The 7 Stages of Grief - Covid style

Over the past few days, my timeline appears to be flooded with people in our industry genuinely struggling and feeling afraid for their future. The human cost of COVID is heartbreaking, the emotional cost of the pandemic though would have changed the lives of millions forever.

In many ways COVID was the great equaliser, regardless of our careers to date in the industry this microscopic germ floored us all from producers to runners, from the established stars to the new graduates, suddenly the playing field was level. However, that in itself has transpired to be unsettling.

1) SHOCK AND DISBELIEF

For the first few weeks, we were all in shock and huddled indoors reeling at the fact that our lives had turned into a SciFi movie, suddenly we were all extras in Russell T Davies' Years and Years, a programme that we'd all admired for its exceptional writing and exquisite performances by top-rate performers, yet suddenly like all of the people involved in that show, we too were all suddenly at ground zero.

I don't think that anybody in their wildest dreams could have envisaged a time when every theatre in the world would go dark?  It's no wonder we survived the first month. We were too numb to do anything else

2) DENIAL

Then came the posts where people declared cheerfully that this was almost a good thing as it would allow all of us to stop being defined by our careers after all this was an industry that had been bleeding us dry for years anyway, so we'd been given the opportunity to reboot 'life'.  A few people put out content, but the majority either stayed silent or felt the need to explain to everybody why they weren't able to put out content. Of course, in reality, we were all attempting to deal with the reality in whatever way we could. It was actually called survival, not creation.  Shows started to stream and we all bathed in the reflected glory of our friends in these shows. There were beginning to be some pluses to this mess after all. Free theatre to the masses - it was the socialist dream realised, and as we all know, most of our industry love the idea of a free theatre (even if we've failed to make it a viable concern as we've also all wanted a fair salary for the work that we do too). 

3) GUILT

However as the weeks turned to months and things slowly restarted our industry, the industry that we all believed was so vital to the health of our nation suddenly didn't matter.  Our fans appetite was being sufficiently sated by the online streaming going on, yet as Joe Public sat and enjoyed the performances, the performers and technicians were just stuck at home, not earning and not even hearing the applause that was no doubt going on in various places around the country. That same applause that actually seems to lift us up regardless of our mood, the sound that generally speaking makes us feel worthy. Self-validation is vital but the sound of applause is something different isn't it? The joy of watching our friends had somehow turned hollow and we were simply being reminded of what we had lost. We don't talk about this much but let's face it, the sound of strangers appreciating our work is the greatest drug of all. A drug that lifts us up when we feel like life is hard, that gives us an adrenaline rush so massive that many performers feel the need to artificially recreate its effects long after the curtain has come down. Well, times were certainly hard, and our 'drug of choice' just wasn't available anywhere, more than that it was now against the guidance of the government to partake in it.

4) ANGER AND BARGAINING 

As 1 month turned into 3 months and there was still no real sign of recovery for our sector, and with so many people financially struggling having fallen down the massive cracks that the treasury had created in its DIY fix of the economic crises that was the secondary disease that the country was attempting to fight, you could see people on social media losing themselves more and more.

An appallingly unjust death in the States provided the release that everybody needed.  Finally, there was a worthwhile cause to utilise all the anger and feelings of injustice that we had all been feeling. Of course, we couldn't get that angry for our own issues, as part of the problem with a global pandemic is everybody understands on one level that we actually don't know where to place the blame that we're so desperate to park up. Where do you locate the anger? We were finally able to truly bargain an explanation out of this mess. We might have felt like we were lost, but some much needed social change could grow from this anger.  This was our chance to turn the nightmare into something positive. It was like releasing the steam from a pressure cooker for a cause that most people had no doubt believed in over the years (as that is the white privileged position of choosing when to get involved in the fight for equality)

Suddenly years of niggles about everything rather unfairly in many ways diluted the main fight, relegating it some 4 months on to a well-intentioned occasional social media post again as we all got swept away into a tsunami of what felt like validated pain. 

Now that the anger was being released we got angry about literally everything and we made sure that everybody heard us (all with the hashtag #bekind). We were angry at people putting content out, we got angry at people putting positive messages out, we were angry at people saying that they were struggling, we were angry at the other industries starting back, we turned on each other as we couldn't actually scream at patient zero, the person who unwittingly started off this catastrophic chain reaction. We couldn't sit with the anger of a pandemic as that was too huge, so we turned to the minutiae of life and suddenly shouted about all the little (but important) things that have impacted us during our lives. Things that under normal circumstances we would have brushed off by now, but with nothing else to focus on for months it was time to revisit them and shout about it. We couldn't get positive strokes from an audience, but we could get a social media validation for our feelings online.

