Ep. 6: As a Performer, Are You the Product, Employee, or Service Provider?
Transcript:
One of the strange things about being a performer – rather than any other kind of artist – is that everything that makes you up, including your physical body, is your art. Other types of artists make things which are outside of themselves – write books, create works of fine art, compose scores.
Performers, though, are both the artist and the work of art.
And that’s one of the things I find most beautiful about being a performer – at it’s best, performing is the most cathartic kind of interaction with your own, transient and imperfect, physical existence, which can inspire a radical self-acceptance, and feel like a kind of oneness with others, with time itself, and your place in it.
At it’s worst, though, being a performer can be one of the most disempowering experiences you could have, one that makes you hate things about yourself you can’t change, question your self-worth, worry about seeming difficult or being unwanted in ways that are unreasonable, and question the vary value of what you do.
And while the above is certainly something all humans might experience, especially in highly-competitive environments, I think the reason the latter version is so often the experience of performers is in part because of a prevalent framing of what we do – a framing which is meant well, and makes sense in some situations, and can even be useful but which, if presented without an alternative, can become incredibly disempowering.
The framing is: “You are the product.”
That seems to be, currently, the preferred way of presenting what it is to have a career as a performer.
The problem is that, like I’ve said before, that phrase can only apply to a very small group of people.
Why?
Well, because in order to be a products, someone else – besides you – has to be making money off of you. You have to be profitable to other people, as a product that they sell. That’s what you are when you have an agent, most commonly, and in less common cases when you are so famous that your name alone can make other people money. Both the latter and the former status, as you can imagine, are difficult to attain on a shrinking, over-saturated live performing arts market.
But what do you do if no one else can make money off of you?
Well, another thing an artist can be is a service provider, that is, someone who finds opportunities to provide a service directly – this often means being the founder of an organisation which provides some kind of service (whether a business or a non-profit) or being a true freelancer – the only difference between a freelancer and someone who actually runs an organisation is that in the former case you’re a business of one and in the latter you employ other people. Both of those things obviously go into that entrepreneurial realm, I talked about in episode 2.
Actually, to be fair, there are three ways to be a professional as a performer:
- Being an employee
- Being a product
- Being a service provider
The first two seem to be the only ones performers are even remotely prepared for by their training. This makes sense – it reflects the ideal reality, as well as a reality much more common in the past, when the idea of performing arts training formed. And I don’t deny that it’s a better gig, at least initially – being a product or an employee means you can do your job as a performer, all the technical upkeep and memorisation and high performance necessary to be good at what you do, you also get a better chance to be mentored by real, relevant professionals in your field, and all that without having to worry about all the big picture stuff.
And I would wish that situation for every performer, at least for part of their career – which is also why it’s important to keep the door open to being a product or an employee, even as you prepare to most likely be a service provider. But it’s also very important to say that being a product or an employee is not just some preferable-but-hard-to-obtain version of a career as a performer and being a service provider some kind of fallback – depending on your unique skillset and personality, pursuing employment or being a product may not be the most fulfilling path at all. It’s also important to say that you may combine all three of these types of professional modes at different points in your life.
So let’s talk about the differences between being an employee, a product and a service provider, and the pros and cons of all three – with a special emphasis, given the nature of this podcast, on that third, less-explored, alternative.
I spent most of my performing career in the Czech Republic. And there’s this saying in Czech, which doesn’t just apply to performing but is particularly evocative when applied to performers: Chodit s kůží na trh. Literally: To take skin to the market. It’s not clear in Czech whether this is your skin, or if you’re a tanner selling hide (which I imagine is the origin of the term) but it’s basically used in situation when you’re going out on a limb to sell yourself, your ideas or your skills, metaphorically or figuratively. It’s a quite graphic term when applied to the courage to sell yourself as a performer. But selling your own skin is precisely what it feels like, at least to me, to be both the artist and the work of art, as performers are.
The Czechs do not have as long a history of commercial and free market culture (though we are catching up) as non-post-communist countries but that Czech idiom echoes another phrase connected to performers, which I’ve heard many times in English:
“You are the product.”
That is literally the first thing that came out of a presenter’s mouth at a crash-course about marketing for performers which I attended when I was like 19, during a summer program. It was the first thing I ever learned about marketing for performers. But even when it’s not literally the first thing you learn, that idea is woven into the whole training and professional industry of the performing arts – and, as you can see, goes even deeper, into repurposed old-timey sayings used in countries with a less commercial past.
