Changed For Good

 When covid hit and we were faced with the bizarre reality of being confined to our homes none of us could have guessed quite how long those "strange times" would last. When the theatres went dark in March 2020 it's hard to recall now that there was a belief that they'd be closed for a couple weeks, whereas of course in reality those weeks quickly turned to months. I remember the excitement of taking my children to watch a drive-in Dinosaur show after months of nothing. As my children looked on in amazement and wonderment I distinctly remember sitting in the driving seat shedding a 'happy tear' just to watch a company of actors being able to work again.

Even though this is very much our recent history it already feels like a lifetime ago that I was in my kitchen doing the homeschooling with my eldest prior to rushing online to check in with the college. I remember telling one of my students who was struggling with the lockdown that once it was all over, it would be like returning home from touring - it would be like we'd never been away. Normal life would just trundle on as it always does we'd just be a bit more knowledgeable about ourselves, as anything away from the ordinary is bound to influence our future self.

As I've said before I'm writing a book about The MTA at the moment, and it's fascinating sketching out the pandemic chapter - how quickly we all adapted and changed in a bid to ensure that no time was lost.

Of course, the reality is that covid is still very present, whether it's a random positive test, a reminder to wear your mask in certain settings, or for so many people the debilitating legacy of long covid symptoms lingering on like a bad memory unable to be 'filed' away as finished. Recently I was chatting to someone that was telling me quite how many friends they've lost recently, friends that prior to covid were young and healthy. For many the explosion of sudden deaths fits nicely into the anti-vax rhetoric, it feeds the paranoia that the pandemic left the world with. Of course in reality (and according to multiple peer-reviewed papers now), the reasons for the excess deaths are somewhat complex. A mixture of a global population that was exposed to a deadly virus (it was never a bad cold), leaving more people than we realise with ticking time bombs as the virus goes for one more mutation, plus a global population that stopped routine appointments, meaning that early warning symptoms have been missed.

2 years on our industry is struggling to find its way forward as I wrote about a few months back. Pre-covid the thought of a show being cancelled was just unthinkable. The adage "the show must go on" was our lived reality, post covid though there are no such guarantees. Even at the college level of producing shows it was terrifying how quickly things could change.  All of The MTA's shows since March 2020 were hit in one way or another by a covid outbreak and each time it gave me sleepless nights trying to work out the logistics. . . and that's without the pressure of needing to break even, so hats off to all producers muddling through this strange time.

As the UK lurks from one crisis to another though there's one thing that's struck me recently - how so many people and indeed so many organisations didn't actually "evolve" during the past 2 years, and how right up to the government there appears to have been a naive belief that we would all simply recalibrate back to a pre-pandemic time.  I'm bemused how so many people have missed the evolution and therefore have failed to plan for it.

Take our industry - the constant cancelling of shows has a profound knock-on effect on our audiences. Even as somebody in the industry I hesitate now to book a ticket too far in advance, I'd rather wait and take my chance on the day that I want to go, yet in making this choice I'm also mindful that there are producers needing to see an advance ticket sale. I'm assuming that time and time alone will restore a much needed equilibrium to this, but I also wonder whether from hereonin the show won't go on? 

Whilst our perceived reality pre-2020 was that things were somewhat fixed eg you'd book a holiday and assume that your flight would happen, we now find ourselves in a world full of uncertainty, and I'm curious how that permeates throughout society. 

Speaking recently to some business owners I was struck by their optimism that things would "soon get back to normal" but they seemed to have missed the point entirely that normal in 2022 has a different complexion from normal 2019. It should be noted that not all the changes are bad, take zoom life for example, the fact that the pandemic normalised video conference calls as opposed to traipsing here, there and everywhere for meetings that often took a fifth of the time to travel to places is revolutionary for personal time management. As a parent of young children the normalisation of hybrid working is a game changer, but I can also recognise that this change has the potential to change the city landscape for good.

We lived online for over a year - that is bound to change us all. I've definitely noticed that my concentration span is much shorter these days. I sense myself metaphorically scrolling through information said in person to me with a sense of undue urgency. With online life comes the pros and cons of social media, the artificial divide that's created when we all unwittingly believe a truth just because somebody wrote it down and posted it.