5) DEPRESSION

We've shouted and screamed albeit it virtually, in a bid to be seen and remind people that we exist as an industry, yet we've wept when we've seen the outside of the theatres converted into outside dining areas for a hospitality trade that had been suffering every bit as hard as us, but who were already permitted to go back to work. Talk about salt in the wounds.

The inevitable loss of jobs has been hard-hitting, literally every day an announcement about a theatre or a company that has had no choice but to make sweeping redundancies in the hope that this will save their business from going under. We've wept for the buildings and our memories in them, and we've wept for the people that are left stranded out in the street, weaponised with an enviable skill set but for an industry that doesn't exist.

We hear a lot about people thinking that they should retrain and move onto something else. I mean the industry has never been easy anyway, you could be waiting years for a job (literally). However, that was manageable (just) when there were clearly jobs happening. You could see the 'dream' happening for others every single day, and for many, that's enough to keep going for. If it could happen for 'them' it could happen for 'you', you've just got to hold tight and survive until it was your turn. Now though it was nobody's turn. We weren't even seeing 'what we could have won'. 

We hit the depression stage with a thud. This is different to clinical depression, it's a feeling of abject loneliness looking into an abyss, even when you're surrounded by your loved ones.  Suddenly this all feels far too big, and we are all left feeling so small and insignificant. The public are getting on with things and we've turned into Mr Cellophane. 

There are very few people in our industry that have not been told by somebody in their lives that what we do is just a hobby. I've been a professional musician for 36 years and my father still wants me to get a proper job. Suddenly the government's response to our sector has felt like every bad taxi ride conversation we've ever had.

6) RECONSTRUCTION AND WORKING THROUGH

Some 4 months later we were permitted to do outside performances. Producers and performers alike were quick to seize on this glimmer of hope. Would people want to come back to the theatre again? Had they missed us? Shows were slowly emerging, filming had restarted, jobs were appearing. Finally, theatres could open again, of course not like before, but open to try and work out how to survive this mid pandemic limbo that we find ourselves in. 

So I guess that's where lots of people are right now, which is why it's particularly tough. In order to work through this period, we're all going to have to adjust what our plans were. A temporary career to financially see us through this period? Possibly retraining in something to build up a skillset in another area. Of course, lots of us have said for years that this would have been a good idea, suddenly though it's the only idea. That's rather scary when you know that you're only really good at the one thing. . . our industry.

We are a vocational industry, our work defines us just like we define our work. That's not to say that the industry is driving us to early graves and abusing us along the way, for so many of us this is our hobby as well as our career. I don't know much about civvy street, maybe bankers feel the same about their job - though I suspect not.

We've always been the outsiders that somehow found our 'tribes'. This alone made us feel safe and contained even without putting a show into the mix. It's hard to feel the benefit of that tribe when everyone is struggling at the same time. You see it online - who's going to pick who up today?

7) ACCEPTANCE 

Well right now this is the aim I guess. We get on with doing whatever we need to do to survive, breathe and just know that in time theatre will return. Fast forward a few years and we might be able to look back on this disaster as a catalyst for real meaningful change in the world, and if we can't then I guess we just have to accept the fact that we tried, and we tried whilst surviving the most bizarre thing imaginable.

It's important to go through a process to survive this period as best that we can. We were right to be numb, sad, angry, bitter, remorseful, optimistic . . . just 'being' right now is enough. Suddenly we are all survivors

Teaching In The Zoom Where It Happens

So a while back I wrote this blog about how, like so many other Principals, I suddenly found myself in charge of an online college. 

We're now about to enter the final week of our first online term so it seems like a pertinent time to reflect on the next part of the journey, especially as it looks somewhat inevitable that our next term will also be forced to be online (at least for one of our year groups anyway).

I think that what's surprised all of us the most is quite how much you can actually successfully teach online. We've seen students making huge strides in both their dance & singing techniques. Of course, everybody misses those great traveling exercises that only a dance studio can accommodate, but what we hadn't bargained for was a more independent learning style. I don't think that many people are consciously following the front line in a dance class, but it's a bit like harmony singing isn't it, you can work on that old satellite delay system, being a nanosecond behind the people that are finding the exercises easy and metaphorically being dragged through the class by them. Just like in a group choral rehearsal you might not be quite on top of your game, but sit surrounded by people singing the same part as you and somehow you can cling on by your fingertips - kidding yourself that you know your harmony line a lot more than you really do. 

