Ep. 1: But Do You Know WHY You Matter as a Performing Artist?

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Transcript

This is a transcript of an episode of Classically (Un)Trained, published on November 4th, 2024.

I want to start this first episode with a question:

Why do you matter as a performer?

Have you ever asked yourself that?

It might seem like a touchy-feely question but it’s actually – a bit of tough love:

If you haven’t always known then you’ve found out the hard way, by now, that you can’t expect to be employed as a performer just because it makes you happy.

You CAN however approach performing like something that’s valuable to others – THAT might actually lead to something interesting.

But finding what’s valuable about what you do, as it turns out, is kind of the hard part.

The answer is going to be based on lots of specific aspects of who you are as a person and who you are as a performer, your training, your network, your goals, your dreams – and even though the main point of the question is to just HAVE an answer that you’re comfortable with and that can serve as a kind of beacon, as your primary motive – it also should be anchored in reality, somehow.

And that’s what’s hard about it – because the value of artists in general, their very function, is in question.

I mean – that might be why you’re listening to this podcast.

So, with that said, in this first episode, to help you with your answer to this big question about your value is as a performer, I want to share two bits of information that I really think matter to the worth of classically-trained performing artists and artists in general:

1) First, while anthropologists don’t know for sure why humans developed the arts, they seem to agree that various artistic formats – including the ones that pertain to performing artists, music, storytelling, dance – are more or less intrinsic to who we are, and that they probably serve some adaptive function. There are hypotheses as to what these adaptive functions are and I suspect there might be some truth to all of them. The ones I find most compelling regarding the performing arts are: improving cognition, fostering social cohesion and stress reduction. I’ll go into more details on those later in the episode.
2) Second, however overcrowded the performing arts job market might seem to you – and it is – your training as a performing artist is unique in the grand scheme of things, and the numbers reflect that – which is to say, you might be dime a dozen on the performing arts market but you’re not dime a dozen in the world at large, and that might actually count for something.

So, let’s go deeper into those two thing – and hopefully by the end you’ll be armed with a few more ideas about what the purpose might be of you as a performer.

You might be wondering what motivated me to want to make this podcast: Well, it’s directly related to this sense of low value of most performing artists, and artists in general.

After I finished my formal education as a classical singer, I entered the desert of the performing arts scene: I’m half-Czech, half-American and I chose to be based in the Czech Republic because Europe has a lot more funding for the arts, in some countries you can live well on less, and, in the Czech Republic, there is one of the highest numbers of opera theatres per capita. So, since I was a classically-trained singer it seemed like the right place for me to be – and for a while I would say it was, in the sense that unlike most of my counterparts with degrees in classical singing who were based in the US or even Western Europe I was being payed to sing roles in theatres and I was also being payed to sing tourist concerts in the highly touristy city of Prague where I lived. However, I was still paying for voice lessons and not making enough money from performing to make a full living and had to supplement it with other work.

I had learned in school that I would have to audition a LOT to establish a performing career, but what I wasn’t prepared for was lack of access to auditions (maybe that quip about having to do 100 auditions for every gig is only useful to performers based in performing arts meccas like Paris, Berlin or New York.) In any case, I was getting maybe 8 truly meaningful auditions a year (and of course I was paying for transportation to these auditions and for the rehearsals with pianists leading up to them). And, predictably, given the paucity of auditions, I wasn’t being cast in any new roles though I was continuing to sing in the shows I was cast in between 2014 and 2017, roles I had gotten through a chain of events which originated with being cast last-minute, and for totally pragmatic reasons, by the director of opera at the Academy where I had gotten my Master’s. And the concert gigs I was doing were neither inspired nor lucrative – don’t get me wrong, I love Mozart and Dvořák and Johann Strauss but doing their greatest hits over and over for tourists who mainly bought a ticket to see the organ that Mozart supposedly played, once, and who were paying for a single ticket about as much as I was being payed for the entire concert – was a particular kind of hell.

Now, I know this sounds just like what you have to go through at the beginning of any career. And if I could have reasonably assumed – as one would with other types of careers – that by simply continuing to do what I was doing I could slowly work myself up through the ranks, I would have gladly done it. But performing careers don’t quite work that way, do they? It’s a boom-or-bust kind of business – and when you analyse how established performers got their start, they generally started young (in their 20s) and, crucially, with a bang, a big break, especially for female performers. And I felt like that big break was getting to be late.

