BLOG: Artist vs. Administrator?

Caption: Yasmin Gurreeboo directing a Theatre of The Global Majority Rehearsal. Image by Alex Kwong.

Rough House – that’s the working title for a production that’s quite close to my heart. Both as a woman, and a mother raising a boy, I have a deep personal investment in challenging gender-based violence and inequality in all its forms. 

It’s a challenging issue to unpack, layering on as it does so many big questions from how the patriarchy manifests in a capitalist society to how various cultural and religious expectations can determine family dynamics or how pornography normalises violence. Whatever the context, we often focus on women, laying on them the entire burden of transcending their circumstances…instead of seriously taking on the culture of toxic masculinity that does such damage not just to our girls but to our boys as well.

It’s a conversation I am committed to having with Rough House. I recognise it has to do with my past and with my future, with the choices we make as parents and children, and with a deep conviction that we need, as a society, to be talking more about these issues.

Now, knowing how deeply I felt about this project, you’d expect that it would already be underway. But there has been no time to really focus on it. Instead, I’ve spent much of the last year feeling disconnected from my work, and searching for purpose.

When administration subsumes the artist

I’m now a year into my role as Co-CEO and Artistic Director of ActNow Theatre and I will sometimes meet people who ask me when my politics are going to start manifesting more overtly in our programming. My honest answer is that I don’t know and that it’s frustrating. There are reasons why things are the way they are. 

For starters, like so many other ADs around me, I’m discovering that you inherit your predecessor’s vision and commitments, and that many months of your tenure are actually spent seeing those through.

Secondly, as you go through this process, your own desires as an artist are subsumed under a mountain of paperwork. It’s no surprise that leading a company in this way requires a very specific set of skills including admin, management and financial ones which many artists never have the opportunity to cultivate. Despite my experience, this year has highlighted for me just how much of it there is to do in a small company like ours. 

Part of my artistry is my ability to creatively problem solve. I’m an ideas person and it's something I bring to the work of conceptualising, directing and producing our plays, and it’s something you might imagine would come in useful when running a company.

However, with so many fires to fight, and so little room to invest in my artistic practice I’m finding that I’m running out of ideas. This year has left me feeling like I’ve sprained that creative muscle. I find myself confronting again and again what it means to be stuck in a capitalist, product-driven, delivery-based system which doesn’t nourish my artistic practice. The result is I feel like I’m working the conveyor belt at a supermarket. We’re so busy ticking things off and getting this and that done that we no longer have room for reflection.

And finally, as a woman of colour, I feel like the pressures are multiplied and that I have to work twice as hard to prove I have the right to be here, to be heard. I’m also forced to confront how as a person of colour, it can be easier to try and advocate for other people rather than yourself and how in doing that I undermine the very things we value so much.

Redefining productivity

You can see why I sometimes feel like the artist is in a losing battle with the administrator. Yet I don’t think the two need to be quite so at odds. I’m here fighting to prioritise my practice because I think without the artist there is no work, there is nothing to deliver. In our companies, we've got all these other roles, but ultimately, they won't be needed unless you've got the people actually making the work and doing the art.

Personally, making art is what gets me up in the morning. (It says something that I’ve had a few days this year when that was hard). I have always loved facilitating the workshops that are such a key part of our performances in schools and institutions. 

It starts with changing the way we work, with decolonising our space in a way that supports excellence and artistic practice. We don’t have to look beyond our First Nations communities to find models that inspire.

The path we choose has to be artist-centred. Right now, we’re exhausted. We need room to breathe, to reflect, to go out on a limb, and even to fail. To do this, we need companies that value their artists, with leadership that understands what the ground realities are.

At ActNow a significant number of our small team are working artists. Determining our direction and building the structures that will support our ambitions is an increasingly collaborative process for our team. I’m determined we need to stop reinventing the wheel and that means doing the foundational work of setting up systems that will carry us through any changes in personnel and ensure our time is used efficiently and effectively – and that we have room for art.

We’re deeply invested in democratising story telling and creating pathways for our communities to build sustainable and meaningful careers in the arts. This means I spend a lot of time investing in other people and creating opportunities for them but am I doing the right thing when I do not do the same for myself?

I encourage my younger team to have their own ‘babies’, projects which they feel passionate enough to drive and invest in and where they have the agency to determine what the final product actually looks like. It’s the best way I know to ensure our work stays diverse, interesting and invigorating.

And for me, I think it's time I see that truly honouring that process means giving myself that.

Yasmin Gurreeboo is co-CEO and Artistic Director at ActNow Theatre.