Remote learning means that you are totally reliant on your own learning style and indeed your own learning resources. Sadly though it also means that you're denied the group cheer at that long-awaited breakthrough that you've been working towards. Similarly, you're denied the knowing look at your mate when somebody does that thing that you both celebrate (or indeed both get annoyed at). No teacher is naive enough to think that students don't moan about them in private, so when your tutor does that thing that they always do that annoys you more than it really should, remote learning also denies you a moment of solidarity with your fellow tolerators of that thing.

We were all concerned that we wouldn't be able to work on singing without being so hands-on so to speak. Masterclasses almost always rely on the workshop leader being able to get 'stuck in' and either clearly demonstrate what they mean or manhandle you (with your permission) to gently prod and poke the bits that they want you to work on or be aware of.  Online singing lessons also miss the collaboration of a pianist working with the singer. Suddenly you're forced to use backing tracks as latency is the common enemy.

Strange to think that latency has become an everyday word since the pandemic took off. It used to be the bain of every musician's life. Those of us of a certain age and with limited technical knowledge have been reminded of a time in history where we were setting up our midi systems dreading how we were going to solve the latency problem with notation software. Sibelius and I have had many strong arguments about this very topic.  Then suddenly the software and the IT caught up with each other and the 'latency issue' disappeared. . . until COVID that was, and the advent of the zoom room. I felt like I was time-warped back to the early '90s as I despaired at the realisation that there was no way to successfully accompany somebody online.  Then suddenly like everything else you learn to find the positives in the situation and you learn to teach in a different way.

I think that all teachers should be applauded as they've grappled the limitations of remote training, whilst grappling at the same time their own emotions about the world stopping. Teachers would check in regularly to see if the students were OK whilst simultaneously trying to manage their own anxieties and concerns. Good staff/student boundaries should mean that a faculty's personal difficulties don't creep into the zoom as part of the job is helping your students to feel contained. Of course in reality during these strange times, everybody needs containing, but students will of course be consumed with their own feelings. The downside of the boundary issue is indeed the fact that students seldom think outside of their own experience (nor should they, as that's what college is about for them). Teaching prep time increased substantially I believe. Partly because we could no longer do it the way that we'd been doing it for years, but also because options like screen sharing gave us more opportunities to do things differently.

Around the world, we've seen performances move into the digital era. There's the bog-standard streaming of a theatrical event, but there's also been space to develop a live performance element online. Looking around on social media it's been fascinating to read what every college has been attempting to do. Of course, none of us will ever know how successful any of us have been with our innovations because none of us would be tweeting that we tried XYZ and it was a disaster, whereas in reality to find out what will work online we will all have to have numerous disasters.

I was due to have a new musical premiered in September, obviously, that's been scrapped now, but I'm about to embark on co-writing an online musical. My regular collaborator Nick Stimson and I are both really excited to explore this area, but also very realistic about the success of such a project as a first attempt. The MTA 1st years will be the guinea pigs as of course at this stage of their training it's the process that's actually vitally important for personal growth, not the finished production. So we have a tacet get out of jail free card if the end result doesn't deliver as much as our excitement around the project would lead us to believe. Meanwhile, I live in hope that once all of this goes back to theatre as we know it, we will keep a vibrant digital theatre scene going too, so it feels pertinent to get our next set of graduates prepped in this area.

However all is not great in the zoom, and we would be wrong to kid ourselves.  All good drama colleges would pride themselves on keeping a safe space, a space where students can express themselves freely without fear. Drama college is a unique little place where somehow you end up divulging so much more than you really meant to, however you generally make those self-disclosures in a studio. A space governed by rules solely designed to keep you safe.

Zoom is impossible to monitor and impossible to be a safe space. Firstly there's the obvious thing you just don't know who's listening. If you're at home with partners, friends, families, or whoever, they could easily be listening to your classes. Of course, there's the nice by-product of this that parents suddenly see for themselves how hard drama training is. I mean if I didn't live in 'this world' and my child was having to train at home I'd be in every class interested to find out more about what it is that they do. Therefore you're obliged to keep reminding students that it's their responsibility to keep themselves safe, don't say anything that they wouldn't want out in the ether as public information. That's not to say that people are eavesdropping, but there's just an inevitability of working from home and for lots of people just a practical limitation. How many homes have that spare room ready to be enlisted as a temporary remote drama college? 

The thing that we hadn't bargained for though was the lack of nonverbal communication that could be transmitted through the zoom box. Of course, you're only really seeing the head and shoulders of all the participants. For those of you of a certain age just think Celebrity Squares. This also means though that you can't see what anybody's arms/hands are doing, whilst you see the eyelines darting discretely to something/somebody else within the square. You can see a wry smile that you know is incongruent with the current discussion (even taking latency into account). In other words, zoom rooms unwittingly facilitate multiple conversations. Some of which will be in the zoom, but in this age of WhatsApp and Facebook groups and indeed simple messaging, some of them will be private conversations taking place simultaneously with the class but out of view of the teacher.

