As A Performer, Are You Knocking On The Wrong Doors Or Living In The Wrong Neighbourhood?

Transcript:

One of the only pieces of advice I got early on about having a performing career which I still believe is true, is that, in order to be successful, you have to keep knocking on doors until you find one that leads to a place where you’re wanted. 

It’s a fairly banal idea but what it means is pretty profound: It means you can’t make yourself into something that is wanted at every door, which also means that being rejected at one door doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing something wrong. You just haven’t found the right door. 

Now look – I don’t believe there is much advice that can be generalised but if there is any golden rule to success, any one-size-fits-all approach, it would be that simple idea: Keep knocking on different doors until you find the right one. 

Where the “knocking on different doors” idea fails, though, is when it discount transformation – when it’s understood to mean that you just need to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. What makes more sense, is that in order to keep knocking on doors, you may either need to change what you’re offering, something we’ve talked about on Classically (Un)Trained quite a bit OR you might have to travel to very different neighbourhoods to find new doors to knock on.

This episode is about that latter choice. I can’t tell you if or when the decision to change where you work is right for you, in particular, but the reason to do so is simple: Do you feel you have more to offer than what your environment seems to want from you? Do you feel those who are making decisions about you just don’t see what you’re capable of? It’s an experience many people have had and sometimes the simple – though not easy – solution is to distance yourself and find a different network of people, with a different frame of reference. This may mean moving to a different place. 

Location is more important than just about anything, when you’re a performer. Sure, a lot of our lives have become digital, which might mean we are overall less tethered to where we live than we used to be, but in my experience physical location still matters profoundly, certainly if you’re a performer – and, ironically, the internet, and its ability to connect people across space, has in many ways made it more of a good idea to physically move away.

If there’s just one thing I’d like to leave you with it’s this: the saying shouldn’t go “wherever you go, there you are.” The truth is closer to: “wherever you go, there you are before a very different set of doors to open.” 

Not convinced by that? Well, I’m going to make a case for it based on my own experience as someone who grew up in two cultures and who later moved to a different country and found out that being the same person in a different context can change everything. 

Recently, I realised something strange: I’ve experienced versions of myself that took a different path, lived a different story. 

Let me explain. 

My siblings and I grew up with a Czech mother and American father, moving between two countries, the Czech Republic and the United States. One year, we’d be going to school in the Czech Republic, speaking Czech almost all of the time, and the next year we’d be attending US schools, speaking English, and then we’d go back and do it all over again. This meant that rather than creating a private cultural identity and a public cultural identity, or transforming one cultural identity into another, the way most bi-cultural children do, it’s as if we really grew two parallel, fully-developed cultural and linguistic selves. 

Now, I saw “we,” speaking of myself and my siblings but my sisters may each describe a totally different experience of being bilingual and bicultural – this is just how I process it. But that way of processing it I think can have broader uses. Here’s how: I am the same person in Czech as I am in English. I have the same thoughts, same feelings, same opinions. The thing that’s different is that I have a different past and different status. When I’m inside Czech culture, the life I lived in Czech comes to the fore: the experience of having an extended family, being more connected to cultural myths and nature, but also the experience of being bullied for having an American father. In English, I experience more strongly everything that happened to me in English: I don’t have the stability of extended family, only my father, but I also don’t stick out as much, don’t have to hide parts of myself and make myself small. I do not experience this as being two different people, though. I experience it as being the same person with a different past and different status in society. It really is as if I were able to meet parallel selves – versions of myself that took a different path and encountered different obstacles. 

The reason I’m sharing this with you, though, is because I found something interesting: You can have this experience to some extent, too, even if you didn’t grow up in a family like mine. When I moved to France for two years, a couple years ago, I started to feel a new version of myself forming, one unburdened by a complex past. In a way, it felt like shedding the past completely – both my pasts. 

