episode of House Lights Up we’re exploring social connectedness in the arts industry, including the benefits and pitfalls of the performing arts environment for maintaining social networks within and outside of the industry.

At the start of the episode you heard from Ian Peel – co-founder of the Australian Road Crew Association and long-time roadie. Ian tells me that going on tour as a member of the road crew was like travelling with your extended family.

Ian: We always got on, had a good time like it was a family. When I was working with Annie Lennox and Dave Stuart as The Tourists/ Eurythmics, we were just a family going on the road there was nothing else to it. We just had a laugh every day. So it was great people. As long as you’ve got good people to work with time is nothing, the gigs are nothing, the touring is nothing. You are all there to help each other out and talk to each other. So you’ve always got the support.

It’s a common notion, this idea of touring colleagues becoming like family to each other. It might be that the pressures of touring life are made manageable by this closeness among crew, creatives and cast mates. Here’s musical theatre performer Anne Wood.

Anne: I think when you’re doing a show, eight shows a week, definitely the people you’re working with can become your family. And when I first out it was definitely like that.  It can be incredibly supportive, because you’re all in the same boat. You all have the same pressures and you’re all having to bring a whole lot to the table at 7:30 every night.

Anne began her performing career in the original Melbourne production of Cats while she was studying science at university. Anne tells me that at that stage in her life, musical theatre gave her a sense of belonging that she hadn’t felt before.

Anne: The overriding feeling I think I had when I first started working in musicals was that I’d finally found my people. Because when I was doing science, I didn’t really feel like the people in that department were my people. And when I went to the opera studio, I didn’t really … I remember I had half of my head shaved and a long purple tail on the other side for quite a while. And most of the other people at the opera studio didn’t have hair like that. I just didn’t … I didn’t really feel like I fitted in anywhere until I went into Cats. And I thought … I can remember my big focus for the first few months that I was there was really organising the chook raffle and things like that. It was just so wonderful to be with people who all felt like misfits the way I did. And that’s been … That stayed with me for a long time, I think. Feeling this is my community. It made sense to me.

Stage performer Deone Zanotto spent a portion of her career in New York, where she says the geographical closeness of performing arts venues has helped to foster a distinctive camaraderie amongst the city’s arts workers.

Deone: When I was in New York, the community is very, very strong there. It’s such a condensed small area, like metric metres of show life and variety that’s going on. So, the family that you create … I have people in New York that I speak to weekly, and I love them. The bonds that I made when I was working in New York were, yeah, incredibly strong. It’s a real family feeling there when you’re working on Broadway for sure.

Choreographer and stage performer Cristina D’Agostino says that when she’s working on a show, she relies on the people around her to help keep her own performance fresh.

Cristina: An eight-show-a-week is… it’s interesting because for most of us, okay, so it’s the same work every day. But you want to create new work within the same work. Do you know what I mean? And so you need the people around you to bounce off of and to find new energy… because it can very easily become … I mean, it’s physically exhausting most of the time, emotionally and mentally. And that same kind of … And it’s not like it’s Groundhog Day at all, but you are delivering the same material every day. And you need the people around you to, like, this give and take and to challenge you and so that you’re always being challenged in your work, and it’s kind of… I like to feel like it’s a fresh experience every night. Partly, too, because the audience is seeing it for their first time. And you don’t want to get into this habit of it just becoming the regular. And that’s not why we do what we do as creative people as well. We need to feel inspired and we love to inspire others. So I think that journey as a cast is just the coolest thing. So the camaraderie is paramount.

For hip hop artist Rob Tremlett (Mantra), having a strong support network on tour with him has helped him work through tough times at home.

Rob: There’s been a number of times where, y’know, I’ve had some personal drama go down or I’ve been dealing with some family stuff or whatever while we’re on the road. And I have often in those circumstances found that as soon as I take that to the crew that I’m travelling with, the support is unconditional. I remember… one tour we did. It was a grind of a tour. We were coming to the end of the tour, I think. And during that tour, my grandfather got really, really sick and he ended up in hospital and we knew that it was getting close to the end for him.
So I was basically going and doing a weekend’s worth of shows wherever, and then coming back and spending a few days in and out of the hospital, visiting grandpa and holding it down with the family and helping out where I could.

And then, we knew that it was getting close and we were due to go to Brisbane and do a run of shows in Queensland, and I knew that he was going to die that day. Like I knew that that was going to happen.

And so the night before I’d been in the hospital with him late and I had kinda said my goodbye to him because we were all doing that. And then he passed away that morning and I was just like, I didn’t know what to do. And I called my dad and I was like, “Hey, I don’t know what to do here.” And he just said, “yo, you got to go do these shows. Grandpa knew you were there, you guys had said goodbye to each other and all that stuff”. He’s like, “if you feel like you need to be here, then be here. But this funeral is going to happen when you’re back and you got to go do these shows.” You know, my old man was a performer himself. So he knew about that life.

And I was like, okay, like I knew I had to go and do these shows, but I knew that I had just lost my grandfather and I felt awful. It was a huge weight on my shoulders, and now I’m off to the airport. I got the news and I’m leaving for the airport and I was on tour with some really, really close friends of mine, Grey Ghost my man, DJ Flagrant. And they knew what had happened. And they were like, Yo, let us take care of everything that we can so that you don’t have to be thinking about anything except your family and just doing your show tonight. So without people like that being willing to step in and help you out, you’d be lost in times like that.

The camaraderie and social connection many arts workers find within a cast or company or touring group is perhaps intensified by the finite nature of live performance. However long the run, the show always ends. Some of the performers I spoke to even said that their career has at times felt like just a series of endings. And that can be a melancholy experience – especially early on in a performing career. Here’s Christina D’Agostino on the importance of relishing those connections during, and after, a tour.

Cristina: So initially… because you are, you’re in this beautiful bubble, and you’re enjoying this time, and then it finishes. And I remember often feeling really bizarre and almost out of body in those weeks post the show where you’d feel like, “I should be somewhere,” or, “I just… I miss this person, I miss our connection. I miss …” And we’d often send messages going, “Shouldn’t we be at the warm up right now?” And it was quite difficult and I think being a bit younger and in my career initially, I did find it really hard. But what I have learned to do is to really try and savour as many moments as I can especially leading up to our closing. I’ve also told myself that the relationships that I’ve developed within a company don’t need to end. We can still keep in contact, we can still chat and reminisce, and we can enjoy a life outside of work just as wonderfully. So that I have done more. And I‘ve felt like that has also eased that jarring closure to what was. So it ended but it’s kind of still going.

Chris: There’s a real interesting intimacy, I think that happens with… if I think about especially performance or musicians.

Psychologist Chris Cheers has spent his career working with artists and producers to support mental health and wellbeing in the creative industries. Chris says that when it comes to social connection, as with so many things, arts workers should strive for balance.

Chris: There’s a really important cast intimacy say that happens on a show. That’s incredibly powerful social connection that is important for the show, important for the art, but I think it’s something a lot of performers need to be aware of the pull of that connection.

