Shouting into an echo chamber

When discussing the current unrest in the world somebody said to me the other week that things would definitely change this time because we now have social media raising awareness. It was said with utter belief and optimism that our timelines could change the world.  

If the current crises in our industry has taught me anything it's reaffirmed my long-held belief that we're all happy shouting about things in our own echo chambers. We don't actually want to be challenged on our beliefs and ideologies, do we? We want to put our thoughts out into the ether and have our 'followers' agree with us. What would a controversial posting be without people liking it and reposting it? The feeling of self-righteousness when we're reposted with a comment that supports our original idea can't be beaten. At that moment we've won the internet . . . well for an hour at least. 

It's not real though is it? We've been lulled into a false sense of security by choosing to follow like-minded people. My political views easily lean more towards the left than the right, and therefore my timeline is littered with like-minded people. Is that skewing my view of the world though, as I'm left thinking that everybody thinks the same as me, which is clearly incorrect, as Trump got elected and Brexit happened, both of which looked impossible given my timelines? 

The day that the results from the Brexit referendum came out my Facebook timeline was saturated with angry, sad people all reeling in disbelief. We (virtually) consoled each other and questioned how such a thing could have happened. Yet step outside your own timeline for a moment and you'll quickly discover that a parallel world has been running alongside it the whole time.

When the unthinkable happens and these two worlds cross paths (I've let go of the geometry analogy for a moment - don't judge me) we tend not to debate with the 'other side'. We shoot from the hip and attempt to shut them down adamant that we're right and they're wrong. They do exactly the same. We've lost the art of gentle persuasion and instead opted for shaming the difference. Then to compound this our mates all pile on thereby suffocating the argument whilst not actually changing their minds.

My timeline screams Black Lives Matter at the moment. I'm bombarded with graphic images of a world that I don't recognise, but a world that I'm determined to understand and attempt to change.  I read the threads of stories of personal experiences that leave me incredulous that friends and colleagues have had to experience such bias all because of their skin pigmentation (with centuries of oppression thrown in too of course), whilst I attempt to educate myself about their lives and their life experiences, lives very different to the world that I've inhabited. Yet I don't stop to think that for every one of 'us' there's one of 'them'. Somebody who is also reading those threads but seeing no wrong in them. I've attempted to chat to some of them online, but their side like ours simply shut down the debate with insults and hyperbole.

Currently, my timeline is also screaming with the cries of an industry going under. COVID didn't only target the vulnerable it targetted a number of industries - the arts being one of those. Shows closed, theatres went dark (except for the fabled Ghostlight), and an entire industry went into hibernation overnight. Nearly 4 months later there is no indication of that hibernation ending. Worse than that nobody except us seems to be talking about it. Yesterday the culture secretary made the first real public statement to mention us in passing. Rather alarmingly he was noting that he'd start to look at how he could help as he wouldn't let our culture just disappear, missing the fact that with each day we were slowly shedding our culture like a goose sheds its feathers, both of us grounded in time. Today a theatre goes dark, tomorrow a company folds, with each passing hour another person decides to leave the industry as their previously unsustainable world suddenly passes the threshold which renders it impossible. We're seeing major companies declaring that they've been forced into streamlining their operations in order to survive. 

I'm old enough to remember Thatcher's Britain. I lived through the coal strikes, the pit closures, the end of the steelworks, communities left in tatters by their hubs being dismantled seemingly before their very eyes. I'm the proud daughter of a steelworker. I saw first hand what those decisions did to families and communities. Fast forward a couple of decades and suddenly there's another cull. It might not have been politics that started it this time, rather a random global pandemic, however, it's politics that could save it, and right now it's not really being discussed.

We scream into our echo chambers that we're dying, that the arts are being dismantled and we hear the cries of our peers shouting straight back at us in agreement. We're not really weeping for the producers allegedly forced into these decisions, we're weeping for us. For the actors and stagehands, the wardrobe departments and casting directors, the agencies and creatives, and entire infrastructure from FOH to partner businesses that nobody but us really understands.

Then I nip across to that parallel universe and nobody cares. They don't think that it's 'their world'. They have no interest in the posh person's theatre world. They haven't made the correlation that 'this world' is also their world. It's the films that they're streaming, the music that they're listening to, the jokes that they're laughing at, the TV programmes that they religiously follow. To 'them' we've always been an elitist institution. 'They' have never stepped foot in the theatre and perceive it to be 'high art', 'hoity toity' if you like. 