In the Czech Republic, where I had spent most of my twenties, I couldn’t get any of my projects funded, none of my ideas seemed very interesting to anyone, at least not in the realm of music, and I felt invisible and incompetent and unwanted. As a last-ditch effort, I applied to a two-year Artist Diploma residency at the high conservatory in Lyon. At the audition, I truly believed I was there by accident, felt I was a joke, as both a musician and a singer, since that’s how I was treated back home, and I thought that would be all the more true in France, since I heard they had very high standards for music and singing. But – the day of the audition, the four of us invited to present our project proposals in person were accepted. And so, I finally moved to France after years of trying to get out of the Czech Republic. And there, everything changed. The project I wanted to do was interesting to people. My thoughts were listened to. I was asked to speak to the composition department about new ways of approaching opera. I was asked to sing compositions by the young composers there (which is how I met Silvia Berrone, by the way, who created the music to this podcast). And my one-woman-show, which I had total artistic freedom to create, was awarded funding.

This change did not happen within me, though – I was the same person, just in a different context. 

I’m not sure if it’s helpful to speculate about why exactly I couldn’t get anything done in the Czech Republic but could in France. In a way it doesn’t matter – it could just as well have been the other way around. In fact: I met a Czech musician a couple years ago who attended the High Conservatory in Paris and who then came back to the Czech Republic. And, from his perspective, the French are, and I quote, back-stabbing snakes. This was simply his personal experience in France, which doesn’t have that much to do with the French. He, too, needed to change contexts – and for him the right context was perhaps the Czech Republic, whereas for me it was the reverse. Which is to say, there is no objectively good or bad environment – it’s about finding the right place, at the right time, for you in particular.

I really believe that whoever you think you are, you don’t know until you’ve experienced yourself in different contexts. Your status, how much people appreciate you, how useful you are to others – that’s a matter of your context. Your context also effects how you develop, what skills you get to learn and refine etc. Where you have agency is finding the right context for you. 

When I say context, I do mean your location, although that’s a broad term: it could be a different country with a different language but it might just be a different town you can commute to and you might even find truly different places, different institutions, without having to move at all. The point is to enter a very different network and frame of reference. Unfortunately, I think the degree to which the world is interconnected through the internet actually makes it harder to find that without traveling much further than used to be necessary. And because of the internet, and the fact that it’s so language-based, I would say learning other languages and moving to places where those languages are spoken may be the best way to find a truly different context.

Here I’d like to make a case for learning languages: Yes, learning a foreign language takes years and is difficult. I’d liken learning languages to learning to play a musical instrument: The earlier you start the better, it takes diligent practice for everyone but some people pick it up quicker than others, and you’re never really done learning it. But I want to make a case for the advantages of moving to a place that speaks a different language, based on a phenomenon I’ve observed but never heard talked about: When you learn a foreign language and come into a country that speaks that language as an educated foreigner, you have a certain whiff of mystery about you that gives you more authority than you may actually have. Sometimes, I think I benefit from that in France – but France is known for adopting foreign artists so it’s not that surprising. I’ve seen this even in the rather less open environment of the Czech Republic, though: some foreigners, who learned Czech, are liked and taken seriously there in ways that their local counterparts, with the same talent, are not. Basically, I think the advantage stems from standing out a little by having an accent and a different background while also showing respect to the local culture by learning a language. I think all that gives you a social boost. It’s also easier to shed your past hang-ups when you’re forced to move within a different language – you’re forced to speak more directly, more simply. Sometimes the limitation of speaking a foreign languages can even make you a better communicator. So, there – that’s my case for learning foreign languages, even if you speak English and have the disadvantage of being able to depend on people speaking your language in most places.

I should also say that changing context takes preparation, even beyond the years you need to put in to learn a foreign language – but you may already be preparing right now without even knowing it. Looking back, I can see that I had been laying the groundwork to be exactly where I found myself in France, for a long time. Though I had followed a very traditional opera-singer path once I returned to the Czech Republic, I had been interested in experimental music theatre and in the idea of creating my own shows for some time – a seed of that was planted even before I returned to the Czech Republic, because I had always liked collaborating with the composition department and even took a year of composition classes in undergrad. Right after the pandemic, I attended a masterclass in contemporary music at the John Cage House in Halberstadt and was exposed to very new repertoire there, which opened my mind to new ways of thinking about music and drama and, back in the Czech Republic, I did get to collaborate on some interdisciplinary projects, created with dancers and visual artists, and I drew from these experiences when pitching my own project for the school in Lyon. After attending the John Cage Institute, I started doing a lot of my own reading about experimental music theatre, which was a whole new world for me, and connected with a professor at the drama school in Prague who had written the only book about music theatre in Czech and who ended up helping me prepare a little for the audition in Lyon. I had also wanted to move to France, specifically, for a long time – Lyon was not even my first attempt. I had gotten into the last round of an audition for the Artist Diploma at the Paris high conservatory some five years before but wasn’t accepted. Even after that, I continued to work on my French, without having a concrete reason to speak it, because I somehow sensed I wanted to keep that door open, was really pulled in that direction. 