It can make it feel like the other connections in your life are more difficult or that it’s hard to connect with them, or maybe they’re just not as attractive, or crazy, or cool or this new. And what I guess you can work on is trying to find stability sexy, I guess, is one way to think about it. Try and find those connections to older friends and family as something that’s really beautiful and grounding.

In the 2016 report Working in the Australian Entertainment Industry researchers found that around 67% of the study’s participants found it difficult to maintain their social life. However, when it came to keeping in contact with friends within the industry, that figure dropped to around 45%.

That sense of belonging many arts workers can feel in their work, and the strength of the bond created by touring or other intensive work schedules, can contribute to this feeling that tending to social connections within the industry is just easier than maintaining those outside of it.

It’s a familiar story for Anne Wood.

Anne: I think, too, that it can be a bit of a trap where you start to think that this is the world. This is all there is. And this strange, slightly disconnected from the rest of the community world is actually the only place that you fit. And I don’t think that’s true now. I think it’s really important that we’re constantly looking around and finding other ways to connect with everybody.

Cristina: I feel like it is so easy to get immersed in this colourful, vibrant bubble. We’re just a body of people that are active and creative all the time. And it’s noisy and it’s this and it’s that and it’s just so wonderful. Colourful would be the way I would describe it. At the other end of that when the show stops it can be ever so jarring because it’s like if you pour everything into those people and then you kind of let go of the people who have always been there for you too, outside of the industry, all of a sudden your performing arts friends aren’t there anymore, and you kinda feel a little bit lost.

I would definitely advise any young performer going to the industry that you know what, this world is beautiful and it is made up of so many magical things. But you also need to hold on to your roots and be grounded and keep in contact with the people who have been in your life for a long time. Those people aren’t any less important to your life.

Maintaining a sense of social connection within and outside of the industry can come down to how well you manage your social time. As Chris Cheers explains, social time is a limited resource.

Chris: Sometimes you can feel like you have to tear yourself away from those after show drinks, and sometimes a task I get clients to think about is if you’re looking around the room after show drinks and you wouldn’t be too worried if any of those people left, then it’s probably okay for you to leave too. If you leaving might mean a better connection to other people, it’s about trying to weigh up… If your social time is really limited, make sure you’re spending it with the most meaningful and important people in your life. And it’s a real challenging balance, but I think a balance that can be found with effort and with a really mindful use of your social time.

Mindful use of social time is a skill that Anne Wood has cultivated over the course of her career.

Anne: I think it’s important when we’re doing a show that we don’t buy into the idea that we sleep until 10 in the morning and we do the show. And then after the show, we go out drinking or we go home and watch television until two o’clock in the morning and drink wine or even herbal tea. I think as soon as you buy into that, then we are limiting what’s possible for us the next day. We’re limiting our ability to get out there in the world and find out what’s going on and connect with people. It keeps us locked into the insular pattern that we can develop when we’re doing eight shows a week.

Hip hop artist Rob echoes this idea of performing life as a bit of a trap, and the importance of maintaining perspective and balance.

Rob:  A really easy trap to fall into is like your entire world just exists within this bubble of being an artist or being a performer. You know, if you are getting this form of therapy or this form of validation or this form of security from your expression as an artist, you need to have a world outside that because if that’s the only place where you’re getting those things, and then that thing isn’t possible for you anymore, that expression, that outlet isn’t available for whatever reason, you have to be able to be all right without it.
And that’s something that I had to learn the hard way, because my life as an artist changed dramatically over the last five years based on personal drama that was happening in my life. And some of the life changes that I had to make in order to be there for some of those people and to get myself through. I also became a parent during that time. So yeah, I wasn’t able to prioritise music.

Which meant those hard things that was going through. I had to deal with without that outlet. And that was really, really hard. It was really hard. I used to go on stage in front of 1,000 people and they would be my source of validation and therapy and support, and all of a sudden I don’t have that. I’ve got to deal with all this other stuff in the trenches of my life, and I don’t even have that to turn to.

So that was hard. But what it did was it showed me like, Yo, that stuff isn’t actually real at the end of the day. It’s beautiful and it’s brilliant and it’s meaningful. But it’s not the core of who you are. It’s not the essence of who you are and it can’t be. You have to be comfortable with who you are outside of that because that’s not always necessarily going to be there. And at the end of the day that form of validation, that form of support, it might be a reflection of who you are, but it’s not being given to the person you truly are because these people don’t know who you are only you know that, and the people around you in your personal life know that. So you got to get comfortable with people being there on a personal level without any of that extra stuff.

Chris: The beauty of the arts industry, I guess, and the arts is that it is different to the general systems of the world. That’s why we go to the theatre to see another world, to be part of another world.

Psychologist Chris Cheers tells me that the long and varied hours that arts work can entail often gets in the way of the rituals that keep us connected to our social circle outside of the industry.

Chris: But what that means for people who work in that world is they are in another world that doesn’t quite mesh when it comes to going to birthday parties, or going to family dinners, or just spending that time with their kids in the afternoon. And it can become a real issue to keep those connections with family and with friends, and to find the time to make those really important connections happen for people.

All of the performers I spoke to talked about the difficulties they’ve experienced in tending to their social connections outside of the industry while maintaining their creative career.  For some, this is a balance that has become easier over time and with practice. Here’s Anne Wood.

Anne: I think when you’re working at nighttime, there’s definitely less opportunity to connect with people. And so you have to make the time matter. You have to make sure when you are reaching out to people and you are spending time with people that it means something. That it’s real rather than superficial or a boozy night. I guess that used to be my idea of fun, but it’s not anymore.

 I think since I’ve gotten older, I have much more respect for my relationships with my blood family. And I also… I can see the joy that I get from my relationships with lots of other people too. And since becoming a mum as well, I feel very much more connected to my local community. So now when I’m doing a show, there is definitely that feeling of straddling the two worlds rather than being completely immersed in the community of the show when it’s just about us, one big insular party.

What do we actually mean when we talk about social connectedness? Researchers studying loneliness talk about the importance of an individual’s social needs being met by their relationships. So it’s not necessarily about having thousands of friends, but it’s about your social relationships fulfilling your particular needs.

And for many people, that means quality of connection is far more important than quantity.

Deone: Firstly, let me say, I am a social butterfly. I’m an extrovert. I love going to cast drinks. I love having lunch with people in between shows. I love all of that.

Stage performer Deone Zanotto’s social needs have evolved over time, and particularly after becoming a mum.

Deone: Now, that has changed dramatically when I had my son. Now that Hudson’s in the world, and… Yeah, I do leave the drinks early or skip them. That definitely has been a massive shift for me, I think, really hugely.

God, I’m going to sound old now. I think as you get older, you also realise that you don’t need a bazillion people in your life. You need really strong, good connections. I have lots of friends. I have a few really close, amazing friends. Those friends really know what happens to me when I do a show. They know that they probably won’t hear from me during the rehearsal period. That’s not going to happen, and then all of a sudden, when the show finishes, yeah, those connections are reinstated and they’re … The bonds are made closer because that’s just what they’ve known me to do for 30 years, I guess. But, yeah, I think you come to realise that you need less quantity and more quality in your life, so that becomes very important.