And then the pandemic hit – and everything stopped and the little momentum I had as a performer dissipated.

This also meant I had time to think.

And that’s when I had time to start wondering: What is the VALUE of performing, anyway?

And I found something strange: I found didn’t know what the value was of what I did, or at least I didn’t know how to articulate it.

Now let’s pause on that for a second.

Isn’t it interesting that even people who have degrees from established performing arts academies and are being payed to perform (even if it’s not enough) can’t articulate why what they do might be important?

It makes sense to think that way about some careers – if you’re a beautician or a personal trainer or you sell pools, you’re also providing a service that people don’t necessarily need but the idea is – it’s your living, if people pay for it that’s what it’s good for!

What’s strange about performers – and artists in general – is that we’re willing to go through extremely rigorous training – more rigorous than that of most other careers – and then work for little or even no pay even while continuing to invest money into training and other art-related upkeep, with uncertain prospects of a return on that investment.

And here’s the thing: A career can be meaningless or unlucrative – it can’t be both at the same time.

And what I mean by that is that – it literally can’t be both at the same time.

Human beings won’t continue doing meaningless work without financial reward – I mean, even with substantial financial reward, doing something meaningless is difficult for many to sustain, an idea David Graeber popularised in his book Bullshit Jobs.

So clearly there is some value in artistic activities beyond monetary reward.

Now, we could just say that if there is only value in this activity to the artist and nobody else – then it’s a hobby, not a career. And that is – let’s just say it – a real fate for some people who study the performing arts, or the arts in general.

But allowing that to be the only answer is once again diminishing the value of the arts – and I feel like something is missing in that answer.

The only place I knew to turn for a response to this conundrum was anthropology – the study of humans. Because clearly we are dealing with something strangely human, here.

So, what does anthropology say about why humans evolved to have all these costly rituals of music, dance, and narrative, which don’t contribute to immediate survival?

Here are the main hypotheses:

Improving cognition – that’s the idea that art helps us learn about the world and make sense of it – stories for example can help us test hypothetical scenarios and teach future generations about hard-won lessons, and I would add that music and movement can aid in better memorising and preserving these stories and lessons about the world. The arts also seem to play a big role in child development – that is, the cognition of future generations.
Propaganda – that’s the idea that art serves to manipulate others into believing something that is advantageous to the one making the art – you can have someone sing an epic poem about how unconquerable a certain leader is, so that no one will think to challenge said leader.
Sexual display – this is one of the more popular hypothesis and it basically says the arts are the same as the elaborate feathers of birds of paradise – a simple mating display, indicating personal fitness.
Reinforcing sociality – this is the idea that, since human beings are nothing without each other, the arts are a way to foster much needed social cohesion, so the shared music and dances, matching body art, and storytelling are a way of making people with common goals feel more connected.
Stress reduction – the arts help us cope with uncertainty, especially in situations when we have little control over an outcome, like natural disasters or disease.

That last hypothesis is by Ellen Dissanayaka whose paper “The Arts After Darwing” from 2008 is actually my source for the list of common hypothesis about why humans evolved to make art which I just shared with you. Dissanayaka’s description of how certain types of performing arts might have developed was particularly striking to me:

“I suggest that in uncertain circumstances that did not call for immediate pragmatic action…our early human ancestors at some point found that performing repetitious, simplified, or stereotyped, exaggerated sounds and movements…felt comforting and ultimately eased tension—particularly when performed in a coordinated fashion among members of a group. Perhaps this behavior first occurred during a frightening storm… Once these became culturally established as ritualized responses to recurrent provoking circumstances, they could become further elaborated and institutionalized as ceremonies.”

So, stress reduction (like singing together before a storm) and reinforcing sociality can actually be two outcomes of collective music and dance which would have been very important to our ancestors’ survival. Dissanayaka confirms this when she writes:

“I…suggest that individuals in groups that responded to uncertainty in stressful circumstances with…coordinative practices would gradually have gained survival advantage over those in groups where each person acted individually or randomly.”

Let me editorialise a bit, from my perspective: The thing about us humans is that we’re really not that impressive, individually – our strength is in coordination, transmitting complex information between individuals, groups and, crucially, generations, and, on the other end of the spectrum, in experimenting – which is to say, adapting to changing circumstances or tinkering with the ways we have adapted to existing ones.

In a way, at the heard of human beings is this paradox: a heightened ability to preserve complex information (and often utter dependence on that preserved information) and the propensity to experiment, to change.