But I believe you can only “be the product” as a performer, if a third party is making money off of you – and that’s something that most performers can’t expect to be, partially because it’s always been very competitive and based on all sorts of things out of your control, like I talked about in episode 3, and also because of those technological changes I talked about in episode 5.
And yet most performers are only trained to be either a product or an employee.
So, I’m going to go over how I might characterise the advantages and disadvantages of all three ways of being a professional performer – employee, product, and service provider. Again, as with the arts funding models I outlined in episode 4, bear in mind many artists are going to combine different models in different parts of their careers.
1. Being an employee – the directly-porformance-based kind of employment possible for performers is mostly reserved for orchestra players, chorus members, and dance troupe members – though institutionally-employed actors and other soloists do certainly still exist in Europe. Being an employee means (mostly) working for one company (orchestra, theatre, chorus, dance troupe) in one place. Just like with any other type of steady employment, you can have contracts which are for as little as a year, or even less, or as much as the rest of your life. Contracts usually involve monthly salaries, healthcare and retirement plans, and, at least in theatres, there is often a bonus for each performance you do in addition to the salary.
As a side note: If you want to count education into all this then being employed by academies, conservatories, universities, or even elementary schools, high schools, and after-school arts programs is another form of stable employment for performers. To me, however, while employment as an educator is extremely common as a way for performers to make money, whether their full income or as a supplement, it really is a different field – and I say this out of respect for the art of education and pedagogy and the specific expertise and abilities you have to have to do it well, especially when it comes to teaching younger students. When it comes to university professors, who I think get to be more creative and have a more artistically stimulating job even as educators, those jobs are honestly almost as hard to come by, at this point, as employment in orchestras or theatres. I also feel uneasy about education being the fall-back or supplement for so many performers – while it is a very noble thing to do if you’re teaching children and not participating in the false-professionalisation many arts educational institutions, especially in the US, engage in, like I talked about in episode 2 – it can still add to the pyramid-schemey aspect of arts education. That said, I think in places where the arts are more respected, and children are culturally expected to have a degree of arts education even if they are not aiming to be professionals, that pyramid-schemey aspect of it is lessened – and I would certainly say that’s the case in the Czech Republic and France, where I could observe this kind of childhood arts education in action.
Positives of being an employee: Stability, both in your schedule, location, and your income. There are also benefits like health insurance and retirement, greater likelihood of getting loans, less likelihood of natural disasters upending your income, and the possibility to work towards lifelong contracts.
Drawbacks: Burnout and monotony – working as an orchestra player, chorister, or dancer at a company is a lot of work and little glamour while it suits some personalities, it can get too monotonous for others.
There’s also the drawback of it being a model that’s on its way out – to the point where a young instrumentalist, choral singers, and dancers, I think, mostly won’t be able to rely on the idea that they would be stably employed by a performing arts institution for their entire career, certainly not as performers. But this is not just because employers like the ability to fire and hire people at will, but because performers themselves are fickle as employees. I’ve met performers who have given up on stable contracts at theatres, including lifelong contracts which would have set them up for the rest of their lives, to work with a smaller, less stable but more artistically-stimulating ensemble or because they felt they could make more money traveling around as products, which if you’re a good enough product is certainly possible.
Another thing I see with employed performers is how little artistic freedom they have – they are assigned repertoire and don’t really get to turn things down when they don’t feel it’s right for them. And also, in an emotionally-charged environment such as the theatre, being bound to people by contract has its positives and negatives – it’s great when things are working out with colleagues and the higher-ups, but very bad when you find yourself contractually bound to a toxic environment, which isn’t uncommon. Though that’s simply the case for all employment in institutions.
2) Being a product – a product is a soloist who has an agent and is bought and sold like a commodity and this seems to be the most coveted position for performers. It’s nice work if you can get it – at least for a while. Whereas being an employee, while there are exceptions, is usually reserved for ensemble performers, being a product is reserved for soloists. And if you do well under this model (which a small percentage of that small percentage do), you can actually make a rather good amount of money – unlike being an employee, which is more stable but somewhat more modest. If there is glamour to be had – and in reality there is very little glamour to be had as a performer – but if there is glamour, it comes from being a product.