Cristina D’Agostino has accepted that having a creative career that she loves sometimes means missing out on social milestones.

Cristina: My friends and family have been so lovely and understanding throughout the years knowing that I can’t commit to everything. We’ve missed a lot of things that I wish that we hadn’t because of the industry that we live in and the unpredictability and the fact that, you know, your contract is here and our weekends… your weekends are gone. My friends now know that during a contract Monday nights are just the way it’s got to be. And that doesn’t always work out for them as well but it is what it is, but I’m lucky that everybody’s really understanding.

I asked Cristina how she deals with sometimes not being able to be part of the shared experience of her friends.

I’m a huge communicator and I advocate communication big time. So instead of feeling… instead of putting myself on and feeling like I’m on the outer, I’ll inquire about the night and I’ll ask, “How was it? What did you guys get up to?” So I almost feel like I’ve been involved because I got to know everything that happened that night. Because it is so easy to kind of go, “I didn’t make it. I lost that opportunity with all my mates.” I make a conscious effort to go, “Okay. What did you guys do? What happened? Who did this?” So that I feel like I’m a part of it, because it’s not their fault too, that I can’t make everything that I want to make. But I think that’s how I get through moments like that.

Rob tells me that it’s not just about missing out on the big events. The small ones matter too.

Rob: I think the ones that I used to feel the worst about was when someone would text me in the morning that I haven’t heard from in ages and say, “Hey, what are you doing today? Can we catch up? I really want to see you. Can we have lunch or can I bring the fam over?” Or whatever. And you’re in Townsville or something like that. And you’re like, Oh God dammit. I would give anything to be there with you right now. That sense of missing those moments that are maybe spontaneous even. That was always a real hard one for me.
Or when you get included into a group chat or something like that, and it’s like all your tightest homies that are like, “Hey, we’re all going to get together today. We’re all going to go hang out in the park and eat food and drink wine and whatever. Yo, Rob, are you in?” And it’s like, “No, because I’m in Aubrey and I’m about to perform for 20 people.”

So that stuff can be hard because it can be really challenging maintaining that contact and making sure you are accountable to those people. And you are responding to those people when you’re knee deep in that stuff. But at the same time, it’s kind of crucial that you do because, A, it’s going to keep you anchored to those people and those people who really care about you, but also it’s going to mean you’re not letting yourself just get absolutely consumed by this thing that probably doesn’t need to consume you to the amount you let it sometimes.

Sometimes your arts career can take you away from the most significant social connections in your life – those with your partner and, if you have them, your children.

Deone Zanotto and her partner, fellow stage performer Adam-Jon Fiorentino have had times in their relationship when they’ve been apart for their work. For Deone, it’s a matter of being able to adapt.

Deone: When I was doing a chorus line here in Australia, and Adam in LA, that was probably the longest we’d spent apart. It was quite a few months. He was doing a gig, he couldn’t come out, I definitely couldn’t fly out. Flying to LA is obviously so much different to flying interstate when we’ve been apart for a long time. After a few weeks, and it’s usually around the four-week mark for me, I definitely become very self-sufficient and I can cope really well with everything that’s going on, I don’t feel like I want to talk on the phone very long. It just becomes… Humans adapt really quickly.

Since having their son, Hudson, however, Deone’s tolerance for time away from the family has changed dramatically.

Deone: When we were first going out and we didn’t have Hudson, it was six-week rule. Definitely never any more than six weeks apart. And now I think about that and I go, “Oh my God, six weeks is a lifetime.” I couldn’t do that now. There is no way. It’s hard. Touring is really hard and I think it really can mess up your relationships. Most definitely, distance is hard, most definitely.

Deone tells me that honesty and open communication are the two biggest factors in maintaining a healthy relationship when you’re dealing with distance.

Deone: Especially even when it comes down to the very, very small things of saying, “I just don’t feel like talking today.” That, me saying that Adam can be like, “Oh, that’s cool. Let’s not talk today. Actually, let’s just… Call me tonight or call me tomorrow. That’s so cool.” But if I’m like, oh, you don’t even say the words, “I don’t feel like talking,” or you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, or you feel like you’re just not in that open place, then I think you can run into trouble.

So, definitely being honest, open communication, and having boundaries, and having boundaries that are realistic for your own relationship. And not modelling your relationship on anybody else’s because everybody is so different and everyone’s relationships are so different. I know people that talk to each other three times a day, and they’re good with that. I’d go bananas. No, that’s not for me. Let’s check-in in the morning and I’ll check-in at the end of the day with you when I feel like I’ve got something to say. Otherwise, it doesn’t work for us. Just, I think, not modelling on other people’s relationships is really important as well.

According to Deone there are also benefits to having a partner who understands first hand all of the challenges she faces as a performing arts worker.

Deone: There’s no explaining… there’s not much explaining when you’re depressed about a job, when you feel like you can’t get any auditions, when you… there’s no explaining that. With Adam and I, he’s like, “Dude, I get it.” Like, “I know where you’re at right now.” And I feel the same way with him. We both understand the ups and downs, the ups and downs.

At the start of the episode we heard roadie Ian Peel talking about the close bonds one tends to form with colleagues when touring.

Ian: When you go touring it’s a big family going on the road. You know you learn a lot of things when you’re young and stupid and going on the road with people.

Ian and fellow roadie Adrian Anderson formed the Australian Road Crew Association to help live production crew members maintain their social connections within the industry beyond their touring career.  

Ian: Well a long time ago in 2012 I was sitting down at Peter McKringle’s and I said, “What happened to all the old boys?” He’s gone, “What do you mean?” I said, “Where is everyone?” I said, “Let’s get a reunion together.

So in 2012 in November 25th we had a reunion with pre-1982 road crew, we ended up with 176 crew came from all over the world to catch up. This was down at St Kilda Bowls Club.

Some of them hadn’t seen each other for 30 years and they started talking as though they had only seen each other yesterday.
You could have run Melbourne on the love and the… we recognised then that there’s a lot of people that needed to communicate. And a year later we did one in Sydney as well. We had another 160 people turn up. They needed to catch up with their mates because all of a sudden they realised after 30 years they still had their mates from working days.

Then we started…ok, well, we need to make sure that these people keep in touch. And now they are still communicating to this day and helping each other out. And sort of people that didn’t like each other 30 years ago now like each other and talk to each other on a weekly basis or something. And that’s more important than anything. From doing that we stopped a lot of problems with people doing it hard and thinking they’re so disconnected from society and normal everyday life.

Ian tells me that members of live production teams have intense workloads, and they look to each other for support. When a career ends, however, that mechanism that connected you with your support network is suddenly gone. The Australian Road Crew Association aims to restore some of that.

Ian: It’s a very high powered industry. You are always working hard, long hours, lots of people. When all of a sudden you might have an accident, you’re completely disassociated with everyone, disconnected with the industry and you have no work. What do you do? People just go into their little holes and hibernate and become reclusive. So they lose contact with everyone.

So I suppose up until today we’ve had about 170 crew die and out of that’s 32 suicides. So we wanted to make sure that we stemmed that rate of suicides as well as make sure the communication is going to continue.

