Event

Good lord.

This was the only photo I took tonight. It was to send to a friend who wanted to know if they could use me for a thing. “I’m on a thing!”

This thing has been a long thing coming. And it has been a learning thing, as I’m trying to balance the creative side with the fact I’m having to be hard and hold my ground about money. We almost fell flat where a miscommunication had left the client expecting they could get two experienced event actors for the price of one. Actors at events get a bad rap and rightly so, so it’s important to hold value if you aren’t gonna be a nightmare. Often the client hasn’t got a clue. “We want vampires” the booker hasn’t got a clue “Can you all be vampires, you’re actors.” You get there and there’s nothing but some shit fangs and a pound shop costume. “What do we do?” “I dunno, just be a vampire.” So you do whatever. I remember dancing in a shower of blood in a singlet vest and a guest came in stupid vampire costume and started talking in Dracula accent. The booker lost their shit about “that fucking actor doing Dracula shit”. He still treated me like a wanker even though they realised the mistake when someone was sent up to fire me, realised I was stuck in a shower doing my Blade shit, and then got told by the guest that “I VANT TO DRINK YOUR BLOOD!”

New actors might want to justify their pay by DOING. That’s a trap. Nobody wants to be acted at. Particularly when they’re getting drunk with friends. I remember rehearsing “audience moves” for an event for the Princes Trust and having to pretend to be an  audience member so the young actors could practice moving us. I chose to be like people genuinely are at these events, being rude, breaking world, being patronising. The director asked me after the first move not to “be so obstructive in rehearsal”. Oh summer child. I said “I’m being realistic,” I tried as these extremely skilful musical theatre performers were going to get eaten alive and I could smell it. 

Come the audience moves at the event, all these young actors went up to all these drunk rich people and started “acting” at them and of course got totally resisted and couldn’t move them. They had no technique to genuinely engage or undercut or play, to read the person and quickly serve what they might respond to. Sure it’s a skill that’s learnt. Sure it has taken me decades. Sure it involves abandoning your crap and shifting up your charm. But a teaching moment was shut down by being told I was being problematic. I still walked away with my head held high, and the performance part of the event went well, but the expectations of the cast were vastly shorted. You won’t get what they thought they were gonna get. Ever.

This evening we balanced it fine for a small audience as part of a pitch. I was white rabbit so timekeeping and madness conversations, but also can touch on things like rabbit hole – he can be a bit mad himself and maybe has bought into one of the crazier pattern matches.

Playing it back I maybe went in energetically harder than I needed to at the start as I had to have a discussion just beforehand about what we were worth, and I knew with that discussion just done that we would be under scrutiny. “They asked for £200 more than we budgeted for each.” Yes we fucking did. Cos you wanted to pay us in tapeworm. I’ve done events, twenty years ago, at that rate all in and everyone on it was bitching about it back then: “This is much more work than that accounts for”.

I held my ground, I’m glad I held my ground. If they want to employ the thirty years ago version of me for peanuts next time time they can, but there’ll be a learning curve before they can do it like we do it. Ffion and I know what to ask the booker now, what to ask the client when I’m given a direct line to them, what I can sort with the venue first, what it needs to build what the client wants, how to deliver it in a way that the guests are happy but so is the client and the booker. etc etc. We play, we learn, we play more, we earn. More.

A good night. I’m fucked. No specifics, just a brain dump. That’s all you’re getting. Off up north at dawn tomorrow. Fuck. Good lord. Night night. Mel is in my room after reading tarot all night with a snake round her neck. I’m in Brian’s with cats. I thought I would drive halfway up tonight but I can barely think. Sleep. Early early start tomorrow. But seeing off a friend.