A Coffee with Joe - Coffee Morning 2.0

Our second coffee morning was with the incredible Joe Strickland, AD from Chronic Insanity and digital theatre extraordinaire! We hope by reading this snapshot of our chat that you can learn something new to kick start your own journey in the arts. Also you can hear the conversation in full over on out YouTube channel (https://youtu.be/tTxtiByHGiw?feature=shared) !

With that lets get into it...

Q: What was your first paid role in the arts?

A: The very first! Technically, like technically technically, like child model. My parents were journalists and sometimes you'd need like an annoying little brother in a photoshoot. I only did it twice or three times if you count when I was a baby.

Or after that magician when I was a teenager, I used to do peoples birthday parties and events. Paid surprisingly well actually even at that age! You could get £50 for a half hour of something show or a couple of hundred quid in an evening.

Maybe that then proved to me what my value was and so I think that has actually helped moving forwards in my career as its always good to know that your fall back is somewhat supportive from a financial perspective. Surprising safety net people don't usually consider!

After that probably employing myself on something!

Q: What sort of skills and tasks do you use and do in the roles you have now? As I think a lot of us hear titles like digital producer but don't really know what that involves.

A: I'd definitely say that the style of producing I do is more within the creative producing side and. i'm definitely making creative decisions ones alongside the logistical ones. That's also because i'm quite a multidisciplinary artist and theatre maker and a lot of the projects I work on I have a creative hand whether thats writing or directing most usually or doing some of the design work on stuff as well as producing. I do produce a lot of my own stuff but if i'm working on someone else's project if i'm freelancing I tend to focus on things like logistics, contracting, budgeting and timeline planning and I don't tend to focus on fundraising as that's not my best skill.

Q: You mentioned that one of your first jobs outside of model and magician was when you employed yourself under your own company could you tell us a little more about that experience?

A: We started Chronic Insanity in about May of 2019, five years ago so its our 5 year anniversary this month as we're recording this. Our first show was in September 2019 which was just an amateur production of a play me and our co founder Nat really liked. Then we did a show each month all amateur productions of stuff and we did our first version of a scratch night which would later become something we'd do a lot more of. Then just before the lockdown hit in March we got arts council funding for the first time and that was about £12k which we said we'd make six productions with and I think it was off the back of that funding, then lockdown hitting that we then realised we had a lot of the capabilities we'd need to make digital work and we had some scripts that were relevant for online stories. And we were also confident in the tools you need to make work for online so video editing, sound editing, felt like we had something to say and now had a lot of artists that we wanted to work with and support financially which people needed more than ever at that time and it as at about the 9 month in point where I first paid myself.

Q: It can feel at the minute that its a really difficult landscape to just create things in and one thing that Chronic has always been amazing at is showing people that regardless of where you are you can be creative and make things, especially with the digital work that is widely available to a lot of people for free online as well.

A: Absolutely, I think a lot of this was formed by our circumstances and my academic background as I did psychology as a degree and then my PHD was in computer sciences looking at how people interact with technology. And it became clear from that background that digital theatre was definitely theatre and was obviously theatre and that the traditional way of understanding of theatre as people having to be in the same room at the same time was limited by what we had available before we had wide spread technology especially like telecommunications technology which allowed you to communicate at the same time with some people in a different place or recordings that let you talk to somebody at a different time and in a different place. But you can still create that feeling of communicating, that feeling of presence and that feeling of liveness through all these means.

So we made a bunch of digital shows to check that and it reinforced to us that digital theatre is theatre, and once you accept that as a theatre maker its great as digital theatre is more affordable, mainly because you don't have to hire spaces and you can make work where you already are, record it and release it. You still pay artists the same amount so you're not short changing anyone and its sustainable for people and its more environmentally sustainable. Its. more accessible as you can easily add captions and sign language interpretation and re edit it to meet your audience's needs. You can also work with a wider variety of artists so you can be more inclusive and more diverse because if you're working online you don't have to work with the people you know around you, you can work with people from all across the country and across the world in our case! You can make work that talks about their stories and find common ground between your world and their world and then you might actually find common ground between loads of people.