So, what could possibly be a drawback, besides the fact that most performers just aren’t going to get to really take off as products? Well, the performers I know who are products are generally stressed and lonely – stressed because even with a well-established career and a good agent, there’s still a feast or famine aspects to this, and fluctuations in finances and, no matter what, there is always that little voice in the back of your head saying: This could end at the drop of hat. If you get sick, if you fall out of favour for some reason, if there’s a natural disaster or pandemic, or as you inevitably transform into a different product because of ageing, there is no guarantee that you will get another job. If you really are a full-time product you’re generally booked seasons in advance – but what’s several seasons, really? A few years of one’s life. When you get to a certain age, that stops seeming like eternity.
And performers who are products tend to be lonely because in order to be a product you generally have to travel quite a bit- most performers who have a full-time career as products don’t get to spend a lot of time at home and live out of their suitcases.
If being a product is consciously how you want to construct your career – and, look, I do think it’s a great way to go for a while when you’re young, if only because of the mentorship you get and how many people you get to meet in the industry – then I would say definitely give it your all when you have a shot at it.
Now, of course, there are also part-time product, who perhaps don’t make a full living from the gigs they get from their agents and supplement their income with other things – often teaching privately. It’s also somewhat possible to be an employee and a product, but there can be tension between the institution you are employed at and the solo gigs you take outside of that. I would say it would be more compatible to be a part-time product and a service provider. Actually, if I could choose anything for myself, it would be that.
There’s also this grey area which I would say is between being an employee and a product: There are still a few places left in the world – and I’m thinking here again specifically of the Czech Republic – where few performers have agents, and you’re certainly not expected to have an agent, and agents are not very important overall, whereas in most of the world it seems that you kind of have to have an agent if you want to have something resembling a career as a performer and be able to work with major arts institutions. I guess not having an agent but being hired by established institutions could be a fourth category – called gigging. I think it’s basically the phase before agents become a must because of over-saturation of an industry. In a way it’s the worst of both worlds – neither do you have someone helping sell you and invested in your success nor do you have the stability of institutional employment. That’s the model I was on when I was still pursuing a traditional career. I’m not sure it’s really a model that’s very prevalent or even relevant these days, except in these very specific bubbles like the the Czech scene or perhaps certain jazz and more popular music scenes.
I should also say many performers absolutely adore their agents and credit their careers to them, and good agents can have a genuinely positive impact on the performing arts scene by discovering and nurturing and, crucially, guiding performers through the ins and outs of an industry they know very well – though just as often, I’ve heard performers complaining about their agents not batting for them enough or not finding them enough jobs or making them take work that isn’t right for them. It should also be noted that it costs agents nothing to have someone on their roster, and they can simply add people without putting a lot of effort into selling them or not being able to sell them, which I think is a thing that happens quite often (there are also people who call themselves “agents” who ask for performers to pay for their services up front – please note, those are not agents, those are grifters, and they likely will not have any positive impact on any performer’s career.)
I would sum up being an employee or a product by saying that I’ve heard performers who have had the privilege of being employed or having agents say that they wouldn’t recommend their job, because it’s either not stimulating (mostly in the case of employed performers), not that creative, or extremely stressfull and disempowering. In both cases, you are fitting into someone else’s vision, someone else’s organisation. This can be a great symbiosis, and many people prefer that situation because it takes the burden of making too many decisions off of their shoulders – but for some it can mean feeling unfulfilled or, given the exclusivity of these positions, left out completely. And that bring me to…
3) Service provider – this is the least explored version of being a performer. It’s also the only format that doesn’t rely on the functioning of an existing industry. It’s also a radical re-framing of the performer from leaning more on being a work of art to being an artist, someone who truly has novel things to offer and is able to adapt their expertise to the needs of different situations.
Being a service provider is exactly what most performers aren’t taught to think about during their training – I think because it would also mean answering a difficult question: “What service do individual performers provide?” And that’s just another version, in a way, of the question I asked at the very beginning of the season: “What is the value of the performing arts?”
It’s a much deeper, philosophical, question that needs to be answered before we could fully know what a performer – or an artist of any sort – is as a service provider. And, collectively, I think we’ve barely started posing that specific question – because in the past the answer may have seemed self-evident. But because of the technological changes I described in episode 5 (which is to say the fact that recording and free online content have fundamentally changed the value of the performing artist on the market as it exists today) we need to answer the question better in order to really talk about what a performer is as service provider.
That said, there are performers out there who I think can be said to be service providers. Without knowing to think of them that way, I interviewed some of them for a previous iteration of this podcast – they are artists who found or co-found organisations, who use their training as artists to educate the public about various issues, who are participating in using new technologies to advance their fields. I used to call them “indie” artists because my stipulation for them was that the heart of what they do is outside of any existing organisation, which is to say they are neither employees nor products, though I also didn’t think to call it that when I was doing those interviews.