So we still continue to have reunions and it’s just a great day to catch up. And everyone nowadays talks about their families and stuff and what they’re doing and the kids and what the kids are doing and a lot of good memories. They all were able to remember what they contributed to the industry, so we thought it’s time that they actually got a bit of recognition and a bit of self-worth so they don’t just end up down in the dumps. So it was really important to keep that going, which is why we got the association together and just got everyone else included.

Since its formation, the activities of the Association have expanded from a reunion and communication network to connecting members with other support services, like the music industry crisis relief charity Support Act.

Ian: We’ll have people ring us up and go so and so is doing it hard. So we’ll ring up and go, “What are you doing, what do you need? ” We’ll all get together and go, how can we help them? Get them to Support Act and Support Act will help them out.

So that has been beneficial to a lot of people. Or we go and visit people in hospital or go and see them at home or just keep communicating with them. That’s how you can get over all these issues.

Ring somebody, go and visit them, go and help them do something. There are people that can’t do things. So you go and help them do something. Mow their lawns for them for a couple of times while their leg is getting better or something, you know? But it’s good that they’ve got that communication, if someone pops in, you know? “Hey, what’s happening? Brought a six pack! Yo!”.

By promoting proactive communication, The Australian Road Crew Association demonstrates the importance of social connection in preventing and addressing poor mental health.  

Ian: When your friends do things with you, you become a lot more calmer about what may be going on in your own head. If you’re in communication with someone quite often you’ll be able to pick up how they’re doing generally. And if you can talk about it, which is why we ring people. We are always ringing. “How are you going?” You know? And that’s more important than anything.

The arts industry is a people industry. Arts workers are intellectually, emotionally and socially invested in the work they produce. Strong social connections within the industry are vital to this production process. But adequate support networks outside of the industry are just as critical in maintaining balance, perspective and mental health and wellbeing during and after work hours. Here’s psychologist Chris Cheers again.

Chris: From work that we see in the idea of de-roling, but also like de-showing or de-touring, that when it comes to an end, a part of that is about finding your connection to your own identity again, especially if it’s been a really long show or really intense performance that you put a lot of yourself into. It can be really challenging to find yourself again after this, or find your sense of identity.And one of the main things we talk about is those connections to people outside the industry, people you’ve been friends with for years, they’re the ones that can often bring you home, bring that identity back.

So you have to make sure you’ve put the meaningful time in between that time to make sure those connections are there. Friends are forgiving, friends understand, but you also have to show some effort as well.

It’s about thinking about time in very alternate ways, like breakfast and brunches are the new places to really hang and have gorgeous meals. And tea is a beautiful way to catch up. Just because you can’t make the drinks or can’t make the way that may be many other people celebrate and connect doesn’t mean you can’t make the time for yourself in different ways.

So embrace your workmates, the show, the tour, and immerse yourself as much as your work requires. But keep one eye on something steady – on your life outside of your work, and invest in what you want that to look like when the tour finishes or the gig ends.

Here’s one last thought from hip hop artist Rob Tremlett on making the mundane sacred.   

Rob: That was something that became apparent to me was that increasingly I appreciated those normal uneventful moments, where you’re just hanging out and you’re having a cup of tea with someone at the dining table.

Because you get so accustomed to this dramatic and exciting lifestyle where you’re travelling all the time, you’re meeting hundreds of people every weekend. You’re performing in front of thousands of people. You’re kind of receiving this adulation and this support from thousands of strangers who are buying your music, they’re buying tickets to come and see you. They’re coming and getting stuff signed, and getting pictures with you.

It’s so easy to party as well. So you’re going out and you’re partying for free and you’re partying with heaps of fun people in these new fun places. It’s obviously not all like this. There’s a real boring and work-related aspect to it, but it is also just on all fronts, this constantly stimulating environment. And so coming back often feels like it comedown, because you’ve just had this amazing adventure essentially, and now you’re coming back and you’ve just got to be at home and doing your normal shit and just doing the dishes, doing the washing and sitting on the couch.

So it became increasingly important to me to actually lean into that normal lifestyle, because I realised that it was really beneficial to staying grounded. But I think I learned to appreciate it more as well, because it’s actually the stuff that can save you from getting lost in that other side of the lifestyle. It’s the stuff that can remind you, hey, that stuff’s really fun and really inspiring and really rewarding, but this is the stuff that is going to actually tell you who you are.

Episode 12: SELF-COMPASSION

Anne: I remember once in Mamma Mia singing the whole first verse of Super Trooper on my own in gobbledygook, like just making up random ridiculous words.

[And how do you recover from that?]

You just have to keep going, don’t you? And awful in a situation like that because of course, not only everyone on stage knows the words, but all the audience know the words as well. That was not a fine moment for me.

[Do you find it relatively easy to shake things like that off or are you someone who carries that sort of stuff with you to the next show?]

No, I couldn’t care less.

 [Really?]

I have a great sense that it’s live theatre, and I actually think when things go wrong, the audience really love it. They love it. I was there the night that that girl completely forgot her words.

[Part of the spectacle.]

I think it is part of the spectacle, and if you want it to be perfect every night, then rent the movie.

This is House Lights Up – honest conversations with professional performing arts workers about how they make working in the arts work for them.

Throughout this second season of House Lights Up we’ve looked at some of the particular sources of stress faced by those working in the arts and entertainment industries, and the cornerstone resources every arts worker can draw on, not just to meet those challenges, but to excel within and outside of a career that brings you joy, meaning and fulfilment.

A moment ago we heard from musical theatre actor Anne Wood, who makes a conscious effort to cultivate a positive relationship with herself.

Anne: I think being with myself is really trying to stay out of my head as much as I can, try to be as connected to my body as I be, and being really mindful of taking on board things that don’t have anything to do with me, and mindful of the way I create stress for myself, the way I get in my own way constantly.

Such an approach is especially useful for an arts worker, because – as we’ve seen throughout this series – there’s so much to contend with.  

There’s the innate fear of making mistakes. Of being exposed. Of being vulnerable. Work uncertainty. Financial uncertainty. Preparation. Repetition. Competition. Self-doubt. Self-sabotage. Imposter syndrome. Performance anxiety. Judgement. Criticism.

There’s the deadline-driven nature of live performance, where the clock is always ticking down to curtain up. And on the flipside of that – the quiet periods of underemployment, spent wondering where the next job will come from.

As psychologist Chris Cheers points out – there’s an uncertainty that permeates the industry.

Chris: Unfortunately I guess one thing that does run through so many parts of the arts industry, whether you’re a musician, or a performer, or an actor, or a visual artist is that sense of instability. And how that I guess, runs through in the lack of, I guess, a grounding to so many aspects of your life that some people may take for granted to knowing how are you going to get the food on the table in a couple of months, or pay rent in a few weeks. So that constant search for the next job and that constant wondering where that’s going to come really creates that instability.

All of this culminates in what can be a high stress environment. Sounds terrible – right?

But maybe we should take a moment to consider stress more closely. We know that stress is a human response to a challenging or dangerous situation, and in small amount can be very useful – increasing motivation and improving performance by sharpening our awareness and increasing our energy levels.

