The Great Acting Blog: “Control All The Steps Of Your Career”
In a recent article, Laura Lindsay, an actress, tells the familiar tale of how a lack of opportunities lead her to form her own theatre company and produce her own play, and so re-claim control over her career. I am of course an advocate of actors being self-reliant, of seizing power over their work, of being so much more than someone who just waits around until an audition comes along. The benefits of self-determination are myriad, not least because it means doing exactly the kind of work you want, when you want to do it.
However, the danger of trying to strike out on your own, is that you inadvertently put yourself back into the mix of those hoping to be picked, only this time the process takes a slightly different form to auditioning. As evidence of her company’s success, Lindsay points out that they were accepted into a festival, then received Arts Council funding as well as mentorship from an established theatre. Nice work if you can get it. Unfortunately, this is the lottery/winner-takes-all model of art, where a chosen few enjoy the rewards and the rest can go hang, it’s the very model we tried to escape from in the first place.
The only answer is to control all of the action steps of our career. If even one of them require us to be picked by an outside agency, then we do not have control, we are dependent on the favours of others. And even if we do sometimes receive those favours, they can be taken away from us at any moment, so transporting us back to square one.
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