Nobody has really joined the two worlds. The basic infrastructure and history of the UK theatre scene has unwittingly nurtured this divide. The government subsidises organisations like the National, the RSC, major ballet and opera companies, but what of the grassroots theatre scene? How much money really goes out to the provinces and the villages in order to create cultural hubs there? To build a sense of community, hell to contribute to communities.  For sure there's ACE money getting distributed but there's a certain language needed to fill out those forms, and the people and organisations that could really do with some of that money don't speak that language - they don't teach form filling in local comps.

When we speak about our industry we only talk in terms of the establishment. There's lots of talk around opening up our industry to a greater diversity, both of ethnicity and different social classes, yet when you check the various schemes that have started up to support this worthy cause, we're still telling people that the establishment should be the aim of the game - we the worthy can help you the needy reach the end goal . . . the heart of the establishment?  The monied give donations to the already heavily subsidised organisations. If the government does decide to support us who'll get first dibs at the recovery fund? I can tell you who won't be getting it, the small scale touring companies that truly do attempt to reach the masses and expand our audience base, the TIE companies who visit the schools in an attempt to squeeze theatre and theatre arts into the curriculum somehow, the youth groups that are transforming lives with their work. 

This could be the perfect opportunity for our industry to regroup and truthfully look at what's working and what's not. We won't though. We're crying into our echo chambers for the government to maintain the status quo, so that we can pick up where we left off. The brutal truth though is that we didn't leave it in a good place. The recent disclosures around institutionalised racism have really hit that point home over the past few weeks. Will we look at different companies and organisations to make the change? Not a chance, we'll spend our energy attempting to change the dinosaurs, grateful that the pandemic didn't wipe them out.

Our echo chambers facilitated Trump and Brexit, maybe it's time to open up the conversations to find out how we truly make our industry come back stronger and more diverse than ever?

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. 

Out of Control

As we're about to enter another milestone in the Pandemic lockdown, so it seems that the conspiracy theories and speculation about what the future will look like spread quicker than the virus itself.

In the past few days alone I've heard how we're all being brainwashed by the mainstream media (or MSM as the enlightened few all seem to call it - which is ironic as that acronym alone sounds like some dodgy news channel), I've read articles both quoting and misquoting the 'people in the know' as they've fundamentally hypothesised about what the future might look at, as I've read the threads of people's reactions to these hypotheses as though they were now facts.

Similarly, I've read the opinions from my industry peers - the optimistic chant of "we'll be back stronger than before after all theatre always survives" being seen in equal measure to the "this is the death of theatre as we know it". The headlines telling us almost daily that a vaccination or a treatment is seemingly days from being mass-produced to the headlines telling us that a vaccination or treatment will never be found for this constantly mutating virus.

Right now we have a Prime Minister speaking on Wednesday in Parliament stating he's about to start to 'unlock' the lockdown almost like a trailer for his much-publicised televised speech this weekend, yet on Thursday, one day later, Scotland declared that they wouldn't be changing anything soon, quickly followed by the Boris dep of the day telling all of us during the daily briefing to not change anything until Boris says so, followed on Friday, just 2 days later, by Senedd Cymru declaring that they weren't really changing anything either.  It's like we're suddenly in the middle of a game of Boris says but they forgot to tell us the rules, scrap that, it's like they forgot to tell Boris the rules!

In other words - the world is suddenly very confusing. We're all trying to work out in the first place who to believe. We've watched the mainstream media and noted how it's not actually covering some of the horror that UK people are living through whilst gleefully giving us a good news story every day, so we've glanced at the right & left-wing propaganda in a bid for clarity, come up with a few theories of our own based on a hunch and ended up exactly where we started. . . nowhere.

So we start to look closer to home as the global picture is too vast to comprehend.  We look to our friends and families but of course, relationships are complex at the best of times. So it's somewhat alarming to see how our peers and families are dealing with the current uncertainty, plus of course, there's a strong chance that we're physically separated at the moment from our 'go-to' people. The friends and families that can talk us down when things are feeling huge. Even worse than that lots of people are locked-in with the people that pander to our acting out giving us tacit permission to be 'however' we need to be without challenging us whilst thinking that they're helping us. I would suggest that a room full of 'yes people' is exactly why we're in the mess that we're in right now. Not being challenged and binary thinking helps nobody to evolve.