That service-provider way of being an artist, though, is on the margins.
Part of that is because it’s so much work to learn how to be a service provider, and it requires so much extra skill and drive and creativity. Being an employee and a product also require drive and skill – I mean that’s why they’re such exclusive and coveted positions – but they also require simply following a path set out for you, following a fairly clear set of actions and rules. To be a service provider, you have to accept constantly finding creative solutions to the situations that come your way. It means constantly asking the question: What can be done with the skillset that I have? And what new things do I need to learn to supplement the skills I have?
Like I said in episode 2, performing arts training institutions understandably just don’t even know where to begin to make that shift to training service providers, as much as employees or products. Educators in performing arts professionalisation institutions are also often afraid of re-structuring their curricula towards that more organisations-building, problem-solving mode of thinking about being a performer because in their mind, it would take away attention from the high-level technical skills they pride themselves on training.
I understand that fear, but one of my fundamental beliefs, one that underlies this podcast, is that a service provider, as opposed to product or employee, mindset means being a much more technically-proficient artists, an artists that is particularly good at what they do, because they are flexible enough to perform under many different circumstances and capable of being both economically and artistically independent.
What would that look like?
Well, to answer that it’s actually good to go back to that traditional model of performing: If you have worked as a professional performer in the traditional mode, think about all the decisions you don’t have to make. The repertoire is chosen by others (so, someone else has to have knowledge about repertoire), the words, the music, the choreography is created by others (so, others need to know how to tell stories, write music, choreograph), the team you work with is build by others (so, someone else has to have knowledge about how to build teams and choose the right people for them), you are given constant feedback on your performance (so, someone else is making musical, dramatic, and other artistic decisions), others light the stage, build sets, set up the sound systems, make sure safety regulators are followed for all of that (so others have to have knowledge of the technical aspects of theatre), the budget is raised and contract is drawn-up by others (so, budgets and legal matters have to be understood by others), the show is promoted by others (so, the audience has to be understood by others.)
Some of those skills listed above are not directly artistic – but some really are, and those are the most interesting to me. I truly think a performer trained to be a service provider would have to be much better educated in the artistic aspects of the art forms they are trained to perform in. A musician would have to be much more deeply educated in arranging music, improvisation, electronic music and all the technological and acoustic knowledge it entails, as well as capable of leading ensembles rather than just reading scores and following conductors. An actor would have to have a better understanding of writing, story structure and a wide array of directing and performance methods and be able to self-direct and build characters much more independently. A dancer would have to understand choreography and music and theatre in ways that not all dancers do (though it seems to me that dancers, because of how fragile and short their careers are, have the best tradition of becoming creators in their own field). All of the things I list are ones that performers are trained in, but I think usually marginally compared to what it could be if the entire educational process was framed from more of a service provider, as opposed to employee or product, point of view. In addition to all of the above, there would also have to be, of course, much more training in arts funding, organisation building, marketing, as well as theatre and music technology (sound, lighting all of that – which, believe me, is a whole field unto itself and not easy to learn.)
For that kind of effort, that kind of very difficult training, to be worth it, though, you have to first understand the specific challenges to the performing arts in the 21st century and also believe that the arts as such are a service, rather than a product. And sometimes subtlety, but sometimes very obviously, it feels like there’s a real lack of faith in the idea that the arts, including the performing arts, are a useful service to others, not a shiny but superfluous product consumers have to be tricked into paying for, like a diamond (which is how it is treated in the “high art” wold, which is more likely to pertain to “classically trained” artists) or some kind of fast-food-like product that’s meant to highjacks the amygdala (as its treated online or by the commercial entertainment industry.)
Which brings me to something that’s more difficult to articulate which I think should be deeply woven into a truly service-provider performing arts education: The ability (which is actually a fundamentally entrepreneurial ability that might actually be taught more in business-related education than anywhere else) to identify where the need is for the performing arts and turn it into an opportunity to build something new.
And that once again brings us back to that question of value. And, right now, at the beginning of the journey of trying to answer that question, I’m drawn back to those hypotheses from anthropology about why humans developed the arts – this costly set of practices that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with immediate, practical survival – in the first place. You can refer back to episode 1 for the full list, but the hypotheses about why humans developed the arts which I, personally, think are important to performers today are fostering community, reducing anxiety (perhaps by giving meaning to unavoidable tragedy or by offering that sense of oneness and presence which I think music can make us feel) and helping us make sense of the world.