But we also know that chronic stress can cause a range of mental and physical health issues. So often we talk about stress and anxiety as states that should be avoided, or feelings that we need to get rid of as soon as they occur.

But as Chris Cheers explains that shouldn’t necessarily always be the case.

Chris: There’s a story at the beginning of Last Connections, a book by Johann Hari, where he talks about being in, I think it’s Cambodia, and he starts having an incredible pain in his stomach and it just won’t go away. It feels like he’s going to die kind of intense level of pain and goes to see a doctor there and he said, give me all the drugs, get rid of this pain, I just want it to go. The doctor goes, ” No. Let me examine you.” He just wants him to get rid of the pain. And then the doctors says, “No, we need to examine the pain because following the pain, will find the cause.”

Sometimes when we start talking about stress or anxiety, we start talking about as something we have to try and get rid of, and we have to learn how to get rid of it. Being stressed or being anxious, isn’t something you have to get rid of. It’s something we can really listen to and give it a give meaning to understand what it’s trying to communicate to us about ourselves or about our environment. What the key is, is trying to learn strategies, to accept and allow space for emotions as a normal thing that will come up as you try and do something that’s important to you.

So to end this series of House Lights Up we’re considering different strategies our interviewees use to manage stress and anxiety in their work, with particular regard for a bedrock quality that can help construct a safe and productive frame through which to view your struggles, your achievements, your worth, and your whole self-concept, really. Namely, self-compassion.

Something that resonated throughout all of my conversations for this series of House Lights Up was the difference that kindness and compassion for oneself can make when we reflect on our past experiences, and our future career expectations. This involves approaching these reflections with balance, perspective and openness.

An obvious example is when arts workers reflect on things they might have done wrong in their work.

Early on in her career, performer and choreographer Cristina D’Agostino took a pretty hard line with herself when assessing her own performance.  

Cristina: So, say, I finished the show. Straight away there’d be a list of things that I stuffed up or that I didn’t do the best that I could have. I would go home with that, I would probably ring my folks, maybe even have like a bit of a cry over how much I had not done the best that I could. And I would take it home for the rest of the night and probably dwell on it the next day. And I found over the years that I needed to change that process because it wasn’t feeding me anything. And it wasn’t feeding anybody else anything. And it meant too, that when I went on for that role, again, that I was harbouring some of that fear.

And I did learn pretty quickly that, and this is my process now, I always make sure I acknowledge the things that I could have done better and I make a note of them. And so I make sure that for the next time I’m aware of those and I try and I communicate with my colleagues to see how could I have done this better. Help me out so that I’m not just keeping it all inside I’m actually communicating it. And then I feel like it’s achievable and there’s more of a positive kind of future experience for it. But I make sure I acknowledge it, but I let it go.
And I make a conscious decision to go, “Okay, that was the past. It’s not my present now and it won’t be my future.”

I’ve also really tried to change the mindset that it’s actually really cool to make mistakes, because you can actually learn some really great things from it. And I’ve gained some skills that I probably could only have gained through making those mistakes and I think this has been one of them.

Fear of failure is a common source of stress for performing artists, whose work so often involves being exposed to judgement and criticism. And as we heard in series one of House Lights Up, the harshest judgement often comes from within.

Orchestral musician Susan Eldridge has learned the hard way how to move beyond past disappointments.

Susan: And I actually failed my music degree the first time I went for it, which is not a non-uncommon thing to happen, but it’s unspoken about. And it’s certainly something that carries a huge degree of shame. So I failed, and by all measures at which we still value music graduates, which is technical competency on your instrument, I was a pretty major failure to everybody. Because I was okay, but I wasn’t great on the French horn after four years of a bachelor of music degree.

So the whole experience had actually crushed any sense I had that I had a creative voice that was useful, and I left. I left music altogether. I just felt like I’d embarrassed myself. I’d let down everyone who invested in me, and I was never going to win a job playing French horn in an orchestra, which is the only thing that had ever been on a poster with the word “musician” on it that I’d ever seen. And I just thought, “Well, if I’m not going to do that, I can’t be a musician.” Like there’s no other model for this, what it means to be a musician. So I left music and went and had a business career, as, you know, fits everyone who holds a bachelor of music degree. And in fact, I had to flee the country.

It was a time in Susan’s life when her capacity for self-compassion was put to an extreme test.

The shame and the humiliation was so bad that I couldn’t even, I couldn’t be here anymore. Because everything, everywhere I turned, was just a reminder of the life that I should have been able to craft, of winning a job in an orchestra, that I didn’t.
So I went overseas and ended up bootstrapping a tech consulting company.
So that’s what I went and did for a while. And I hid from music. I didn’t tell anyone I was a musician. So I kind of hid away in business for a while, and then came back to Australia.

And really, the psychological distress was too much to cope with anymore of this shame and humiliation. And I ended up living back in the city where I’d trained and did my music degree. And it’s a small town, I kept bumping into people.
And I just thought, “Well, maybe I could… maybe I don’t need to own the story about humiliation and shame. Maybe I could take this and write a new story for myself about what kind of creative capacity I have.”

So after 16 years in hiding from music, Susan took control of her story, returning to the French horn and obtaining the achievements that had felt so far out of reach all those years earlier. Today, part of Susan’s work is directed at promoting innovation in classical music education, including introducing training in skills like entrepreneurship and enterprise creation into the tertiary music syllabus. And Susan tells me that it’s pretty common for people working in this field to have come through some kind of professional struggle.

Susan: The people that are the forefront of this conversation around innovating the training of musicians… there’s a cluster of women that I know that are working in this space. And all of us have been crushed by music. Walked away, trained or had a practice or craft doing something else. And been unable to resist the call to come back to help others have a different story. So there’s quite a few of us in this space who are coming at it from a place of having been damaged, but the commitment to others not having that experience being the driving factor in keeping us in the game.

Chris: I think that’s an important kind of focus to have in any conversations about stress and anxiety that we can’t get rid of. It’s a normal part of life. And often it comes up even more when you’re doing something that’s important to you. If you don’t allow space to examine your emotions and understand what they might be telling you, you’re not going to know the changes you need to make in your life to make it meaningful and to make it work for you. So I think the focus needs to be on – what are the strategies you use that change your relationship with stress and anxiety? So you can have it and it can be there while you live the life you’re wanting to live.

And the great outcome of that is, often the dysfunction in life from mental health is often not about the emotion you’re having. It’s often about your wish that that wasn’t there. That you’re anxious and that you’re anxious about the fact you’re anxious and then you’re angry that you had a panic attack and that you’re guilty that you got anxious or you get angry and then you feel guilty about your anger. And often it’s our want to control and get rid of emotions that is the thing that’s stopping us from living a meaningful life. And if we just actually examine the first bit, giving them space and understanding them, it can make a big difference in our ability to engage with life and the people around us.

So how can we allow space for our emotions without letting stress and anxiety take charge of our lives?

Everyone I spoke to had their own approach – some are formal practices of things like meditation and mindfulness. Others use less formal but no less deliberate tactics they’ve cultivated over time, with effort and experience. For Anne Wood, it has involved developing an awareness of how she uses a precious, finite resource – her own physical, mental and emotional energy. 