For a lot of people in our industry our work also tends to be an anchor during stormy seas - but now the unthinkable has happened, the show just didn't go on. It literally stopped overnight.

Or to put all of this another way, our lives are no longer within our own control. I can't go back to work until the government tells me that I can. I can't go to my 'escape' - the theatre until the government tells the industry that we can re-open.  So whilst we're essentially freer than ever before - no time restraints for anything, we are of course straitjacketed by the pandemic.

So we speculate.

We each have a different approach to trauma - which after all, that's exactly what this is for all of us. Some people like to look at the worst-case scenario and then be pleasantly surprised when things don't end up so bad, some people need to be eternally optimistic about the future, refusing to see any liquid left in the glass at all, let alone leaving us with a glass half empty. Then there are all the people straddling optimism and pessimism in equal measure and who enjoy exploring that dichotomy aloud.

The thing that we never take into account though is how everybody else is hearing 'our process', and indeed what is the agenda of our public statements (sometimes known, sometimes subconscious)  Throw into that mix a health mix of social media bots and aggravators and we're in a heady mix of chaos right now. 

Somebody throws out their 'theory' or speculates on when the theatres will be up and running and literally everybody jumps on it. Either doing the 'I knew it' line, or doing the 'how dare you write this down line'. Yet for all the 'noise' out there (and boy is there a lot at the moment), you'll always find an opinion or a piece of speculation that will fit your current thinking, allow you to think that somebody somewhere does know what's going to happen next, and therefore you throw your social media support behind them.

The truth is scarier right now though. None of us can predict the answer. None of us truly know whether people will flock back to the theatres relieved to finally get that escape, or whether they'll stay away in their droves. We don't know if 'normality' will happen this year, next year or indeed if we'll need to adjust to a different normal from before. Already I find myself being caught off guard if I see people on the TV greeting each other with any sort of physical contact. Suddenly a handshake seems like a daring move, yet just 2 months ago this was my regular greeting and had been my entire adult life

So I guess that's the crux of it, isn't it? We will all adjust. Life (for the majority of us) will continue and we'll learn to adapt. In order to preserve our sanity maybe that's enough of a surety to help us see our way through the chaos?

Competition - the Pandemic Way

In my recent blog about finding myself in charge of an online college I confessed to never having had a pandemic plan up my sleeve on the off chance that one day the world would suddenly be in lockdown. Of course, hindsight is everything. It's easy to regret decisions made before a global event. Strange to think that from now on a couple of generations probably will eh?

Suddenly we all wished that we had really taken in the Bill Gates prediction that this was bound to happen, or questioned how we had missed the now oft posted speech when Obama told us that this was almost definitely going to happen.

Heigh-ho - we're here now and I guess we just have to get on with it.

It's a strange situation though when literally nobody was ready for something, and within the space of a few days, we were all forced into an environment that we didn't want to be in. We've always assumed that living in the UK we'd be able to leave our houses, nip to the shops, see our friends. All things that we now perceive to be luxuries.

However, everybody being in the same boat has its own inherent problems. Where do we go to moan about our lot, when it's clear that we all have it better than somebody else? The lone person in lockdown yearns for some 'real' company, the family and friends in lockdown yearn to be alone. We have lockdown envy - the 'virtual' grass is indeed greener in everybody else's zoom garden.

With everybody in a forced situation though even a slight social media moan results in a Pythonesque thread of 'how lucky we are compared to Mr/Mrs/Ms/Mx whoever'.

The bottom line though of course is that we all have to just get through this the best that we can, whilst working really hard to see every journey as personal, not an affront to how 'you're' needing to get through this period.

Some people really took to heart the initial social media messages of this is your chance to do everything that you've been putting off for years, though why people felt the need to keep telling us that Shakespeare had supposedly written King Lear, Macbeth and Anthony and Cleopatra whilst in quarantine during the plague I don't know. Talk about a high bar! Then seemingly within days completed DIY projects and baking posts started to pop up on my timeline at regular intervals, each of them more impressive than the one before. In our industry some people really needed (or indeed just chose) to keep being creative, that was to be their own road map through these uncharted waters (talk about a mixed traveling metaphor). Editors and sound engineers have never been in such demand as we attempt to reproduce that most basic of rights - to produce music with other people. Then there are the people who are genuinely using the lockdown to take some downtime, with a constant stream of requests for the next best programme to watch, or recommendations for their next book. At regular intervals, somebody will remind us that we don't all have to do the same thing to get through this. Freedom of choice is still ours (within our own four walls). We are reminded that just surviving this time is actually winning.