This of course means that no zoom can be safe - unless you ask your students to take all classes with their hands above their heads (and believe me I did think about it several times). Of course, when you're a student you have absolute knowledge (I mean what do staff really know anyway?), you feel somewhat smart at working out that you can have a private conversation in a public zoom, you're confident in your multi-tasking ability, so have no fear of that moment of when your name is called you, you've managed to keep up enough to answer appropriately, however you bypass the bit of the equation that equals trust eroded. It's OK when you're in the middle of the conversation, but what if besides your conversation there are other private conversations taking place? The friends that are so active in your private conversation could actually be conducting another couple of private conversations that you're not part of, after all, most of us if we're lucky have a friend for all occasions. Do you know what I mean?

I have my friends that I can call on if I need to talk through an everyday problem, I have other friends that I can call on if it's a deeply personal problem, they there are the people that I chat aimlessly to just because they make me laugh and cheer me up. My world is richer for having all these 'resources' at my disposal to support me, so why wouldn't I bring them all into online college with me? What harm could it possibly do? Of course, the harm is potentially huge. The pandemic took away our industry overnight, it took away our way of life overnight, the world is already feeling very unsafe. The people that usually guide us through these 'new bits' of life are the grown-ups, our parents, and teachers, but for the first time ever we were all attempting to navigate something for the first time. So an unsafe world with no safety net. . . great! Young people forging their way through into adulthood suddenly found themselves back in their childhood bedrooms. It's not great though is it? When you're already feeling vulnerable you now also know that other conversations are taking place so blatantly behind your back (even when you're a part of it) leaving you completely and utterly exposed.

Like most colleges, I should imagine we have grappled with this issue most of the term. What I realised for the first time is that it's actually the students that create a safe space, not the teacher. For sure the teacher can set out the rules of the room, and it's their job to uphold them, however, it only works successfully when every student buys into it 100%. As soon as somebody breaks rank the tutor is helpless. None of us (I don't think) would allow students to keep their mobiles out and on during a regular class. Imagine the chaos. Students snap chatting away as you attempted to keep a disciplined safe space - however zoom rooms take the ability to monitor a room completely away from the teacher and rely on the students to take full responsibility for their actions. We've all been students. If we're being honest with ourselves we know that that is an impossible ask.

I heard a colleague making a plea the other day for all students at online colleges to remember the word respect as staff are still putting in the hours to teach them, they hadn't had the luxury of checking out during the pandemic. So this particular beef was around the level of attendance at classes and the sudden lack of notification about that absence. It's like the global lockdown had eradicated all the common decency rules of collaboration that we used to take for granted. We couldn't really challenge the sudden rudeness as we're conscious that everybody is struggling, so you have to give a bit of leeway, but how much? Where do you draw the line between understanding the difficulties but also understanding that no college could operate successfully without ground rules?

So does online college work? I think that the honest answer is that for lots of disciplines it actually could, but it would take a lot more personal responsibility from everybody for that to happen, and in truth, I don't think that that would be possible. 

You can keep up a skillset though, and indeed progress, but college is about so much more than a skillset. It's about hanging out and talking nonsense with your friends. It's about that opportunistic meeting with a tutor which prompts you to ask 'that question' that you've been puzzling about for a while. It's about a spontaneous dialogue, not a formal lecture. It's about giving your mate a hug when they did something brilliant or seeing a friend having a hard time and being able to take them for a coffee and a quiet chat. Those corridor conversations are the lifeblood of a successful environment.

I suspect that technology will soon catch up with the need to be more fluid. Most of us hadn't clocked before March that we couldn't create music together online, but now that we've noted the problem, I'm confident that somebody is currently working on the latency issue in order to resolve it. 

I question whether in time pandemic or not, more things will move online (or at this rate, stay online), but until things return to normal, we just have a responsibility to keep growing within the medium, and try to make it work as best as possible to ensure safe professional and personal growth for our students and indeed for ourselves - after all these ongoing issues make the staff every bit as vulnerable as the students. 

Mental Illness is more than just depression

Last year I was really honoured to be asked to give one of the keynote speeches at Equity's first ArtsMind Symposium. I had been invited to discuss the journey that I had been on whilst initiating the #time4change Mental Health Charter, and I also got to discuss the highs and lows of running a college that is taking a whole school approach to mental health.

