5d. Continued..

I have posted some questions on my LinkedIn page.

Please have a look at them, any feed back would be greatly appreciated!

Going back to training..

5d. Proposed Enquir

In less than one week today I will be leaving for New York!

I have got a place at The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, so will be studying out there for three months.

The reason I have chosen to go back into education and to study this course in particular was for a number of different reasons:

I keep speaking to people about how I have trained, (Three years in Musical Theatre at Italia Conti) and they turn their nose up at it. 'Ohh musical theatre..' As if doing musical theatre means that you have not studied acting;

I love method acting. This school specialises in it. It is also an incredibly accredited school;

I love that it is a 12 week course, I feel like anything else would be too short. And I wouldn't have enough time to cultivate what I had learnt. And anything longer would be too much time to take out of my working life.

So I have decided to change my proposed enquiry to;

What are the reasons you would go back into training?

With this question there is a lot of explanation to be made. Similar to my old proposed enquiry, people have a lot to say about the company.

5c. Ethics

A lot of news is for light reading. Should we really care about what a celebrity has in their fridge when there are issues happening all around the world that are more common that we may think!

An issue that is very close to home at the moment is about a family friend. He had the wrong lung operated on and as a result has passed away. Now, who could have made such a foolish mistake? Was it the mistake of the surgeon? Was the surgeon just following the notes? Who wrote the notes incorrectly? If it was the fault of the note writing assistant, who is to blame? The assistant or the surgeon that was clearly operating on the wrong lung? Is this man slaughter? Could someone go to prison for originally trying to save the patients  life? But most of all, how often does this happen? Is it that this is very common but the media don't widely report it? Because its not as interesting as the new nail varnish that your favourite D list 'celebrity' is being out?

In the eyes of the mans family. This man has been murdered. If the procedure had gone correctly, he probably would have lived. Someone made a huge mistake and should pay for that. 

'Luckily' this was an elderly man. Who's wife has passes away and his children are all in their 40's. However, would the law look upon this case differently if this had been a thirty year old man who supported his wife and three children? 

A subject is only ethical if it is believed to be ethical. 

Take one of the main topics of news at the moment, gun crime in America. The one thing everyone can agree on is we don't want a mass shooting in schools ever again.

But how do we go about stopping this?

Some states such as Texas and other republican states want to make guns readily available, they believe that the only way to stop fire is with fire. They say that if a psychotic person had a gun. The only thing that would stop him would be to have gun pointed back at him. There are many stories of people who have lost their friends and family at gun point and believe that if they had been in possession of a weapon they could have stopped devastation.  And where do you draw the line with who can own a gun? At sixteen or even eighteen years of age you are still wanting to show off to your friends, you wear your heart on your sleeve and you want to be top dog. You are still not mentally mature enough to own something can can kill a person so easily. Surely it's like tip toeing on the edge of a cliff. The slightest thing could make you fall.

The other view is a ban on weapons. But surely, this will actually make no difference. As drugs are illegal but widely used all round the world.

 Guns can be confined to shooting clubs. As shooting and hunting are still sports. A ban on weapons in the home. But it will be very difficult to controls this as there is always a way of getting around the law.

Another idea would be to stop schools being gun free zones. To make sure that two or three teachers were trained to handle a situation with a gun incase the worst was to happen. But who is to stop someone or a child getting hold of this gun?

It's an ethical issue that Obama us trying to solve with a vote. Who who is right and who is wrong?

In regards to the ethics of the well being of yourself or your employees. A list of factors must be drawn. But inevitably it all comes down to twos fault it is. If a dancer has slipped on a  wet stage it is the fault of the employer. As it is the employers job to abide by the minimum safety requirements for the dancer. 

If a dancer does not warm up and tears a muscle it is the fault of the dancer as a dancer is required to keep themselves in tip top condition.

However, if a singer gets nodules or looses their voice it is very difficult to decide who is ethically responsible. Is it the singer for not looking after their voice correctly? Is it the employer for pushing them to do too many shows without enough rest? Has the singer been abusing their voice with late nights, smoking and shouting?

Each topic is very different and maybe the only way to solve them is to look at the facts and to try and work out which is the most logical explanation as people look at things differently. Making ethics a continuously hard subject to tackle. 

Notes..