Of course, it wouldn't be social media without some conflict, so we have the posts from those people that feel really strongly about how 'the others' are coping during this time, either applauding from the (virtual) wings with a degree of envy or angry that their way of coping has been made to feel the 'lesser' somehow.

So what is the right way to cope during a pandemic and who actually has the right to judge others? Who's right and who's wrong? Who is having the 'worse' time surviving the lockdown? Is it the parents frantically attempting to homeschool whilst juggling all the other demands too? Is it the shielded who feel like they would rather take their chances with COVID, the families, the lonely?  In our industry is it the so-called Corona grads who have had the rug pulled from under their feet at the start of the most amazing adventure, or is it the seasoned pros, who have been sideswiped as they've seen our industry magically disappear overnight?

Which industry has suffered the most? Surely that one is a no brainer - it's 'our' industry. Overnight everybody was out of work with no idea when we could possibly restart again, but then that's true of the bar owners, the restaurant owners, tour operators, airlines, etc The house of cards that we had thought was so safe suddenly crumbled for so many people. Then as if that wasn't bad enough we're all trumped by the people that are literally putting their lives on the line every day when they go to work or the families that have lost loved ones due to COVID?

Of course, the answer is really quite simple - none of us are having it easy. We are all attempting to stay emotionally grounded. It's not a competition.  The safest way through the Pandemic for each and every one of us is to just 'be', to 'be' however we need to be. If you've seen the Pixar movie Inside Out the control console in our brain is literally being controlled by the full range of emotions - seemingly all at once. One day it's OK, it's doable, we know that it's only a moment and moments pass, the next day the affront to our liberty is exasperating, we can't see how this can possibly end well, the world will never be the same again.

Somebody said to me today that they were struggling right now, but they shouldn't be. Compared to others they actually had it easy. The difficulty with this self-imposed scale of entitlement is that we're not giving ourselves the time and space to grieve what's going on right now. It's like there's some pivot that we're all straddling - we can maintain the equilibrium if we deny ourselves the right to be ecstatic or pissed off or scared or whatever.

The pandemic isn't a competition. I put the college online because I had no choice, not because I wanted to look back in a few years' time and be proud of my achievement during a lockdown. If I had to choose the perfect lockdown scenario, without a shadow of a doubt I'd choose the sit in front of the TV and veg out for a few months' approach*. However I have 2 young children to homeschool, a business to run and an encroaching deadline for a new show which I still have to meet in case the theatres open this year, so I don't have the luxury of choice - but then again I don't think that any of us have a choice right now. We just have to get through it.

So let's not make handling this situation a competition. We're all stuck in our own peculiar circumstances, and within those, we all have the right to feel however we need to feel, whenever we need to feel it and get through it however we can. We don't have to diminish our own difficulties just because we can see what we perceive to be something harder going on elsewhere. Let's all try our best to survive eh? It's not a competition.

Stay safe.

*In the interest of full disclosure I should add that this is forever my 'dream scenario', however, were I ever to have the free time to do this my secret suspicion is that I'm not actually that sort of person as my wife reminds me every time I state it. We all have dreams though right?

A College for Life

When I opened The MTA back in 2009 I knew from the outset that I wanted to run a college that would be there for its graduates even at the end of the course.

When I left college (back in the year when dinosaurs roamed the earth), I felt that I'd literally been thrown off a cliff. For sure they'd given me a backpack full of 'tools', and for all I knew they might have packed a parachute too, but they never had the foresight to let me know so I was just left in freefall for a little while.

Now in fairness times were different then, and my course rather bizarrely used to proudly say that they weren't training professionals and they weren't training teachers. . . but then never did tell us what they were training us for? However I got to create music and theatre all day, every day for 3 years, so I didn't care.

However, on leaving I do remember that feeling of being lost out in an industry that seemingly everybody else had a road map for (or would that be sat nav nowadays?) 