Anne: A couple of years ago, I was doing the tour of Beautiful – The Carol King Musical, and I’ve been teaching for a couple of years. I teach three days a week in a high school, and the school were very happy for me to go. They’re really fantastic, and they let me out when I’m doing performing gigs. And when we came back to Melbourne with the show, I thought I would like to try teaching at the school during the day, a couple of days a week, and doing the show at nighttime. I didn’t have a big role in the show. So I thought that maybe it was possible for me to do that.

And the first couple of days that I tried it, I was absolutely exhausted driving into the theatre at the end of the teaching day, thinking, “Oh my God, how am I going to do the show?” I had no idea. So I really started looking at the way I use energy during the day, the way I take on stress, absolutely needlessly. Just driving a little bit too fast, leaving the house just a few minutes later than I should have so that I would be rushing to get to work on time.

Even, even just standing in the queue for a sandwich or at the bank, I could feel that was an opportunity for me to take a bit of tension on in my body, and get a bit cross, and tapping my watch, and little tiny things throughout the day really adding up. The way I walked around the school too quickly because I was in a hurry or for whatever reason. And so when I started looking at those little things, those little stresses, and letting them go, I found that I was able to do that. I could teach during the day, and then going to work, and still feel ready to work, and be able to drive calmly home. Because my focus is being able to get out of the car and go straight to bed via the toothbrush. I watch the way I drive home. I used to … I remember when I first started, I would pride myself on getting to the car park before the audience did. I might still have a bit of makeup behind my ears, but I would be … That to me was part of the game. The frisson of the end of the show would be an absolute mad pelt, a sprint to the car park and then pulling out a thousand miles an hour and driving home just over the speed limit. And now I really try to take some joy in just taking my time and then maybe connecting with some audience members on the way to the car. And then driving sedately home and enjoying the quiet streets in the nighttime.

Anne tells me that this experiment of teaching during the day, and performing at night showed her just how much of her daily life she spent operating in top gear. These days, Anne is highly selective about what she takes on board, and what she chooses to let go of.

Anne: If I let myself look back on some shows that I’ve done, and some things that I’ve done within those shows, some things that I might’ve… that I’ve reacted to, or taken on board, I cringe a bit sometimes. And I know that sometimes a show can become so all consuming in your life that suddenly little things that are going on, that in the normal scheme of things you wouldn’t even notice, suddenly become massive. And it’s… I would like to think that I’m not like that now, that maybe I’ve grown out of that, and that I’m much better at being less reactive.

I think that’s something that I’ve gotten good at over the years. Certainly when I was younger, I would be mad about a whole lot of things that had nothing to do with me and a whole lot of things that I could do nothing about. So I’ve learned over the years to let go of all that stuff that is actually beyond my control, and really try to focus on the things that deserve my investment, I guess.

As a creative career advances, the stressors arts workers face can change significantly. Initial naivety is replaced by experience, and as early challenges are overcome, new tests can present themselves.

Hip hop artist Rob Tremlett (Mantra) tells me that as a performer’s profile increases, new opportunity to create space for one’s artistic practice brings with it new pressure to deliver a certain standard of work.

Rob: I think in those early days I was a lot more confident because it just didn’t feel like there was anything to lose. I didn’t even have any kind of inkling that I was going to be able to do this for a living back then. So we’d be backstage smashing beers, and then go on the stage and rip a show and just have a great time on stage. And it would be fine because you’re confident in that way. There’s no way I would even dream of doing that now. I will hardly even touch a drink before I go on stage these days because it’s like, Yo, I want to be delivering to the highest possible standard. And also to a crowd that knows me as an artist and knows my work, has probably seen me perform numerous times before and has this kind of expectation. So there is a different pressure that comes with that.
But like I was saying that added pressure is also going hand in hand with that added opportunity to invest more time into your performance, into your rehearsal and into your stage craft, into your stage show.

Rob tells me that as his life has changed, and especially after parenthood, he’s had to be careful of how much he expects of himself in his creative practice. 

Rob: Something that you’ve kind of got to learn when you’re doing stuff like parenting and trying to be an artist, or just trying to do anything as a parent. One thing it does teach you is you got to be a little bit gentle with yourself and the expectations you put on yourself because you got to remember that your biggest priority is always going to be your kids, and that means that you have to be willing to accept not being as productive or as efficient or as effective in your work as you were before. Or maybe not having as much time to yourself to do the things that you valued in your own life before, but that’s okay.
That’s just a kind of necessary by-product of being a parent, you just got to be ready to let go of some of that stuff… not permanently and maybe not always, but you just got to understand you’re not going to get as much shit done during the day. And I think that’s something I had to learn as well.

I was kind of getting real frustrated and I would often get impatient because I’d be like, “Man, all of this stuff that I’m trying to do, I could have got it done in two hours, but it’s taken me two days to get to it all. And it’s like, yeah, but that’s because you were doing more important stuff and it doesn’t necessarily feel more important because it’s like reading a book with your son, but that is the more important shit that you need to be doing.
And so I think you got to be, though, just gentle and understanding with yourself and you got to forgive yourself for not getting that stuff done because there’s a good reason for it. And by putting that pressure on yourself to always be achieving those things and be that productive kind of prolific creative person or whatever, you can kind of do yourself more damage, emotionally, psychologically, but also creatively.

As we heard earlier from psychologist Chris Cheers, the arts industry is characterised by instability, as is well illustrated in the role of the understudy. Cristina D’Agostino has understudied a lot in her career – and she says that navigating these particular challenges was a lesson in self-compassion .

Cristina: Being a young performer and having to cover like four or five people it can be quite stressful. But I have found in working through it how to find a balance between enjoying it, letting the adrenaline work for me, and not coming down too hard on myself for making mistakes, and things like that. So if I could have told myself back then, I would definitely say, “You need to relax on how hard you are on yourself”. If you go on for the first time for a role, and you don’t get everything right … You do need to help create a balance for yourself. To go, “You know what, I can just let that go. I did what I could.” Because you want to go into every process with an open and positive outlook. If you’re already beating yourself up for the things that you think you might do wrong, it just doesn’t help. And it doesn’t help the people around you on stage either. They’re wanting to be giving and open, and if you’ve got a closed mindset, you won’t see all the beautiful things that they’re doing for you to help and guide you on the stage.

To help manage the stress-inducing uncertainty they face in their work, psychologist Chris Cheers encourages arts workers to focus on creating a sense of stability and groundedness in other areas of their lives.

Chris: So whether that be keeping up some sense of yoga practise, or mindful practise, or just seeing those old friends regularly, or just having a phone conversation with people that are outside of the industry. You need to find ways to find stability in those other aspects of your life that even though they feel like they’re not there, with effort they can be there and those connections can be made.
And I think the more, I guess, sense of stability and groundedness that you find in those other aspects can really make a difference to your ability to deal with the stresses or the anxieties of the ever changing nature of the arts industry.

Deone: …It might’ve been my second gig, which was Chicago… I was swinging the show. So of course that involved knowing a lot of the different girls’ plots. And also I was understudying Caroline O’Connor. So I was understudying Velma, and it was my first gig doing that. And yeah, it was mega, mega stressful.

