Beginning a career as a theater designer can be a daunting proposition. When I was first starting to establish my career after I graduated from design school in 2010, I didn’t always know where to look for advice and answers to questions. So, I’m grateful to be able to contribute here to try to help other emerging designers have a smoother transition as they establish their careers.
The advice I have to offer is to value yourself properly, find solidarity in community, and find strength in organizations. I hope that this advice is useful to designers starting out in terms of helping to navigate any difficult situations that you may face, but, especially, to be able to build the community support structures among designers to ensure that difficult situations can be prevented or avoided.
1. Value Yourself Properly
The strongest advice I can give to any emerging designer is to value yourself properly. There’s an exploitative tradition within the live performance industry in which designers are expected to work for free as they establish their careers. Instead of compensation, you’re offered exposure in exchange for your work. I’ve encountered producers who are apologetic about this expectation yet still engage with it, and I’ve also encountered producers who feel completely justified because it’s how emerging designers “pay their dues.”
This practice also creates a significant barrier of entry for emerging designers. Unless you have considerable independent economic security, it can be impossible to earn a living while being expected to work for free. Or emerging designers work full-time elsewhere and try to fit in designing around their work schedules. I’ve sadly seen many talented designers burn out and leave the industry because it wasn’t physically and mentally healthy to work full-time and try to establish a design career on top of that.
How To Become a Theater DirectorThere are unfortunately no easy answers to this problem. This is an issue that designers must collectively work to solve and there are many designers doing incredible work to organize, advocate, and educate about the need for emerging designers to be fairly compensated. But until the day that emerging designers are no longer asked to work for free, always value yourself properly and fairly. Your worth as a designer is in no way tied to the work offers that you receive and the dollar amounts attached to them. Your hard work and talent aren’t determined by budgets and contracts. Value yourself properly because the industry often does not.
2. Find Solidarity in Community
One of the potential supports to combat the economic precarity that emerging designers often face is through community strength within the design community. Recently, I wrote my thesis in Sociology and Labour Studies at Simon Fraser University about how designers can improve their working conditions. As part of that research, I was able to travel across English Canada, Quebec, and New York to interview designers about their working conditions and suggestions for improvement. I was constantly struck by the strength of design communities in the cities that I visited.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, designers in cities across Canada gathered the last Monday of every month for a tradition called “Drinks with Designers.” In every city, a couple of designers would organize a gathering at a bar for designers in their city to attend. These events grew in popularity and became a place for emerging designers to be able to connect with established designers informally, to ask questions, to talk design, and to build the bonds that form a strong community. Often, emerging designers were able to ask questions or get advice in a much less intimidating way than sending a cold email to established designers in the community.
The pandemic has made these in-person meetings impossible but has also highlighted their importance and value. Designers gathering together and sharing their experiences, struggles, and triumphs is immensely powerful and really bridges some of the isolation that you can often feel. Community solidarity is key to ensuring that emerging designers are not isolated or facing difficult situations alone.
7 Tips for Theater Students Asking for Letters of Recommendation3. Find Strength in Organizations
Other designers can be incredibly generous with their advice, support, and solidarity. Reaching out and connecting with other designers is not always easy and is something that I find personally intimidating. But, thankfully, there are organizations that represent designers that are always available as resources. In English Canada, the Associated Designers of Canada (ADC) represents designers. In Quebec, the Association des professionnels des arts de la scène du Québec (APASQ) represents designers, and in the United States, United Scenic Artists (USA 829) represents designers.
When I began my career, I waited several years until I became a member of ADC in Canada. It’s without a doubt the biggest mistake of my career. I was taken advantage of by producers because I didn’t know to ask for proper contracts or for appropriate fees or royalties, or to even enquire about basic working conditions. These organizations that represent designers are the formal structures of the very real bonds that have been forged among designers in cities across Canada and the U.S. These organizations can also be intimidating to approach when you’re starting out, but they exist to help and represent designers. The combination of strong local design communities and representative organizations is what keeps us together as designers and makes us much stronger than a collection of individuals.
Value yourself properly, seek out the local design community for solidarity and advice, and approach designer organizations for support and resources. We are all in this together and no one ever has to face a difficult situation alone.
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