Obviously, training is massively different now, and I intended to open a college with a clear end game - to get performers out into the industry. The business side of our profession was going to be 'taught' alongside the jazz hands. I was adamant that 'my' students would know what was in their tool kit and how to use all the different tools. However, I also wanted to be very clear that I had packed a parachute. Hence the college for life policy.

Being a small college I wanted my graduates to know that the door was always open to them. Not just in a 'pop in and have a chat' way but in a very real, practical way. Rehearsal space is expensive, so I could give them that, dance classes are expensive, so they could come back and join in with ours, even prepping a song for an audition is expensive, so we could help them with that. Most importantly of all though, I wanted them to have the same level of pastoral care and mental health support available to them after graduating as they had received at college.

The MTA takes a whole school approach to mental health, we have 2 members of staff on call 24/7/365 (on of which is a mental health clinician) so it made sense for our graduates to have continued use of that resource? After all, if they had already accessed that support whilst training they would have a shorthand to access the same level of support once they'd graduated.  As our entire pastoral policy is a clinician based system it allowed them to jump back into talking therapies etc as and when they needed it. I've never understood the idea of sessions with a counsellor being time-limited anyway. How awful to start talking to someone, open up that can of worms, only to be told that your 6 sessions are up. Your counselling and/or therapy surely needs to last for as long as you need it?

In a poorly researched blog about The MTA last year I read somebody state that this was an unrealistic vision. They stated that we were a business not a 'community outreach programme' (I might be paraphrasing somewhat, but that was the general gist of the article). Yet my vision of the sort of college that I wanted to open extended way beyond the 2-year model that I had devised. I felt that looking after the graduates was a core belief that we had to achieve.  It's an interesting take isn't it to call an institution out for genuinely trying to help? Yet to me it was always a no brainer. 

We don't really start learning until we're out on the job, yet we all need somewhere to go and ask those questions that couldn't have possibly been known about on the course (as each job and each company will pose their own questions). Very often it's after college that all the self-doubt starts setting in. Prior to opening The MTA I had been told that 95% of graduates drop out of the industry within 5 years, and I completely understood that, as every day is a chore at the beginning isn't it (unless you're lucky enough to walk straight into a nice contract)?

 

I didn't want my lot paying all the money to train with us, but then change careers before they'd given it their best shot. I just wanted them to earn their fees back really.  However in order to help them to achieve that I felt that 'we' should be the parachute. Actually more than that - I felt that we were obliged to be their parachute.

Inherent in the vision for The MTA from the outset was ongoing support. 

As the years moved on our #college4life tag has become something of an in-joke to myself and the students, as it truly is more than just a social media hashtag. It's a lived reality if you chose for it to be so.  It's also helped to create an amazingly vibrant community outside of the day to day college. Our graduates are known to the current students (in reality all their pictures are up on the walls, so they are very present at all times). Lots of them come back at various intervals to take part in classes. It can be a successful reboot if that's what you feel like you need. Or maybe you've just missed a weekly sing-song, so you can nip into the whole college choral class and get those endorphins racing around again. 

Since 2012 our graduation has evolved into a thing called a Gradunion. A mixture of a celebration for the new graduates entering the industry, combined with a reunion for those that have gone before. Last year's 10th anniversary Gradunion was particularly glorious, with nearly half of our graduates returning to celebrate both the arrival of the new lot and the college milestone. 

The raft of well-meaning support projects to support the #coronagrads has really wound me up this year. Not because of all the things that are going on, as each and every project is brilliant and being supported by so many generous people and organisations. However, those students have paid money to institutions to fundamentally get them to the finishing line. To kick start their careers, to enable them to graduate. I obviously understand that these are unprecedented times, after all, there is barely a moment in the day where somebody doesn't use that very word BUT it is up to all businesses to adapt and fulfil our obligations (both contractual and moral) as best as we can. It is not up to the kind hearts in our industry to take up the slack.  

Whilst every day at the moment we're seeing colleges come up with really inventive ways to enable them to showcase their students albeit virtually right now, we're also seeing a lot of colleges and universities not bothering. Literally graduates online begging for help. Where's the colleges' contractual obligation in all of this?

We all need a 'parachute' when we leave training, and in truth, I fundamentally believe that your fees should pay for it (although I know that this is a rather unique thought). However as a bare minimum, we need to ensure that our graduates have a back pack full of tools that will equip them in our industry - they shouldn't be on social media trying to work things out.