For musical theatre performer Deone Zanotto, early swing gigs were some of the most stressful of her career.

Deone: Just trying to remember all those things, trying to feel confident in doing that. I would go to bed at night looking at my phone. I would wake up first thing in the morning looking at my phone. I would worry about what I was going to eat in between shows in case I was thrown on mid-show, and that happened a lot. So I found it incredibly stressful.

The prospect of taking on more jobs like this prompted Deone to get active about how she manages stress in her life.

When I moved to New York, I got offered a job in a Chorus Line on Broadway, and it was a swing position. And I nearly turned it down, because I just did not… I thought, “I don’t know if I can get through this. I’m not sure if I…” I was willing to give up a job on Broadway because I didn’t know if mentally I would be able to cope with it. And I was beside myself. But I decided to learn how to meditate, and a specific kind of meditation, transcendence meditation. And it honestly, it was the key for me.

It enabled me breathing space, and it enabled me to not be a basket case when I was at work, and also at home. I think my boyfriend, my now husband, at the time can vouch for that, for sure. He was worried about me taking on the job, because it was… understudying, swinging in a chorus line is like covering four lead roles, plus all the cut dancers.
So it’s a lot. But yeah, I started meditating before I did that gig, a couple of weeks before, and it just gave me perspective. It gave me breathing space. It gave me responding time, more than reaction time. It gave me energy and just a different belief system in myself. So from that point, life really took a different turn for me.

Deone tells me that establishing a formal meditation practice was the circuit breaker for what had until then been a dysfunctional relationship with stress.

Deone: I can literally transport myself back to swinging on Chicago, and I definitely used to internalise my stress. So I would get, you know, stomach ache, like bad cramps, and the nausea was very real. And I think at night I would… I’m surprised I have any teeth left from teeth grinding, and lots of jaw problems from that.

And definitely all the physical things that come from that. I think I had a few digestive problems, and I couldn’t even really research them and find out what they were. It wasn’t until much, much later that I worked out what was going on with my digestive system. And yeah, my nervous system. It was shot. My sleep… I was not a good sleeper then. Yeah, I would stay up late, but I’d also get up early. So I would probably average about four to five hours. Five hours, probably, a night.

Just also realising, and I don’t think I knew this at the time, but how much of my life I wasn’t being present. I just was worrying about either what I was going to do and how I was going to do it, and also what I had done and what I could fix. I was not living in the moment as much as I could be. I spent so much time reflecting or worrying. That’s my biggest thing I can look back and see. Yeah, that’s how it was before I had a practise. I wish someone had given me that practise back when I was in Chicago. It was the, yeah, that lifeline.

A key component of self-compassion is being able to effortfully direct your attention to where it will be most useful to you. So if you feel that you’ve underperformed at something, it’s about not allowing yourself to ruminate on the feeling of failure, but instead taking only what is useful to you away from the experience.

Broadly termed mindfulness, this deliberate directing of attention is a skill that can be learned, as Chris Cheers explains.

Chris: There’s a million ways to practise mindfulness, but I think the important thing to always know with is mindfulness is the ability to move your attention effortfully to wherever you want it to be. I talk clients about practising everyday mindfulness. So what you can look at is how do you incorporate mindfulness into your every day. And it’s just about effortfully choosing to really attend to whatever it is that you’re doing with your every day.

So rituals become incredibly important to move your mind away from the job you’ve done to another place. And if it’s something that you enjoy, that’s going to be easier to, whether it be tea, to wine, to some beautiful chocolate, to… I always talk to clients about whatever it is you choose to make your mindful moment, put your money to it, make it the best thing you can do because that’s where you should be effortfully putting your attention, so make it as beautiful experience as you can. I’m a big fan of a mindful shower. And what that means is I can buy expensive shower gels, and shampoos, and all the things to make that shower really pleasant experience. It’s something I’m going to do every day, why don’t I make it good? But I have to really attend to the water, attend to the smells, attend to everything.

And what we’re doing when we practise any sort of everyday mindfulness is we’re building that skill to be able to move our attention away from our thoughts to the thing that’s important to us or to something else.
And the more you practise that, whether it be through an app or through a mindful glass of wine, whatever the thing is, you’re practising that skill, so hopefully when you’re faced with these decisions or you’re faced with these things where you need to be self aware, you have that ability to go, “Hang on. I can mindfully do this. I can move my attention away from my thoughts and choose to behave in whatever way is important to me or meaningful to me, rather than whatever my thoughts are telling me to do, or whatever the expectation feels like it’s telling me to do.”

Anne Wood tells me that while the repetitive nature of musical theatre work can weary many arts workers, she now sees it as an opportunity to practice mindfulness as part of her every day.  

Anne: I think one of the things that can really weigh on people when they’re doing eight shows a week is the repetition. How monotonous it can be and how challenging it can be to actually bring something fresh to the show every night or really stay connected with the show. And I feel nowadays that it’s a great opportunity. Because the repetition just doesn’t happen on stage. It’s not just that you’re standing in the same place, saying the same thing to the same person as you did last night and the night before. It’s also repetitious backstage. Because you have a track backstage, you’re always going to a dressing room at the same time. You’re always going to the quick change at the same time. You’re always waiting in the wing at the same time. And therefore, you are passing people, the same people at the same time. And that’s not just the cast. That’s the dozens and dozens of people who work backstage.
It’s not only just about what’s happening on stage, but there’s opportunities at every moment, every single night for you to connect with people differently or more deeply. Or have a different experience in your track backstage. And I often have a lot of fun with that. Playing around with what my energy feels like, what my body feels like, how I’m preparing mentally, what’s coming into my head to try and sabotage how I’m feeling. All those things I play with backstage in my little track. And I’m coming across the same people and loving connecting with people backstage. I think that we forget sometimes that there’s that opportunity for us to leave our problems and to just be present in the moment.

It’s an opportunity on a different level personally where we can use that time to watch the way we connect with people, watch the way we connect with ourselves, listen to self-talk, all sorts of little ways that we can be watching ourselves I guess, and the world.

It does take focus and sensitivity, and it doesn’t happen all the time. Some days I’m better at it than other days. Some days it’s just about being really gentle on myself because actually I’m really tired. So recognising that it’s an important time to look after ourselves just getting through the day.

Mindfulness and self-compassion have an important role to play beyond stress management when we consider all of the ways creative practitioners tend to undermine themselves.

Say for instance, in combatting self-sabotage and imposter syndrome.

Monica: Oh god, it’s a constant conversation here, because again, there’s 14 people who work here and we’re all creative practitioners. So we’re all practising self sabotage and imposter syndrome on a daily basis.

Monica Davidson is a writer, filmmaker and founder of Creative Plus Business – a social enterprise dedicated to empowering creative practitioners to take control of their careers. Self-sabotage is of particular interest to Monica as it’s a common way in which arts workers tend to undermine their own career ambitions.  

