At the start of March I was working on a new chapter in my apprentice blog.
It was going to be called ‘Brave New World’ and in it I planned to talk about all of the ways in which I’d experienced changes in my apprenticeship in the first few months of 2020. The inspiration for the chapter came from a saying I’d heard:
‘Three months from now you will be someone else’.
I wanted to write about how when looking at the person I was becoming, it felt as though I’d become completely unrecognisable from the person I was in January, let alone from the person I was when I started my apprenticeship. In three months I’d gained five classes of my own to teach, I’d begun directing 4 productions and I was now working almost daily in the newest addition to the Artz Centre’s facilities: The Library Café.
Even now it is still hard to believe just how much I’ve grown in three months! I’m not just talking about getting better at lesson plans or learning how to select audition criteria (although they’ve all been apart of the process too). I’d also learned a lot about how I react to increased responsibility.
I didn’t expect though, for the world to change like in the way it has done in the last month. Have you ever seen a TV show where the good guys spend a whole season overcoming some sort of problem, only to find out at the very end that there’s a whole new problem for the to deal with in the next season? Yeah, I’d say that’s a pretty good representation of how March felt, with the new problem to overcome being COVID-19.
For the Artz Centre, huge changes have had to be made. Absolutely huge ones! Ones the likes of which, I honestly don’t think the company has ever made before. The biggest part of what goes on at the Artz Centre goes on in in-person sessions. That’s how we rehearse shows, how students learn skills, and how the company values are passed on to a younger generation. So it was a drastic measure to take to close both Artz Centres for the foreseeable future. That question though, created a question… ‘What Now?’
COVID-19 could cut my time as an apprentice short. With hundreds of jobs at stake worldwide, and arts based organisations like the Artz Centre at real risk, I’ve had to acknowledge that genuine risk. However, that hasn’t happened yet! Therefore while the Artz Centre is still being supported by the amazing community around us, our entire team will do everything we can to keep the centre alive and make sure there is an Artz Centre to one day return to. Until that day… we’ve turned Artz into Artz Online! Social Media output has been cranked up to 1000, sessions are being adapted into online videos and every day we are exploring new ways to keep the Artz Family connected online.
Hence there’s been an undeniable change to my job. Somedays I feel like I’ve gone from the apprentice of a theatre company, to the apprentice of a small television network! Honestly, at times in the last few weeks I’ve felt massively out of my depth. I can recognise though, that is just the same feeling as the one I had at the start of the year. I am reminded of that saying: ‘three months from now, you will be someone else’. At the end of all this, I’ll have once again grown so much and if the Artz Centre does survive this hard period, then we’ll be coming out of the other side of it even stronger than we were.
The battle to keep pushing on has already begun for us! This weekend we’ve just released a Lockdown Timetable which is full of online content for our Artz Community. It is a love letter to the many families that make up our Artz Family, a promise from us as a team of artists and professionals, that we will keep a smile on people’s faces.
To sum up, nobody knows where we will be in 3 months. But I want to do all I can as the Artz Apprentice to make sure that in 3 months time, I can be proud of the achievements I and that the Artz team have made while we build Artz Online into something spectacular!
-Joe