The idea of experimenting ties in to the hypothesis that arts improve cognition: they can be a kind of cognitive playground, allowing us to test out ideas. Music has played a role in the development of math and physics and even computers while storytelling – which before writing was often danced or acted out in some way, partially to aid memorisation – helps us test moral ideas, play out scenarios, prepare for various outcomes, and preserve stories which contain information about the way the world works.

So, I think all the hypotheses about why the arts evolved may have some truth to them – but the ones that I find particularly pertinent to performing artists living today and trying to find meaning in what they do is that the performing arts bring people together, reduce anxiety, and (along with other art forms) help us make sense of the world. And they do so in a way that isn’t marginal – but a way that was evolutionarily adaptive, important to our survival as a species.

So, you might be thinking: Alright, you can argue that there’s some good reason for humans to have evolved to tell stories, dance, and make music in hunter-gatherer societies – but that won’t change how artists are valued right now, in this reality, will it?

Well, you’re right – but now at least we’ve articulated a concrete problem, and can ask the following question in an informed way: Why is it that performers of all sorts have such a hard time making a living?

One answer might be: It’s because too many people are studying the field – it’s over-saturated.

And technically that’s true, if your idea of the correct amount of people studying a field is roughly the amount needed on the job market.

But consider this: Only a very small percentage of degrees are granted in the performing arts, or the arts in general – and there are swaths of the performing arts field which assume specialised secondary education as an entry point.

I’m going to take the US as an example, here – that’a country where the disproportion between number of graduates in the performing arts and the actual opportunities in the performing arts seems to be on the higher side.

The annual percentage of higher ed degrees awarded in music, dance and theatre in the United States are – drum roll – about 1.13 percent (by the way – these numbers are hard to find and I had to do some of my own adding up and percentage calculation. My sources and notes are under the episode transcript, linked in the description – do check my work, if you care to. It was harder to find numbers for outside the US, like the European Union which probably puts out rather large number of trained performers – what I did find on the EU is also in the transcript. It would be nice to have some global numbers but teasing those out would be a much bigger project.)

Now, when it comes to how many of those graduates of performing arts fields actually work as performers, the number ranges from only 2 percent (this is from a study of actors) to 23 percent (this is from a study looking at ALL arts and design graduates.) The most optimistic numbers put specifically musicians’ employment at 61 percent – however, this doesn’t seem to distinguish between part-time and full-time work which I think is kind of important and seems to include teaching music as working in music and what I’m trying to find out is how many performing arts graduates actually get to be performers. That last, more optimistic, study also lumps all generations together – and the authors do admit that employment is lower for later generations. Again – I’ve put the sources and some details about all this in the description.

What I’m getting at is, whether employment is at two percent or more, we’re not living in a reality in which half of all college graduates are getting useless performing arts degrees because they live with their heads in the clouds or because college has become a joke. That’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is that a small number of people is studying performing arts, and of that a very small percent is going on to have a career actually being performers.

That to me says more about the values of the society we live in than it does about the bad decisions of college grads or the uselessness of college education. And yet its often people who graduate in “impractical” disciplines or the colleges themselves, who are mocked and blamed for this predicament.

Now, let’s add another layer to this: Pretty much everyone interacts with the arts every day – whether they listen to music, read books, watch movies or shows. Sure, maybe it’s not “high art” but – well, that’s subject for another day.

The fact is, entertainment is a big business. The people who are doing well in it are doing very well. In fact – while investing in arts ventures is one of the most risky kinds of investments it’s also one with the biggest jackpots – that is, unexpected huge returns.

The issue is one that extends beyond just the arts – the boom or bust of it all, the disappearance of the middle class, of anything except winners and losers is something that seems to be a ubiquitous problem these days. But it does seem that the arts are particularly susceptible to these extremes.

And the reasons for this are technological and economic and social and I’ll talk about that later in the season but let’s talk briefly now about the MOST popular degree in our test-country, the United States (and it also happens to be very popular in Europe, I found out). The greatest percentage of degrees in the US is granted in business. And I guess what you’d expect me to say would be something about how this reflects the twisted, materialistic values of our society but no – what I’ll say is that if we thought of business graduates the way we thought of performing arts graduates we would be lamenting that they aren’t all becoming entrepreneurs. I mean – most start-ups fail, just like most artists fail. So most business graduates will not be “doing business” just as most performing arts graduates won’t be making a living “performing” – instead, business graduates are more likely to be administrators, paper pushers, company shills, sometimes even in the manner described in David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs.