We also always approach work in a lo-fi way. We don't tend to worry about the quality of the execution we worry about the quality of the content and quality of the idea and the story that we're telling. Fundamentally theatre is about suspending your disbelief and you can push that as far as you can push anything, remember theatre began with someone telling a story around a campfire. You don't need set or costume or props. Some shows you might but then you can use that to really highlight those elements when you do have them.

I think that its the blend of this lo-fi approach and our acceptance of the digital being a meaningful place to create theatre and tell these stories which means that we can make a large amount of work.

Q: One thing you touched on there that i'd love to dive into more is access as thats something you guys are so good at. Can you speak a bit more about how you embed that into your work and how people with maybe very little resource or who are just staring out can begin to embed it into theirs?

A: I think the main ting to understand with accessibility is that it is literally impossible to do it perfectly. You are not going to be able to and you can't approach it with perfectionism because access is human and as a result is infinitely complex, you are highly unlikely to make one bit of work that absolutely everyone can access and engage with in the way that you want them too. It just means that it's okay to not do it perfectly. You just have to do it better and better the more and more.

The second thing I'd say with access is build it in as early into a project as possible. We all know how it gets when, you know, the kind of You have to put your nose to the ground and get something finished and if you put your access in as the last thing, it will be the first thing taken off when you don't have enough time. It will also not feel properly a part of the production and at least from a like a political perspective. If you have a disabled audience, they're just part of your audience. If you made a show where you didn't have a lighting design, you didn't turn the lights on but a part of the show was a visual element, you would be disabling the whole audience.If you have a show that you can only listen to through headphones, but then you don't give one of the seats a pair of headphones, you disabled that audience member, the way you design your show disables your audience. That's following the social model disability, which is the idea that human beings have qualities, they aren't necessarily good or bad, they aren't necessarily disabled and able, it is a society around you and how it caters for and supports you or fails to do so that decides whether you're disabled. And that is just kind of a fundamental truth and it doesn't have to be about disability. It can be about any sort of access, financial access, geographic access, and technological literacy. So it's about finding way to design your show or the way you tell your story so that your audience, whoever they might be, can understand the meaning of the show and that's actually just what you do anyway. The form should match the content. And the form will be accessible or inaccessible depending on how you design it and how you deliver it.

Some of the easiest things you can just do are captions. First of all, most young audiences watch most content in their life with captions now anyway. Over 50% of people, Gen Z and below have captions on for everything. So if you want to build a young people, you need captions in your show or people will potentially either struggle to watch it or just not want to.

Or they'll see one and then never come back and that might actually be worse. You can do captions any which way like I said there's no wrong way you can have a video designer design super lovely animated captions and project them into a particular part of the stage or you can Make a PowerPoint presentation with bits of the script in and then just have someone hit the space bar to go to the next bit of the script. You can, with something I have done, you can buy a flat screen TV off of a gum tree for the beginning of your show and then put it back up on Gumtree at the end of the show and sell it for what you paid for it.

So you haven't actually spent any money on optioning other than your time copying and pasting lines from the script.

So yes there are ways to make access affordable and very time efficient and to make your work more accessible to your audiences.

Q: What is your favourite project you've worked on?

A: This is difficult like we've said because we've done so much work and so much of it is so different. It can be tricky to compare everything. The project what we've revisited the most is our gig fair show, 2423 22 that started as a digital project in 2021 and roughly every 6 years from that point onwards until this month, we have done a version of that show in some way. Late 2021 we did it as a live there piece for the 1st time then 1st half of 2022 we took it to London for 3 weeks very last minute. There was a slot we jumped into it and we figured out how to make it work. End of 2022 we taught it a little bit beginning of 2023 we told a little bit more end of 2023 we took up to Edinburgh for the month. Beginning of this year, we've just, of recording a cast album. We've recorded it now I just have to mix and master it and then we can release that same. So it's going from digital to single location to touring back into a digital thing.

