This post originally featured in Lane’s List in Autumn 2014.
How often do you delete or scroll over an opportunity for work or training that flies into your inbox or Twitter feed, because it’s a call for ‘artists’ rather than ‘writers’?
This week I found two or three listings to include in Lane’s List that had the word ‘artist’ in their headings – not writer, not playwright, not writing – and without clicking on them, I wouldn’t have necessarily known that writers were perfectly eligible for the goodies that lay within.
In the last few years, I’ve increasingly been in the company of creative people – many of whom work within the field of live performance and some of whom are writers – who are happy to stand side-by-side under the umbrella term of ‘artists’.
Their presence around me has been down to working more collaboratively, working across artistic disciplines, working increasingly with schools who are looking for ways to bring artists of all kinds into curriculum environments, and creating new working relationships with people.
These particular people aren’t ashamed to associate themselves with the act of ‘artistry’, the making of ‘art’ or the job of being an ‘artist’. Obviously they all have titles that specify their roles within that family of artists: but they don’t shy away from the overarching term. They embrace it. They use it in conversation.
Often, it gives their whole process, their approach to it and how they value it a strong underpinning philosophy.
I suppose just as ‘writer’ carries stereotypical connotations for many people (puffing endless Gauloises, quaffing red wine, wearing a smoking jacket, moaning about the world but never doing anything about it and only actually writing about it), so does the word ‘artist’ (you know, paint-covered smocks, anti-Establishment, crazy hair, unwashed, hippy, irresponsible) – and of course self-proclaiming it with an ‘e’ on the end: I am an artiste.
At the end of the day however, I’ve had to embrace the word ‘artist’ to some extent to help me make a living. No, I don’t call myself an artist on my website. It’s not plastered all over my CV. And there are circles in which I wouldn’t be seen dead introducing myself as one.
But the job of art and of all artists, I believe, is to allow people to experience their world differently, if only for a moment. That difference might be aesthetic, political, emotional, comedic: it doesn’t really matter.
For me though, that’s what art does. That’s my philosophy (and yes I have a separate philosophy for what stories do, which I’ll save for another time, but importantly it sits beneath this one). And that’s what great writing does, on the page, on the stage, or out of the mouths of poets.
If I’d pigeon-holed myself too often with the word ‘playwright’ I would have assumed I had to only write scripts, see them on in theatres, and nothing else would ever comprise my working day for eternity.
Instead I allow myself to engage with the craft – no, let’s be bold – with the artistry of theatre-making, through using my writer’s skills with companies, playwrights, non-theatre artists, children, teenagers, schools, directors, venues, historical sites… and usually it’s the perspective of the artist – the one that we should proudly share as writers within that family – that will illuminate things for others, and allow them to see their world differently.
Careers are built down various pathways: but sometimes that career can be hamstrung by insisting on defining yourself in only one way and ending up struggling more than you need to.
So step up, writers: remember you’re artists too and see what might open up for you as a result.
Enjoy? You can read more like this every Monday on Lane’s List: a weekly subscriber email that in 2014 distributed over 600 opportunities and industry articles for UK-based playwrights. You can read a sample list or find out more here.