Industry needs to take young people seriously

Appointing a young person like me to programme for young people the community Boundless serves puts into action the belief that young people are expert at being young people. Only by working with us will the industry know what we need and care about.

It feels affirming to be given the responsibility and I also value being given the permission – and stability – to take the space and time to think in depth about why forming creative communities with young people is important. 

For Boundless, this role aims to redress the balance of how many young people have influence in arts organisations. Broadly speaking, it is not many. 

A shared sense of disillusionment

In this job, I’ve been able to spend time having conversations with young artists and we all feel the same way: a shared sense of disillusionment. Our experience doesn’t match up to the advice we’re offered on how to succeed.

Start small, make your own work happen, find assistantships, do scratch nights, have short runs at smaller theatres – all these pieces of advice are posited as the steps to go through to make more work. But the promised developments never seem to come. 

On the flipside, if you get an early-career-specific opportunity, it often comes with the prefix ‘young’ or ‘youth’ or ‘trainee’. To me, that language speaks of a ‘lack’; that presupposes we haven’t done it before, we haven’t had any experience yet, so we are not as valuable.

When a ‘young producer’ is hired there is almost always an ‘actual’ producer too. There is something really sticky for me here.

We are the experts

Creating opportunity for young people is vital: only young people, now, can talk about what it is like to be a young person, now. We are experts. This expertise, however, often means we don’t get taken as seriously as we’re not performing a ‘full’ role, we’re performing the young person’s one.

So, how can a young person be invited into a role with responsibility – acknowledging there will be a learning process as they gain experience – while also being legitimised for their experience and ability? 

Young artists consistently evidence their drive and connectivity to the world; they are entirely capable of making excellent work. Furthermore, the relative inexperience that comes with our youth can be very powerful.

The energy of the young artists I connect with leans toward a desire to make change. Maybe precisely because we sit on the outskirts of the industry and find the processes less familiar, we can better question why things are the way they are.

I’m trying hard to ask the questions I don’t know the answers to, to encourage people to question terminology and methods that are treated as implicit. This is what young artists offer in abundance: the ability to ask the question “Why?” That ‘why’ could forge industry-wide change. We just need industry to take us seriously.

Continues…

Addictive Beat by Boundless. Photo: Harry Elletson

More questions than answers

At Boundless, while my role is not perfect, it has developed from active engagement with the lack of an offer to young people and what can be done to address that. I get to listen to how creative and executive directors collaborate, I attend industry-wide meetings. And what I notice most is how people talk about us and not with us.

I hear industry struggling under the same weight of issues about money and time and sustainability and access and outreach and attendance. But what is being done to open up those problems, share them with new, young artists? How we can tackle them together? 

While I’m in the early stage of a supported role for a young person, it doesn’t mean there’s enough support in the wider industry. My job is fixed term. Where do I go next?

It is one thing for a small company to adapt their structure, but is there room for me to pursue my development elsewhere? Who is looking for me, my peers? Will the industry ever find ways for young people to truly emerge from our youth theatres, our trainee roles, our ‘1-3 years’ experience’?

Having provided the tools, time and engagement, who will trust that a young person can handle responsibility and make new contributions? And then, how can people continue to be supported as they age out of the ‘young person’ bracket? How do we produce a system that offers sustainable growth to us all? 

I did say I liked asking questions I don’t know the answers to.