This and That

Worrying trends in the creative industry

 The entertainment calendar year 2021 has exposed some worrying trends from our creative industry. Mainly the issues have come to the fore via the various art festivals that have taken place.

The entry which we published last week addressed a part of that general problem. Only that the focus was on the conduct and capacity of event organisers. The artists were sort of spared in that entry.

But their honeymoon seems to have run out very fast and today they have fallen in the hat and pan. They need to feel the heat a bit.

The developments and the comments that were made in the aftermath of the Hangout Festival held at Kabumba Hotel in Salima had me worried, honestly. As has become traditional, the event in Salima came with its controversy.

A number of artists, who were initially billed to perform at the event made last minute decisions to withdraw. Predictably, the blame was heaped on the organisers who were accused of failing to honour the ‘contractual agreements’, even to ferry the artists to the venue.

I am using the word contractual advisedly as it has come to light that some, if not a majority, of the local artists make commitments or enter into agreements to sign up for these festivals without any written contractual agreements.

A word of mouth, maybe over the phone and even via WhatsApp coupled with the camaraderie between the two parties they say is enough to have them sign up for these mega events. Just how that is the case, I don’t know. But that is what it is.

This, by all considerations, is a recipe for disaster.

It is, therefore, surprising that the same artists cry out loud when it turns out that they have not been treated according to their expectations. But this arrangement is a village operation which gives just too much room for the organisers to abuse the artists.

How do you expect someone who is not bound by anything to honour every word they say? The loopholes that these ‘gentleman agreements’ have are catastrophic.

In the event that

some organiser goes back on his/her initial promises, the artists are left with no space to seek any legal redress since there is nothing to back their claims in the first place. With the present scenario, artists are literally laying themselves on the ground to be trampled upon by any promoter or event organiser.

For long, creatives have cried for better treatment and yearned for increased financial support from corporates and the government. But sadly, these people have not set a price for themselves and everyone they come in contact with is given a blank cheque to set a value for himself.

If you haven’t identified your value on the market, know that everyone who will walk in will demand your services at any price of their liking. Our creatives need to wake up from this slumber if they are to get a good value from the sweat and receive the dignity as real professionals.

The creative sector is big business elsewhere and the same can happen here if we put the proper tenets to pull it in the desired direction. We should not wait for someone to come from Mars to teach us how some of these basic things need to be done.

As we seek to improve the creative space, we need to adopt a befitting approach too, which is professional and reflective of the ambitions we have set for ourselves. In 2021, signing up for a festival performance via a WhatsApp conversation doesn’t sound so cool.

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