What will it mean for the training industry this fast-scroll life that now exists as a shop window to dance and drama training. Well I think that we've already seen a shift. It's no coincidence that some of the newer colleges that hit the ground running with their brilliant social media campaigns of commercial videos have done considerably better than the "old guard" colleges over recent years. The rapid growth of quite a few of them has been fascinating to watch. As with all these things only time will tell if they're actually any good. It'll be interesting to see their stats over the next few years to find out the quality of that growth. Alternatively of course there's my other theory that elite training is on its way out, and bulk "life training" is on its way in. When training hundreds at a time there will always be enough clickbait to mute the fact that the majority of students don't do that well. 

As for waiting for things to settle down and go back to "normal" though. . .we all have to accept that "normal" has always been a moveable point.

So. . . I now run an online college?

The MTA's strange academic year worked out well in terms of the CoronaVirus lockdown. We were incredibly lucky that we managed to complete our 5 performance run of our flagship revue show - Something Old, Something New.  Whilst it's important to note that it's not our Showcase, it is an important production to start introducing our graduating year to the industry.

However, our timeframe did mean that we were able to chat with our students before we ended the term and reassure them in person about how we were going to run an online college if the UK did follow the rest of the world and get put into lockdown. We were even able to chat through roughly how it might work.  We were lucky - 2 days later that's exactly what started to happen. Even though we were then on holiday I did a quick live stream to our private group to remind them not to panic as we'd already spoken about what would happen.


I don't know about anybody else, but I must confess I never had a backup pandemic plan up my sleeve ready for a global shutdown, and with no tech department to help me, I think that I undertook the biggest learning curve of my life (and I thought that I'd already made that journey when I opened the 'real' college 11 years ago). However, I had just 2 weeks to create The MTA Online. One of the things that I felt would work in my favour was that when I created 'the other MTA' back in 2008 I had consciously created a course that I could run and monitor remotely. The idea being that after the college was up and running I could go back on tour and continue to run the college in between my 'real work' as an MD*. The college has a policy that all staff have to be currently working, so the online infrastructure was actually already in place and part of our everyday life.  Our classnote system is online, the timetable is online, there's not a day that goes by where we're not communicating with them via private groups, etc. So it was just the actual teaching to sort out <gulp>

So then it was hitting each problem in order of urgency. The priority was to ensure that all the agent 1:1 auditions could at least be offered in an online format.  So I first made friends with Zoom. What a fast-moving world we all live in isn't it? Suddenly we're all speaking about meeting up in zoom, yet most of us had no bloody clue about it before the pandemic.

The majority of agencies immediately agreed to move their auditions with our graduates online, so that was my first relief moment. We wanted to reassure the students as quickly as possible (even though they don't graduate until September I was aware that they were seeing all the #UK2020grad posts going up which were bound to make them anxious even though they were not in the same position as those graduates that had lost their showcase), so back I went online to live stream some more reassurance. I felt that it was important to be 'present' as opposed to just posting notices.

The next job - was to move our 100% vocational course online.  Finally, after a few years of really fighting against the 'establishment' because I've refused to turn our course into a formal qualification (because our industry is vocational and therefore it's the training that's important not the piece of paper in terms of getting you into the audition room), The MTA came into its own. We could literally rewrite the course to ensure that this would be a valuable term for our students. I was so mindful that they were still paying their fees so I had an obligation to give them value for money albeit in a different way. I was also mindful that our industry had literally had the rug pulled from under it. The MTA has a faculty of very loyal freelancers - the very people that had completely lost their income. So I wanted to try and help to support as many of them as possible too. After all, a college is only as strong as its students AND faculty.  I felt that there was a moral obligation to try to help (if possible)

So emails were sent out explaining that we were going online, and if they wanted to continue to teach for us, they needed to work out how to run online classes. My only stipulation was that the classes had to be interactive. I felt that videoed classes wouldn't allow us to watch and correct the students in real-time, and therefore not achieve the aims of the course which would, in turn, impact the progression that we needed the students to make this term (pandemic or not)

Suddenly I had an entire faculty on the learning curve with me. With that cog working away in the background next up we had to move our auditions online for our 2020 intake. Once again I didn't see the value of them sending in a self-tape as we wanted to work with them, we wanted to interact with them. The MTA's whole day audition is all about getting to know the people, not just the talent. Cue several senior faculty zoom meetings as we worked out how best to run the online audition. Suddenly lockdown was our friend, as when we needed volunteers to help us work it out we were never short of students and graduates willing to pop into the 'virtual' room to help us try out our latest idea.  A plan was formed, the auditionees were notified and before we knew it my senior faculty and myself were all in a virtual room with several complete strangers.