I think why it's 1 of my favourite things is not only because our writer Doug and our cast Joe and Ruth have been always brilliant to work with, but I think it's a really good example of a lot of the ways that my company does stuff like the show has no set.The show has me at the back of the stage controlling the sound or sometimes the sound and the lights depending on what the venue can, so the operator is on stage part of the show. It's a solid hour with a bunch of hyperpop and low-fi hip hop music and 2 performers each has a handheld microphone, very simple costume, maybe a single prop each. The lights are very simple, there's like 7 lighting states throughout the whole show. The Characters talk to the audience, they move through the audience, that doesn't really feel like a barrier between the audience and the show and half the times other than one scene one character is the audience alongside the audience watching the other character. So I think it helped us explore a lot of concepts.

Q: What is the biggest piece of advice you would give to someone considering starting a career in the arts?

A: It's hard because the, the key skill to learn is confidence which as soon as I say I know say it some people will be like, but I think it's more like whatever you can do at the moment or whoever you are, that's enough. You don't have to be anyone else. You really don't. It's just kind of proven that to yourself and I think you can do that by just making Just making things.

I think you just have to go out and do stuff. No one's gonna pay attention to you when you begin and that's great because it means you can make all your mistakes without the eyes of the world and that's the whole point of starting out without, you know, hitting the big time straightaway, make loads of work, make mistakes, annoy people because they thought you were more professional than you were or because you thought they were more professional than they are. Figure out how to work with a whole bunch of different people. Learn who you want to work with and who you don't want to work with, the sort of work you want to make. Lead projects and follow on other people's projects. Like embed yourself in as many different spaces as possible to learn from.

And It's a marathon, not a sprint, having a career in the arts and theatre. It's always going to be unsustainable and shaky. We want it to be more secure and it's very unlikely for most of us that's going to be the case. But if you sprint and run out of resources or run out of patience, then you're not going to want to keep going and if you in this moment right now want to do it in a sustainable way, you need to find a sustainable pace for yourself.

It's almost certainly probably not going to be doing 12 shows every every year. That's just because my neurodivergent brain gets really bad if I'm not doing anything. So I do lots of work because I like it and because it helps me but that doesn't mean you have to do that. You can do one show. You can spend 2 years making it and then you can tour it for 4 years.

That's just as fine, but in that 2 years of making it do a version, write a scene, get it on a scratch night. Easier said than done, but talk to 5 pubs in your local area and one of them will have a function room you can use for free if you buy lunch there or if the audience at the scratch night each by a drink and you can put one on with just mates or by just putting it up on Facebook, so if you start one, you might be able to keep that running as quite a thing. Then you'll meet more people. You'll be able to network. You'll be able to have a place to show your own work off and support other people. You start growing a community for the work you want to make in the location where you are, regardless of where that is.

Or if you can't do that go online the whole benefit of online the first things it was for was to build communities for shared interests where there weren't enough people around you who had that interest in your physical world.

You will only become a confident in it by doing it more frequently and it might feel awkward at the beginning but you have to kind of carry on with that. Push through it and at some point if you want to do something different you can do if you want to go back to what you were doing before you can do that too you can do whatever you want it doesn't doesn't have to matter at the early career you have the freedom to make all those decisions yourself.

The best career is a slow build. One that slowly you get more and more established, more and more known, more and more trusted, more and more valued by your community or your audiences.

So just make that stuff, be experimental. Or be really traditional if that's what you want to do because that will be probably the widest audience. There's not really a wrong way of doing it. Yeah, that's a very word salady amount of advice, but I think within the different bits will resonate with you if you've listened to it and so pick those bits and follow that!

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Phew! Have you got any coffee left? We certainly haven't!

Do't forget to check out our upcoming coffee mornings and Open Office Hours to come along, chat, get advice and have fun!

We'll see you soon!

Team Flood x