BAPAM had recently published their consultation paper about the mental health difficulties our industry faces and had also made some recommendations about a more productive and helpful way to move forward. Interestingly they were recommending a whole school approach as the most effective, and also discussed the possibility of moving towards a clinician lead system in drama colleges.  The MTA has only ever operated with such a system, so it was interesting to discuss the realities of this (The MTA now being in its 11th year). The synopsis was this really - early intervention is key, and by getting our community to understand that mental health is no different to physical health, we could help to prevent or decrease a personal mental health crisis. See the physio when you first suspect that there's an injury, and you're more likely to make a quicker (and often stronger) recovery, see a mental health specialist when you first recognise some symptoms and the same rules apply.  The difficulty being of course that most of us recognise early signs of physical illnesses, but very few of us recognise early signs of mental illnesses. Indeed that was the entire point of the charter - to get those symptoms (and maladaptive coping mechanisms) more widely known.

Within my speech though I also spoke at length at how I felt that the mental health conversation had gotten sideswiped by the conversation around wellbeing.  I noted that having campaigned for 6 years to have a more honest conversation about mental health, somehow in the past year or so the conversation had been sanitised. As great as it was to see more and more people recognising their own struggles and indeed naming them as part of their process, or as a way to get 'the message' out there, the conversation had taken an interesting diversion, and one which I felt wasn't particularly helpful.

Mental Health had somehow turned into Wellbeing and in doing so we had lost Mental Illnesses within the discussion. A social media statement about a bad anxiety day usually turned into a list of people saying that it would be OK, that they were around if that person needed somebody to talk to, or people just sharing their own mental health struggles in a bid I suspect to show the original poster that they were not alone. What I noted though was that it was unusual to see a possible solution in the replies. It was rare to see a response asking whether the person had checked in with their doctor. For a surprisingly large number of mental illnesses, you can expect to live in a symptom-free world. Yet the answers to the posts didn't have that expectation or offer up that hope.

Wellbeing was everywhere. For every great mental health article there would be one stating that the 'cure' was much simpler than people realised. One of my students actually wrote a great ranting post about how if it really was as simple as eating a healthier diet (for example), don't you think that they would have tried it? The reality was much harsher, and by 'helpfully' sharing the Daily Mail's latest take on 'How to cure depression' they were actually unwittingly sharing a belief that mental illnesses were avoidable. That it was a weakness of the person, as opposed to a genetic, chemical or environmental cause.

Then somebody else pointed out to me the dangers of these articles. For somebody who is seriously unwell and who has potentially lost their grasp on reality, reading all these 'cures' was actually feeding the illness not satisfying a cure. As they limped from article to article believing that each one would 'make them feel OK', they were also getting more and more unwell.

I noted in my speech that we had completely whitewashed the ugly side of mental illness. How self-destructive it can be, how an illness can almost manipulate a person's personality to make decisions that they would never make when well. Some illness really do take over the person's personality - we've seen it time and time again at college, as people slowly alienate themselves from their friends because reality is moving further and further away from them. I could go on - but you get the picture.

Mental illnesses don't manifest themselves in the way that many people think. The critically depressed person isn't necessarily the one that's telling you that they're low - indeed they're more likely to be the one that's telling you that they're fine. Anxiety isn't just about feeling worried - the physical symptoms are often more debilitating. Basically what I'm saying is what we see on people's social media might be a manifestation of something rather serious going on for somebody, so maybe it's better to say nothing rather than piling on to tell whoever that they're damaging everybody else's mental health. Maybe right now they are so fragile we should just leave them be (as hard as that is).

Our words are powerful and whilst a statement can often feel like an empowering thing to do I wonder if it is? Report accounts to the relevant complaint handles then just block them. Don't go back to see what they've done 'this time' . . . walk away from it. Do we have to announce that we've blocked or reported someone? Do we have to encourage others to do the same? Could we all just use our own autonomy and trust that others will do the same? If it's really bad and you feel really strongly about it, could you sound your battle cry offline? Literally, the world is vulnerable right now, so it doesn't take much encouragement for us all to rush to 'protect' people or in our case an industry that is struggling. However, there's a difference between the lone warrior and the organised hate groups.

We are all throwing the 'Be Kind' hashtag around, whilst very often have forgotten to do the same ourselves. Many people will discuss the impact of a feud on their own mental health, but what 'if' the person that your fighting against is ill and you just don't recognise those symptoms? For sure even an ill person can take responsibility for their actions and their words (unless they're psychotic), but can you be sure that your response won't tip them over the edge? Is the defence of 'well they're not being kind' a valid excuse for us to stoop to their level?

Words matter right now probably more than ever. . . but remaining curious to the possibility of the ugly side of mental illness might make a big difference too.

Stay safe