a career in the arts?

becca marriott

How do we diversify the Arts?

It’s a huge question, and one that keeps being asked, and still the answer evades us.  From classical music to ballet, acting, painting and film making - statistics don’t lie.  While culturally and ethnically diverse artists are increasingly prominent and rightly recognised and promoted for their talents, the number of people entering the arts industry from these backgrounds is still woeful.  Furthermore, young people from lower socio-economic classes are a real rarity – particularly in the classical music world, and especially in opera.

For opera to become truly diverse, we need to see and hear, be directed by, and written for by artists of all cultural and economic backgrounds.  How can this dream become reality?

I believe that only a two-pronged attack will slowly lead to true diversity.   The first prong is education.  Many people have talked and written about the tragic loss of music education in our schools, so I want to ask instead, “What is a career in the arts?”

To entice a new generation of diverse artists, a career in the arts must look like a promising option – at present, it does not.

Show us the money…

I am one of the lucky ones.  While I grew up in a run-down terraced house in North London, primarily looked after by a single mother who did not work, and who managed the home and two children on £500/month child maintenance; both my parents were art lovers.  My father was an academic, my mother a former ballet dancer.  Our house was full of books, instruments and classical music.  Deciding on a career on the stage would never be derided.

And yet, when in 2010 I decided to leave my well-paid job as a PA and Office Manager and follow my dream of becoming an opera singer, my mother and father were worried.  Particularly my mother, who had come to understand the power money has over one’s life, begged me to reconsider.  Her only concern was for my financial future. 

Her own story is worth a mention.  She left school aged 15 to pursue a career in ballet which, for many reasons, never took off.  She understood how cruel and insecure working in the arts is.  Before her, her more working class, northern mother had longed to be an actress.  Her family had insisted that “the stage” was not a career and that working in the arts would leave one financially and morally bankrupt.    Fortunately (or not, depending how one looks at it), my grandmother’s own love of performance allowed my own mother to break the cycle and pursue her dream career.

Even though I have been able to pursue my dream career; I have struggled, and I believe held myself back in many ways, as I haven’t been able to just stop earning. Throughout my masters degree I worked as both a singer and a tutor. Partly because I needed the money, and partly because of my background - the idea of not earning was unthinkable. When trying ton enter an industry that requires such long and intense training, the years of unpaid full-time hard work is a real barrier to singers from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

What am I really trying to point out here? 

I believe that the biggest barrier to diversity in the Arts, particularly in opera, is the insecurity, financial volatility and moral dangers that the industry is still plagued by. 

The larger percentage of those who follow a career in classical music find themselves freelancing precariously.  If the current Covid mess has taught us anything, it should be how shaky and terrifying a freelance career can be.  A pittance of state sick pay, no holiday pay, pitiful maternity allowance, no meaningful government help despite ever increasing NI bills, no pension and no job security.  Not to mention, that when one is employed, the pay is often dreadful.  My first professional – I say again professional – job in the arts carried a fee of £25 per show…and no, that wasn’t in 1912, but 2012.

When people from lower socio-economic backgrounds consider their options, they want to choose careers that will help them escape deprivation, not ones that will leave them penniless.  The idea of investing up to £15,000 a year in fees and ending up a poor bohemian when it’s all over is unattractive to say the least.  Let’s not forget that Murger and Puccini’s bohemians were all upper-class rich boys playing pauper-artists; almost 200 years after Murger’s birth, very little has changed.  The arts world is still a playground for those wealthy enough to not need real jobs.

And what of the moral dimension? 

One of my best friends, from a working-class background, told her mother she wanted to be an actress.  Her mother replied – “What? An anorexic?”  I have other friends whose parents believe their operatic careers are as close to prostitution as one can legally get.  The MeToo movement has been a step in the right direction, but stories of young singers (both genders) feeling the need to begin sexual relationships with older conductors, casting directors or superstar singers are still rife.  Anxiety and depression are par for the course in the performing arts and opera is no exception.  Where are the HR departments?  HR departments?  Don't make me laugh...

Such moral concerns certainly bar access to careers in the arts for women from more conservative cultures.

If we want to diversify our industry it needs to change. 

Worldwide, but in the UK in particular, major opera companies need to properly employ a pool of singers on year-round living wages, rather than do everything legally possible to avoid their singers becoming what are legally and inescapably employees. 

What are currently summer festivals need to support artists all year round, rather than using all their funding to prop up one, star studded, lavish season, and their current, heavily private, funding needs to be matched by the state. 

Opera houses throughout the UK need to be funded so that they can offer real jobs and training to artists; even if this means artists taking on a mixture of performance and clerical work. 

There needs to be financial backing for artists who can prove they are working to the benefit of all, even if the work they are doing is unpaid, or low-paid, with guaranteed living wages, and all the benefits that employees have.   Perhaps opera companies could offer emerging artists administrative roles alongside stage and training opportunities, helping to shape and support individuals and give them work experience in all areas of the sector they love. 

All opera companies need to be open and transparent about how their artists can access pastoral support if they feel that anything untoward is happening in the workplace.  Company directors need to be alert to the age-old, slimy route to success that is “the casting couch,” and  they need to stamp out any whiff of such practices.  The industry needs to become radically more attractive to work in to attract really diverse artists. 

I believe that it is possible, and moreover necessary to make the arts industry a real industry; and not just for artists, but for the economy as a whole.  One of the UKs greatest exports is culture. In the coming years of automation and technological advance, as industrial jobs fizzle away, transforming the way we support, promote and market the arts could boost the UK’s worldwide standing and economic growth massively.  

I recently gave birth to my first child.  I genuinely do not want her to pursue a career in the arts.  It shouldn’t be like this.  Until it changes, the arts will remain a playground for the upper classes.