This turned out to be our lightbulb day though. Whilst for sure there were limitations online, it also offered up so many great things. In many ways, we actually preferred the online audition, and it's certainly going to prompt a serious discussion once the dust has settled about how we audition people moving forward. We already offer a free online first-round audition in a bid to save people money, maybe there's a way to move the main audition online permanently - saving them a fortune in travel & often accommodation. Maybe we could offer both options? I don't know. . . but definitely watch this space.

Having experienced a few hours in the 'virtual' college, we all started to realise that there were endless possibilities that we could explore. The MTA does a 50/50 stage/screen split anyway, so actually working with a lens between us offers us lots of opportunities to explore. We live in a world where more and more auditions are via self-tapes. What an amazing chance we had to really focus on all of this stuff.

The dance staff met up and all were confident that they could offer worthwhile online dance classes, voice, and acting were easy to transfer online. Strangely enough, singing was the hardest area, as whilst 1:1 singing lessons could happen with ease, group singing is just not feasible in our 4G world.  After much asking around it seemed like my only option was for the students to mute their mics and sing to a screen? Our students are not singing for pleasure, they are singing to enhance their skill set, we're looking at the nuances of group singing. They might have been blending beautifully, their harmony line might have been divine - but the tutor would never know. However, we did know that the 1:1 stuff worked really well.

Still on holiday we had another live-streamed chat with our students (& graduates. . . as we have a college for life policy and therefore I needed to check in with them too), and as part of our 'checking in with your mental health' chat, we were chatting about what people could do during this lockdown, and lots of people started chatting about learning to play 'that instrument' that has sat in their room for years but they've never had the time to learn it. Cue the next idea. We are not an actor-muso course, nor do we aspire to be, however we all know that instrumental skills are incredibly useful to a performer. So a quick check who could gain access to a guitar to check that my plan would be worth it - and suddenly 75% of the college are now having weekly guitar lessons. Learning in streamed groups expect to see something spectacular at next year's revue (she jokes, but not really).  Then a group came to me as they had access to a keyboard, could we teach them how to play the piano? We're currently putting this in place.

In our senior faculty meeting, we were chatting about the fact that literally, everybody was available right now - so we should try to get some good Q&As and masterclasses going, as they'd work well with this format. It would also mean that our students always had something to look forward to. Days and weeks of lockdown monotony were going to hit hard. We needed to offer them something to be excited about. What an amazing opportunity this online term was going to offer us. Of course, being online meant that we weren't limited to UK guests - so off I hopped over to Broadway (virtually of course), and with the help of our friends, we suddenly found ourselves with one hell of a term. Q&As with film directors, Dexter Fletcher & Joe Wright, writer David Eldridge returns to the college, masterclasses with Cassidy Janson & Annalene Beechey, Q&As with Broadway stars Claybourne Elder, Laura Osnes, Julia Murney, Kara Lindsay, with West End stars Adam Garcia and Louise Dearman, plus meetings with producers, casting directors, resident directors AND a private screening of the Desperately Seeking The Exit thanks to the ever marvelous Peter Michael Marino. . . and. . . well, who knows? 

We're on day 3 and already we've discovered new things, but again because we're completely independent we can implement new ideas within hours. From an 'oh no' term, we're seeing our Pandemic Term as an 'OMG we could do this too...  .' sort of term.

My virtual office stays open for a while after regular classes, so students and graduates can pop in if they're struggling or just to say hello. Our mental health clinician is still available to the entire college 24/7/365 and is of course now just offering online or phone sessions, but it does mean that our lot (& staff) have instant access to a mental health professional if the lockdown is particularly hard for them. 

So that's it, within the space of just 2 weeks . . . I now run an online college. I sit in mission control for hours on end looking at screens, opening up zoom rooms, and planning. What else can we do? Maybe I'll revisit this blog at the end of the Pandemic Term to see if it was really as exciting as we currently think that it's got the potential to be.

Stay safe all 

*this never happened. Turns out running a college is really busy