01 Mar SDUK Blog: Zoë Waterman
On March 23rd 2020 – my birthday and the day the country shut down – I sat down to a take away dinner with my housemate. Like so many working in the creative industries our worlds had shrunk to the square footage of our flat, all work was swiftly evaporating, and the future looked very blurry and unknown. In the following weeks, as theatres and drama schools I had upcoming work booked with dodged my calls, one next door neighbour was rushed to hospital, while on the other side home schooling of three children in a two-bed flat with no outdoor space began in earnest. The personal professional calamity and financial precarity was tempered by the seriousness of the situation beyond our walls. I started volunteering at a local food hub, packing boxes, and delivering them to vulnerable people across the borough.
Fast forward to June and my professional work was no longer blurry but absent, but I was lucky enough to be offered a full-time job with Newham Council off the back of my volunteering. This saw me coordinating a team of volunteers and redeployed staff as we packed and distributed up to 4000 food parcels a week to vulnerable people. In time I shifted to another role, I was part of a team of three who set up a new alliance of 36 voluntary, community and faith organisations to provide ongoing long-term support for those experiencing food poverty in Newham.
The theatre industry faded from view as I worked long hours, developed new skills on the hoof and built working relationships with an entirely new team. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the work, was stretched by it, and was able to bring my existing skills to it. It was incredibly stressful and tiring at times but also rewarding as I was working in the public sector to directly deliver essential services to those most in need. I surprised myself by my competence in this new role.
And so, we fast forward again to now, I am back working as a freelance theatre director, and hoping one day to become an Artistic Director. I am forever grateful for having had an income, a way of directly working with and supporting my community, and frankly a reason to leave the house and exercise my brain during what was a very dark time for much of the theatre industry. But I also come back with new skills and challenges to bring to my work as a director.
1. This job gave me confidence in my abilities outside of the rehearsal room – my management and organisational skills and ability to build and run systems (and I got a LOT better at using excel). It showed me my transferable skills – be that a long transfer to a completely different workplace or a shorter transfer from freelance director to Artistic Director. For the first time in a long time I had the same manager for a period of months who developed me and my skills and fed back on my work. I realised how much I value that feedback loop.
2. This job had the most genuinely diverse workforce I have ever experienced. Across employees and volunteers, at all levels of management and in all roles, we genuinely reflected the population of Newham. It made me really realise quite how far we have to come as an industry to get even close to that. It made me ask how the council was achieving this in such a deep and broad way. It made me furious and upset and despairing and fired up for change in our industry. It was the most inspiring, exciting, challenging team to work with and I want that again.
3. This job allowed me to work closely with community, faith, and voluntary organisations. I regularly liaised with GPs, social workers, probation officers, care workers, imams, priests, housing officers and more. It made me more than ever want to take that partnership working into a theatre, to build those networks in my professional theatre life, and to ask as they do, “how else can we help?”
In the wake of the pandemic SDUK set up its Resilience project, looking at transferable skills, new and different roles within theatre and building resilience generally within the freelance workforce after we were so exposed and vulnerable through the shutting down of the industry. As I return to theatre making it has been wonderful to engage with that project, as well as my own personal journey through the pandemic, as I plan and build for my developing career.