Because that is actually what the job market needs – people who work for other people, who are cogs within larger human-made machines.

So, in a way, to choose to study the performing arts, and perhaps the arts in general, is to choose to do something antithetical to what weaves this society together. You can make a business graduate into a company worker without changing them much. You can’t do the same with someone with a music, dance, or theatre degree.

As a side note I’ll also say: yes, I can imagine that a lot of performers would love to be company employees if that meant being a full-time performer at a local theatre with medical benefits and sometimes a lifetime contract. I’ve know performers with those sorts of contract in the Czech Republic and other parts of Europe – but while those contracts still technically exist, they are becoming a thing of the past because theatres are realising its better for them not to have to commit to any one employee. And, anyway, these sorts of contracts only ever pertained to that top few percent of performers who can make a living performing at all.

So, what I’m saying is that by pursuing a life as a performer, you are inherently, whether you mean to be or not, a bit of a rebel.

And being a rebel isn’t easy – and there are also ethical and unethical ways of being a rebel and meaningful and silly ways of being a rebel. But what I think a good rebel is, is someone who holds a mirror up to mainstream society and says: “This is what you’re missing.” And in that mirror mainstream society might see something true about itself which it denies.

And – let me address the elephant in the room, here – you get to be a rebel because you’re privileged. And I really wish that word “privilege” hadn’t been turned into a quasi-insult— because the truth is nothing extraordinary can be accomplished without some degree of privilege, even if that privilege isn’t socio-economic but that of having a loving family that cares about your education or showing early talent and being noticed for it by the right person at the right time. Even though I know it doesn’t always feel like it – it is a privilege to have an education in the performing arts or the arts in general.

And the positive message I want to leave you with is this:

In that frustrating time in my life that I described in the beginning of this episode, I started to think that it was wrong that so many people were studying the performing arts and that we needed to limit the amount of academically-trained performers. I started to think academic training in performing really was a pyramid scheme. I don’t believe that any more – instead, I think we’re called to answer a conundrum about the value of a humans in the 21st century. No, not the value of performers or the arts – the value of humans. And I think that artists, including performers, will play a big role in (if you’ll allow me to say it in a very lofty way) the battle for the rights of the human soul.

In this first season of Classically (Un)Trained, I do want to explore pragmatic, actionable things about existing in the world as a performer. What I hope I’ve made clear, though, in this first episode of the season is that this isn’t just about you winning the competition for the limited resource which is a satisfying career in the performing arts – this is about understanding yourself as someone able to serve the world in a meaningful way.

Not because it feels good and not because it’s easy – but precisely because it does involve accepting hard truths about the way the world works.

But you didn’t want to become a performing artist because you thought it was going to be easy, did you?

In the next episode, we’ll talk a little more about education, especially the kind performers flock towards after they’ve gotten their degrees. What kind of skills do you actually need to (re)invent yourself for the 21st century? And why did your classical education not teach them?

Oh and this is very important – a big part of this podcast is gathering information from you the listener. So, how would YOU answer the question: What is the value of the performing arts? You can drop me an email or write an anonymous note. See the description for details.

Footnotes & Sources

How I got the numbers on college graduation (in the US and EU):

It’s tricky to get consistent numbers of performing arts graduates. Here is what I found concerning degrees in the US:

The HIGHER EDUCATION ARTS DATA SERVICES (which however does NOT seem to include all the institutions of higher learning in the US) gives the following numbers for degrees granted at ALL levels in 2021:

Music degrees: 20 867

Dance degrees: 1253

Theatre degrees: 6064

When I looked it up on CollegeFactual.com, which presumably uses a larger pool of institutions, for 2021 it was:

Music degrees: 25,860

Dance degrees: 3,288

Theatre degrees: 17,341

This checks out, since it’s higher than the HEADS’s numbers. The fact that the music degrees grew by less than the dance and theatre ones also makes sense, since it seems HEADS has many more music institutions participating than dance and theatre institutions.

So let’s say that around 46 489 degrees were granted in 2021 in all performing arts fields in the US.

Degrees granted in ALL FIELDS in the US in 2021 seem to be 4.1 million according to Statista.

That would make performing degrees account for about 1.13 % in 2021.

