how to survive

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to survive, as an artist (specifically Director/Producer of a small theatre company), as a mother and as both an artist and mother at the same time. So here are my top five tips. For each.

HOW TO SURVIVE AS AN ARTIST

1. Make the work for your ‘audience’. If you work in the subsidised sector and on the small scale your main ‘audience’ is your funders (sad but true) so dream up ideas that are in line with their funding priorities. Wellcome want science theatre. ACE want touring work, especially for diverse and/or young audiences. Also make it for your actual audiences – that doesn’t mean selling out – just take a moment to really interrogate whether there is an audience out there for aerial-dance-theatre about arsenic poisoning (there wasn’t!) or how you might frame the work in terms that would appeal to the audiences that are out there.
2. Make work that makes your heart sing. Do the other stuff as well (that maybe feeds your wallet or your CV more) but if it’s your own work then do the stuff you want to do (whilst also aiming for 1.)
3. Learn to love marketing. It makes you a better artist to understand how to present (sell) your work (to audiences, to funders, to venues) and sometimes it even shapes the work itself. That’s a good thing – it means you’re making it for your audiences and not for your navel-gazing self.
4. Ask for help. There will always be people willing to advise – especially producers/marketing/fund-raisers within larger organisations – no one ever writes to them, everyone’s too busy writing to the Artistic Directors who have no time to reply.
5. When you write budgets (again specifically within the subsidised sector) a) budget for what things will cost first, think big, be ambitious, dream. Also properly work out the number of days you’ll spend managing/administrating/fund-raising for it – really properly and in great detail. Then aim to pay yourself at least £100 a day x however many days that is. Then work out how much money you need to raise (from box office, ACE, other funders, begging, crowd-sourcing). You can always cut things (and of course paying yourself for the management of it all will be the first to go though do keep a note of the days/in-kind work somewhere in the budget) but start from what you feel the project needs rather than how much you think you can raise.

HOW TO SURVIVE MOTHERHOOD

1. Ask for help. Don’t expect it but don’t apologise for needing/wanting/asking for it. Lots of people love babies and will happily hold one for an hour while you sleep/wash your hair/have a meeting. Or they’ll come round with food and wine and hugs. Whatever it is you need – just ask (especially through Facebook/Twitter where people can choose to ignore or engage on their own terms).
2. Cleanliness is not a priority. Babies don’t need washing very often (every 3 weeks is fine, apart from bums, and they get washed when you change them so that’s enough) and embrace the greasy-haired/vomit-stained look yourself. Then on the rare occasion you have a shower/wear make-up you’ll get loads of compliments. Also houses don’t really need to be kept very clean and if you’re lucky enough to have family close enough to visit every now and again then they’ll probably pitch in when they see you’re living in a cesspit.
3. Bad sleepers are all geniuses. Console yourself with this fact (good sleepers can also still be geniuses). And if they won’t nap then walk them in a buggy with a cover over (like a parrot) and they’ll go eventually, plus they’ll be strapped in so they can’t escape.
4. Streamline your life. Children eat up time and energy which makes them great for forcing you to prioritise. So let go of anything in your life that doesn’t bring you joy (see Number 2.) including relationships. Especially relationships. Equally trust that the relationships that do matter will endure even if you don’t have lots of time to put into them. One of my best friends I only see once a year – he’s still one of my best friends.
5. Fish fingers can be cooked in the fat bit of a Dualit toaster in 6 minutes (and you can get cheap-ish second hand reconditioned toasters on Ebay for not silly money). It’s also fine to feed them fish fingers for dinner 5 nights in a row.

HOW TO SURVIVE AS AN ARTIST/MOTHER

1. You can get maternity pay as a self-employed artist. It’s only £100ish a week but adds up to over £5000 which, let’s be honest, is about half of what I earn in a year, and I imagine that’s the case for most young-ish freelance artists. So claim it!
2. It’s much easier to network with a baby. No one likes networking – we’re all shy really, but (almost) everybody likes babies (the newer the better). A lot of people remember us now as the ones with the baby (ies) – and you suddenly discover huge swathes of the arts community are also parents and they in particular will support you more, knowing you are parents. Because they know how cocking hard it is. So take babies to parties/meetings/conferences (while they’re still small enough) and if you’re writing to someone you know has children too there’s no harm in including a picture of your new-born baby. Why not!
3. You can take a proper break/gap from making work and the world won’t forget who you are (this is obviously not advice I’ve followed but I want to put it out there – if you choose to jump straight back in, great! If not, also great).
4. Crowd-source your childcare. On Facebook. See Number 1. of HOW TO SURVIVE MOTHERHOOD. If you’re still young-ish/emerging-ish then childcare will cost more than you will earn. Trust that other people won’t break your baby (they won’t) and just ask for help. Start when they’re little and the babies won’t mind or even notice – it’s particularly useful for short meetings in town and you’ll be surprised by who and how many people want to hold a baby for an hour. It gets harder as they get older but by then you’ve hopefully built up a core group of people who know the child and will take them for longer stretches of time. Plus it makes your children really confident with adults.
5. It’s totally fine to put them in front of YouTube videos of tractors or Disney for several hours when you have a deadline/funding application to write. So long as it’s not every single day. You can even have them on your lap with one tab open with YouTube and another with your document/email/work. Cunning.

And once you’re out of the survival stage (or even during, if you can summon the resources/energy) be the one to offer help or respond to people’s requests for it. That’s how I’ve survived the last 9 years of being an artist and 2 and 1/2 of motherhood.