Now, I know that those just sound like platitudes – but one of the things that bothers me about how things are approached these days is that platitudes are used as shields against doing anything fundamentally different. And this has made talking about anything that’s important rather difficult – because so many words, so many important issues, have been drained of their depth. Businesses talk about innovation and creativity, arts institution about inclusivity, arts education institutions about entrepreneurship – and it all sounds right, but all those words mean nothing without an incredible amount of minute, practical, long-term, open-minded work and constant observation and re-evaluation of that work in an environment that incentives actual outcomes over mere reports containing more words.
Are you ready for that? I certainly am.
And I truly believe we can imagine this way of going about things together. I also believe it will take many different artists (and also people who don’t consider themselves artists) with different training backgrounds and working within different formats and locations to start to envision it. That’s why I’ve tried to structure this podcast as a conversation and hope to build some kind of online think tank or conversation forum, though at time of recording I’m still brainstorming how to actually structure that. You’re welcome to give your input on that, as with everything else. I’d really appreciate it, in fact. In any case, in sharing my point of view, through this podcast, and especially from this episode going forward, I hope to gather ideas from and learn from you, the listeners. As always, I’d like to remind you that you can respond, amend, argue with this episode and all others through the contact form in the description.
And I’ll make one more aside before ending this episode – I created a contact form that can be anonymous, if you want it to be, because I think part of the reason this conversation is so hard to have, is precisely because of this “you are a product” (or possibly “employee”) mindset that’s so interwoven into the way performers think about their careers, especially in places where there is high scarcity of access to work as a performer. True, some people build their image as artists around protest and industry critique – which can be a bit of a manipulative strategy, in my mind, and also I think can only really benefit a few artists. I would like not to build a career around industry critique, though depending on how people digest this podcast, it may be something I won’t be able to help. However, I don’t think becoming a public commentator should be a requirement for participating in the conversation and I totally understand the worry around that. So that’s why I made the form optionally anonymous – maybe the anonymous function is not necessary, in which case please do introduce yourself and leave your email so I can contact you back and we can perhaps start a conversation, but if it is welcome that you don’t have to connect your name to your words then great – and also I hope it won’t always have to feel that way. And I think part of making that feeling go away is this mindset-shift to being not a product or an employee but a service provider.
This episode is the last before a break I need to take to do other, performance and research-related things. And, if you’re listening to this as it comes out, I hope that this first half of the season can serve as something to think about during that time. But even if you’re listening to this in the future, and can go on to the next episode, I think this is a good time to just think about everything I’ve tried to kind of throw up into the air in the season up until now.
I’ll go through the questions posed by each episode:
Episode 1: What is the value of the performing arts?
Episode 2: What new skills could you learn after the main part of your education is done?
Episode 3: How do you find meaning as a performer? And are you a philosopher, pragmatist, or caretaker when it comes to meaning?
Episode 4: Which arts funding models, or which combination of them, would make sense for you to pursue – public, private, commercial, crowdfunding or self-funding?
Episode 5: What events or services might you build off of the internet, as a performer, while using the internet for what it’s best at?
Episode 6: How can you be a service provider (even while keeping the door open to being an employee or product)?
I hope to see you back for the rest of the season – and I hope to hear your experiences and thoughts about all these big questions I’ve tried to open so far and, even more importantly, that they’ve helped give you some new ideas or perspectives.
Footnotes & Sources:
Oddly, I don’t have any directly-cited sources for this episode but I’ll take this opportunity to share a selection of sources that are helpful to understanding the subject overall:
William Deresiewics’s The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech (2020)
The work on art anthropology done by Ellen Dissanayake, specifically her paper “The Arts After Darwin” (2008)
Jaron Lanier: Who Owns the Future? (2013)
David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
David Graeber’s Towards and Anthropological Theory of Value (2001)
Justin O’Conor: Culture is Not an Industry (2024) (you can also listen to this lecture based on the book)
Jack Conte’s talk “Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web” (2024)
Claire Bishop: Disordered Attention: How We Look At Art And Performance Today (2024)
Claire Bishop: Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012)
Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message
Miya Tokumitsu: Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness
My interview with David Blackburn about NYOP and the opera industry (which I think provides some interesting insight into the performing arts overall)
The SNAPP research on how artists fare professionally after their education is pretty poignant, even for those outside the US