A couple of weeks ago I went into Middlesex Uni and met up with Alan and a group of other students from the BAPP course. I found I had a few revelations. 

From this I learnt that I could be at a disadvantage, this is because my profession is performing, not teaching. By this I mean that because I am not with a group of children or young adults, I do not have a vast selection of people that I can use to gather information from at my disposal. So I don't have a great source of observation. Working as a teacher and doing the BAPP course, there is more to talk about as they manage a group of children etc and can tailer the lessons to the appropriate subject for the BAPP course. When teaching, information can be picked up everyday. Where as when it is just myself, I need to have these revelations to progress. 

So the work I do delves deeper into myself rather than the information of other people. For the course this making what I am writing about harder, but for my critical reflection it helps a great deal, doing a degree is not just about getting the paper at the end but also the learning that comes from it and how you can use that for the rest of your professional and non professional life.

However I did find that I am not just in the dark doing this subject as what I am doing also linked up with other subjects where people also felt they were on a long road and did not know which direction to take next. I was speaking to one girl about her subject. She was taking this degree from an angle which I didn't know you could take on this course. Fashion. However I found that the topics that I am touching on also linked with hers. I am very interested in the subject of low or non payed jobs and she was also talking about people doing unpaid internships. So from different subjects we can help each other. I can also use this for my SIG groups. 

I found that being in an interactive environment also really helped me to spark new ideas. So I need to do my best to make sure that I can get myself into these situations to get the best out of my degree. 

5b. Working Abroad Continued..

From one of my comments on my previous blogs helped me to think more deeply into my earlier reflection. 

Often, with any problems we might have had, we just had to do our best to work our way around them. Because we would only be in the venue for a forty five minute set, the venue would not have necessarily moved mountains for us. This is because they are a business themselves and although we are there to bring in the customers as an attraction, they are inevitably the ones who make the money. So wasting their time on us will be stopping them from serving customers.
I am not overly fussy when it comes to job situations that I am faced with. This is because being able to perform overrides all other problems. I can change in a grotty area, glass on the floor is a difficulty but we can sweep this away. I have moved barrels around a changing area before, this wasn't my job to do and if I would have hurt myself there would have been some serious repercussions, but I didn't so it wasn't a problem. I think where I draw the line is at bugs. Were I have a genuine phobia of something. It's something that I would not tolerate in my own home and I'm not being payed enough to tolerate it anywhere else. But the problem is, I put up with everything else and others want the job so much that they can stand being put in a room with cockroaches running around. Which as a result allows employers to put performers in situations like that and to only think of them as little worker bees that bring in the money. This is a downward spiral for performers. This is why I have grown to believe performers should not do unpaid work. If performers lower the price of themselves then it allows employers to pay less and put performer in bad situations because they know that performers are very replaceable.  So by a small amount of people doing something for a low fee, why should the employer want to pay any more to have new performers when they know that someone will do it for a cheeper price?

I think this has brought me to think about how we as performers look after our wellbeing. Organisations like Equity have been put in place to stop this from going on. But we have to work with them so that they can help us. The more we allow ourselves to be walked over the more it will affect others within the industry too. We must do our best to bring the industry's view on performers to a higher level. 

5b. Ethics Within Working Abroad

I have been trying to look up different laws on the topics that I had brought up. Straight away I contacted Equity. Today, Equity is not as important as it was before, Long ago, performers were not able to work unless they had an Equity Card. However, You could also not get an Equity Card unless you were working. so people were just going in circles. Now though you can still employed without the necessary documents.
I looked though all Equity's contracts and discovered that there was a lot of information on health and safety. Explaining that it is always the fault of the employer or venue. However, the performer must also look after themselves by warming up and doing their best to avoid injury. There was also lots of information on the performers welfare. But the way it was written was very non-specific, to cover all angles. The best way to find out individual issues is to make a claim to one of the Equity representatives that will individually taylor the claim around you. I am very glad that I have joined spotlight because it keeps me reassured that in a dog eat dog industry, I have someone else looking after me.

All of Equity's information is found though this link:

www.equity.org.uk

Blake Curtis-Woodcock Dance Showreel

I have finally got my dance showreel up and running and now it's been uploaded to the web!

Blake Curtis-Woodcock Dance Showreel

Give it a click and let me know what you think!! :D xx