Note: This includes degrees like costume design and screenwriting and directing and music education. I don’t mind including those since to me they are also part of the performance world, but if you wanted to be really precise about how many aspiring PERFORMANCE degrees are granted my rough calculation brings it down to about 28378, or 0.7 % .

For Europe, according to this report, performing arts seems to be lumped in to “culture-related fields” – which accounts for 15 % of degrees. This, however, includes all humanities, languages, journalism, architecture. About a quarter of that 15 percent (so some 3.75 % ) are studying “the arts” – which I assume is the performing arts and the visual arts, as usual lumped together. This is a bit less than the “visual and performing arts” category in the US which, according to this source, accounts for 4.48 of Bachelor’s degrees earned (this source doesn’t mention Master’s degrees so must be in the Other section for those.)

I was a bit less rigorous for business, where I simply had one source and pulled the percentages from there: 18.63 percent of Bachelors degrees and 23.37 % of Masters degrees in 2022, in the US. For Europe, according Eurostat, 22 % of students were studying business, administration and law in 2021 (so I guess business is less popular in the EU, because it has to be lumped in with other categories).

I should also give credit where credit is due and say that I was inspired to make these calculations by William Deresiewitz who makes a similar point about values reflected in chosen majors for his book Excellent Sheep – here are the numbers he gives in a lecture about the book (he seems to talk about majors rather than degrees granted):

All of the arts and humanities combined add up to 14 % of majors
1/3 of 1 % of majors are in Art History
3 % are in English
Business accounts for 21 % of all majors

Here is a lecture he gives sumarizing the book.

Different numbers, same picture…

When it comes to employment rate of artists, here are my sources – and I admit this issue of employment is a bit more complicated:

This study puts the unemployment of ACTORS at 90 % and later says that making a sustained living from acting is as low as 2 % (it seems to focus on actors in Britain).

Here is an article I cite in the podcast which has an optimistic view of the employment of performers and visual artists. I should have specified in the podcast that these employment statistics are taken from the US. However, when this study says “67 % of respondents are working in the arts” – what does that mean? Looking closer at the study, it becomes clear that “in the arts” does not mean making a full living as visual artists or performers. Here is a more detailed version of the SNAAP report which the article seems to be referencing.

For Europe, there is actually a detailed report from 2019 – admittedly, done before the pandemic (I take back that information on the EU cultural sector is harder to find – I was frustrated that I wasn’t getting specific numbers for performing arts but there is lots of other information for the EU.) One interesting thing about the above report is that workers in the EU cultural sector tend to be more college-educated (60.6% compared to 37.1% in other industries) and more often self-employed (31.7% compared 13.8% in the economy as a whole). According to the report, cultural workers are more often “work part-time, combine two or more jobs, and do not have a permanent job.”

So, I don’t know if it makes sense to calculate it this way but here’s something: Apparently, 3.8 % of the workforce in the EU is employed in the “the cultural sector” (this includes everyone – administrators, tech etc.) and, of that, 22 % are “artists and writers” (I assume that includes performers? There is no special category for them.) That would be 0.836 % of the workforce. If 3.75 % of college students are studying “the arts” in the EU – well, it doesn’t take a genius to see the disconnect. I cannot find (unlike for the US) how many people GRADUATE each year with degrees in “the arts.” Whatever that number would be, and IF roughly the same number of people retire each year as graduate each year (I would assume that fewer retire than graduate?), then whatever the difference would be…would roughly be the employment rate of arts graduates within the actual arts – right? I suppose it gets pretty messy, because even though artists tend to be college-educated (about twice as likely to be college-educated as the general work force – see above) there are some who aren’t (also, in Europe, conservatories, which are high-school level, are more likely to graduate people who can directly go into the workforce.) There are also many non-graduated students who are already working (this was my case when I was studying at the Academy in Prague – and it was fairly common for some students to already by working in theatres and orchestras before they got their degrees.) Perhaps we might say that about a third of graduates of arts disciplines are working in the arts in the EU – with the caveats above. “Working in”, however, is a complicated term when you’re dealing with a mostly self-employed workforce – we’re dealing with a part-time-y, chaotic kind of employment for most of that third of graduates that is working in the arts.

Some other sources:

When I mentioned that investors in the arts face an even more boom or bust situation (with the occasional “boom” being particularly robust), I was citing this episode of Freakanomics radio, which features an economist talking specifically about people making money off of Broadway shows.

I also mention David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs.

And this is Ellen Dissanayake’s paper “The Arts After Darwin”.