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I DO agree we need to think of ourselves as a business and learn how to create new opportunity and make the opportunity we have more profitable.

AND I think often people mistakenly believe that to do that we have to give up our integrity and our creativity. Not so!

In addition to being a theatre artist I am also a small business coach, and I have worked with 100s of small businesses that have found a way to make it work without selling out their values. You have to think like a big boy in terms of going after ways to make the $ you need. But you do not have to sell out or think like some of them do in terms of poor quality and false promises to do it.

I can get my clients to think about marketing and other practical concepts because they trust this fact- but my artist colleagues assume they will turn into Enron by just taking the time to learn how to write a show poster that actually makes someone want to attend the show.

The schools need to foster the arts as business idea-but every forward thinking artist with a brain needs to foster it too. The new message is that you can do your art AND make money without selling out your creativity or your ideals. The idea that we will not have the time, ability or brain power forward our art if we are also learning about business is just plain silly. All of us have the capacity to learn and do in many areas of our lives all at once or we would all be broken people without friends, family, running water or day jobs. While there are some of those- most artists are pretty high functioning people.

We need to fully believe in ourselves and in the idea that we can succeed both practically and creatively at the same time. Once we do that we will figure out the specific "how tos" to get there. We are smart people and it IS possible.

Thanks for bringing up a really important topic.

M.

(And if you want to jump in on the specifics and share your ideas on how to do that for Theatre specifically go to Theatre Puget Sound at http://tpsonline.org/
The discussion thread I am talking about is at
http://tpsonline.org/forum/index.php?topic=2993.msg6991;topicseen#msg6991)

posted 5 years, 3 months ago
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