Monica: The important thing to remember about self sabotage is that you won’t necessarily stop doing it. Self sabotage is just a part of being a human being. It’s not about stopping it. It’s about recognising it, and recognising the cause and effect of, I feel like I’m now enacting behaviours that are going to make it difficult or impossible for me to get the thing that I decided that I wanted. Why am I doing that? And just being a little bit more self aware. Just to be a bit more mindful of it. And that can be very, very confronting.

Monica says that self-sabotage and imposter syndrome are so prevalent in the industry that business coaching conversations with clients often stray into this complicated territory.

It will happen with clients, and I’ll say, I feel that you are already very successful and I’m not entirely sure how I can be helpful to you, because you have a BAFTA and I don’t. And then of course, what they’ll usually say is, “well, I’m full of shit because I don’t even know why I’ve got a BAFTA”. And then we can have a conversation about it, and then it’s fine.
So there are always ways around these things, and I’m using the word around on purpose. We can’t fix them. There’s not nothing to be fixed. It’d be like saying we’re going to fix being human. And really, as creatives, we have to be even more human than most humans, because we not only have to have our own human feelings and emotions, but we also have to capture other people’s and communicate them on a wider canvas in some way. So we’ve got this big kind of human responsibility. So we’re not going to stop doing these things. We just have to think a little bit more strategically about it, you know.

While we’re on the topic of self-sabotage… Let’s think about why owning our achievements in the arts often feels so unnatural.

Arts workers consider – how many times have you found yourself in the midst of an experience on the stage or on tour, or in the connections you form with colleagues or an audience – and thought to yourself how lucky you are to be working in this industry?

There’s something about live performance that inclines many to view a position on or behind the stage as a matter of good fortune. While gratitude is undoubtedly an admirable quality, it’s worth reflecting on the detrimental effects that become possible when feelings of gratitude prevent us from taking ownership of our achievements. As Anne Wood points out, arts workers need to champion their professional achievements as the product of their own hard work.

Anne: I think that if we hang on to the idea of being lucky to be working in the performing arts, then there’s a huge opportunity there that we might be underselling ourselves and that we might be not valuing ourselves to a high enough degree.

Cristina: I felt that my entire career that you’re really lucky to get this because a few and far between these shows as well, so…

Cristina D’Agostino tells me that the sense of being lucky to be in work is even more deeply ingrained by the relatives scarcity of jobs in Australia compared to places like the US and the UK.

Cristina: We’re not blessed with having so many shows coming up all the time and you get one and yeah, you’re lucky, but you’ve really earned your place as well because you’re hungry for it. You’ve worked hard for it. That’s a huge point and I think one thing that if I was to ever offer any advice to a younger performer to say you need to be gracious, you need to stay grounded, but you need to also be aware that you’re there because you deserve to be there. And you’ve worked really hard for it, too. So own your space.

Susan: So I think if you asked a plumber or an electrician, do they think they’re lucky to do their job? They would probably say, “No, I trained really well. I’m really smart in the way I manage my business, my business solves a problem and meets a need for people. And so I deserve to be compensated properly.”

Susan Eldridge urges arts workers to take  a more business-minded view when they reflect on their achievements.

Okay. So when I speak to a lot of performing artists I say, “Well, let’s harness your inner plumber. That the work you do makes a difference for others.” And you can feel a sense of gratitude, but this idea of luck had nothing to do with it. You didn’t trip over and wake up with the musical theatre competency on stage that you have all your screenwriting ability, right?
It’s training, it’s training for decades. And it’s a massive investment of resources to get us to a point where we can work professionally.

So we work hard, we’re not lucky. Luck is where opportunity and preparation meet.

Chris: There is that sense about luck that is problematic.

Psychologist Chris Cheers sees this notion of luck as one part of a broader performing arts mythology which contributes to the challenging nature of this particular working environment.  

I think any kind of mythical ideas around the arts can be really problematic because they’re not based in reality. When you get the role or you’re in the industry, you try and find a place to go, “I worked for this. Element of this were outside of my control, but a whole lot of this I worked for and I’m proud of that work. And my value is not in the fact I got this role, my value is in that work that I did for all those years to make this happen.”

In an industry that can have many obstacles for its workers, there’s no quick fix that will see you through. The key might be creating an environment in which you can feel safe and supported to learn the lessons without being devastated by the experience. Self-compassion will go a long way to creating that soft landing space.

As Chris Cheers notes, there’s a role for the industry to play, too, in creating this environment where arts workers can safely learn from their experiences.

Chris: I love to be able to just tell every 18-year old all the secrets of life and then they’re going to be fine. There’s something about what environment you can create for people to learn those lessons in a supportive way. You can’t teach anyone anything, they’ve got to learn it themselves, but you can focus on providing an environment that allows for that growth and allows someone to feel safe to make those mistakes, so to speak. So I think as an industry as a whole, it’s about examining structures that support and allow people to honestly and authentically talk about the issues, and then talk about what’s happening for them.

There is no roadmap to a creative career. Working in the arts means finding your own way through a unique industry.

Cristina: We’re just a body of people that are active and creative all the time and it’s noisy and it’s just so wonderful.

Rob: You’re travelling all the time, you’re meeting hundreds of people every weekend. You’re performing in front of thousands of people.  it can be a heady lifestyle

Anne: There are a lot of romanticised beliefs around the performing arts that aren’t true.

Ian: Then you find out that the life of a roadie is not sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. It’s just bust your arse all the time.

Chris: This is an industry that is an agitator and it does act against the system. That’s kind of the whole point of a lot of arts.

Deone: I’m a sucker for a good applause. And I love live theatre. I really do.

The qualities we’ve explored in this series of House Lights Up – insight, adaptability, experience, courage, social connectedness and self-compassion – are key in creating a career that is meaningful, and nourishes the other parts of your life. We all have these qualities to varying degrees already – our job as arts workers is to learn to harness them as resources that support our working lives.

Here are some last thoughts from psychologist Chris Cheers and stage performer Deone Zanotto on the importance of what we value, and who we celebrate as symbols of the arts industry.

Chris: The ultimate artists in history is the van Gogh, or the one that is deranged or whatever. That their creativity comes from that torment and comes from that torture is a really unhelpful, I think, narrative to apply to the arts.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to have an industry where the person that held on the pedestal is the one that does yoga, goes home and sleeps well every night, comes really prepared for everything? Rather than what’s often held on the pedestal is the one that is able to get drunk and still wake up the next morning and do a show or turns up and hasn’t prepared, but does this incredible performance like magic.
These mythical ideas really detract from the reality of the situation, which is this is work and it is hard work, and you can become better in that work if you work harder. You’re not just lucky and it’s not magic.

Deone: I think the industry definitely attracts…I think there’s two different things. There’s passion, and there’s pain. I think a lot of us in the industry think that we need the pain to have all of this. We need the pain to be passionate. We don’t. That is absolute bullshit. When people are so, so passionate and they don’t have the pain, there’s even more room for creativity. I think there’s more space for colour.

Sometimes we can feel like we need the excuse. “It’s the pain that’s making me do this.” Okay, well, let’s get rid of the pain. Like, are you ready to let that go? Are you ready to get rid of it? Are you ready to just have, amazingly, that passion without all of that extra stuff? It is absolutely possible.