Why Backstage Niche?…
Hive City Legacy Directed by Hot Brown Honey:
Roundhouse Studio
I started this company because the representation of me was absent backstage.
For my final university project, I wrote my dissertation on “Why is there a lack of ethnic minorities working in backstage theatre?” This subject was very important to me as I had only experienced this when I started drama school and working in the professional workforce of theatre.
When I was fifteen I was part of a summer programme called street-to-stage, I did not see any lack of ethnic minorities that were in the creative team because we were all young people who lived in London, who came from various backgrounds. Anne-Marie Reid was the first black woman I learned stage management from as she was part of the company Dreamarts. She hired me as her assistant on various events and festivals, so when I had gone to drama school and spoke to her about what I noticed, she said I should do something about it and this is where the seed of Backstage Niche came from.
This is a seed that has sat on the shelf for a long long time and I felt like I needed to get to a point in my career where I had the right contacts and had met great creatives from different ethnic backgrounds who worked in the same industry as I did, so I could not only start my own business, but also be able to correctly facilitate the ideas I had for diversifying backstage theatre.
The idea of creating a database or simply a hub specifically aimed for people who are from various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds working within technical theatre, I feel is an important platform to have. Where theatre companies can go and find a diverse group of freelance professionals that work backstage.
I always hear, ‘I only know you’…’We did ask around and couldn’t find anyone’, which is very unfortunate because as there may not be a lot of us, we are still out there working, therefore, we need a platform where theatre can find us. This might be it?!
A platform where theatres and organisations can find this site as somewhere, they can diversify their creative team for the varied genres of stories that are portrayed in the industry. Not only do we need to reflect our society within theatre, we need to make it an active effort to make creative teams inclusive and not be comfortable with the same archaic structure.
‘We don’t want an advantage, we just want equality’
Getting the young generation involved…
The longer I worked in the industry It became intriguing to see there was another gap, a gap where there was a generation of non-white people working in the technical team who seemed to be in their late thirties to mid fifties (I call them the pre-QLab era lol) and then there was my generation who were in their early twenties to thirties. I wonder why this is? I don’t have the answer, put all I know is that there should be a continuous flow of diversity within this particular department. If acting industry can portray this then we should to.
As everyone knows the young generation are the future, therefore, we as theatre creatives must take that responsibility to inform them about the career possibilities of backstage and what happens behind the curtain and not just what they see on stage.
I hope facilitating workshops and panel conversations, will encourage young people to think beyond the stage and maybe venture out and try something new. The focus for some is performing on stage, which is fair enough because it is the profession they frequently see and the visual benefits of the financial and social media gain that come with it.
However, I believe that when you are given the opportunity to participate in something new it can be the deciding fact whether you are intrigued about that subject and delve into it more or realise it is not for you. Either way, it’s a chance to be involved with an industry so many think is unreachable.
The most common saying among stage managers is, ‘You don’t choose stage management, stage management chooses you!’
2020