So, what I’m saying is, you might find that you are already laying the groundwork to open certain doors in more distant places – there are languages you’ve learned or want to learn, parallel skills you’ve developed, people you’ve met from different countries, places that have always drawn you. Those are instincts you can follow – you can think of them as your call to adventure. 

In a way, this is also about the archetypal hero’s journey, the one we’re all on. This is another concept used by Carl Jung, whom I mentioned in relation to shadow-work in the last episode. The hero – which is to say all of us – has to answer a call to adventure, which involves leaving home, journeying into the unknown, and then coming back home, transformed, armed with some new wisdom or tool. Of course, we live this story of answering a call to adventure, leaving home, and then coming back transformed many times in many different ways, sometimes in parallel. For example, I was called to the adventure of going home to the Czech Republic in order to find out I still have journeying to do out in the world. Later, I might experience another return home. Perhaps I’ll return to the Czech Republic, able to offer something that other people will want, this time. Many, if not most, artists have taken that rout – whether it’s leaving a small town, moving to the big city, or disappearing into another country and language completely. 

So, the question is: What journey is calling to you? 

This is the note I want to end the season on: The idea of venturing out into the unknown. 

Over the course of 9 episodes, I’ve laid out some problems and offered some ideas based on what I learned on my own journey. Now I feel I need to get back on the road and learn some more. During that time, Classically (Un)Trained may transform, temporarily or permanently, into something else – I might do smaller written updates but I’m also laying the groundwork for an online exchange network for performers who are on their own unique journeys to find out how to proceed as artists in the 21st century. I’ll let you know more about that as it develops. 

I’d like to end with a re-cap of the season – which might either jog your memory or inspire you to listen to more of the podcast. The first part of the season leaves you with a set of questions: 

Episode 1: What is the value of the performing arts? In other words: Why should this podcast – and your career – exist at all? 

Episode 2: What’s wrong with the classical performing arts education system and 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, as a performer, can you be a service provider – even while keeping the door open to being an employee or product? 

The second part of the season, which was the last three episodes, were structured around “you, with who, and where.” That is the trifecta of a creative career – you start with your own skills, then go to relationships with others, and that to the broader context of your location. I tried to incorporate the criticism I got about the first part of the season being too pessimistic by focusing these last three episodes more on possibility and opportunity: 

Episode 7: How it’s possible to become the performer you need to be through professional performing experience – even if that means changing what you perform, first

Episode 8: How collaboration and networking can be honest and principled, rather than a game of manipulation – and how that pays off in the long term 

Episode 9: How you can find your value by simply changing your context 

Like I’ve said before, I’m suspicious of self-help or inspirational content but I sometimes find myself going down that path, simply because it’s hard to write a podcast like this without a sprinkling of advice. The truth is – I do not believe I really have any answers. What I might be good at is asking the right questions, structuring arguments, and being able to articulate things others might already be feeling or thinking. I created this podcast simply because it’s content I would have liked to have a little earlier in life. I would have wanted to be given permission to step outside the standard path as a performer, earlier. And I can’t possibly be alone in that. So, I created Classically (Un)Trained for a younger self, in a way, and, hopefully, putting all these thoughts in one place can help someone find their path just a little sooner. 

Footnotes & Sources

I’d actually just like to point you to two podcasts which talk about the Jungian idea of the hero’s journey: This Jungian Life (obviously) but also the biggest podcast in the “advice for artists” space Creative Pep Talk.