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If I were 22 – Tom Bellerby

Tom Bellerby takes a moment out of his day as Youth Theatre Director at Hull Truck Theatre to share the advice he would give to his younger self.

Tom Bellerby
4 min read

Everyone has started somewhere and everyone has had people along their path who have helped them out.  Don’t be afraid to ask for this support. It can come in all shapes and sizes, from long-term mentors who are always at the end of the phone and become your surrogate theatre family, to people who’ll have a cup of tea with you to talk you through your latest funding bid. Most people working in the arts are happy to give advice and support (when they have time!) and those that aren’t are probably not worth working with. Just do me a favour, when you’re in a position to give the advice and support, be one of the good guys.

When just starting out, one of the greatest things you can do is absorb, absorb, absorb. This mainly refers to artistic practice: spending time observing and working with artists you respect and appropriating the best of what they do in your own practice. But it also refers to all other areas of the industry. I’ve loved working in open plan offices, picking up information about marketing, technical stuff and business development. All these departments are essential to the process of getting work in front of an audience and it’s helped me massively to have a sense of how they all fit together and support each other.

Working for free can be a great thing to do—it can open doors, teach you valuable lessons and give you experiences you’ll never forget. Almost everyone has worked for free at some point and this is an important way to get your foot in the door. But don’t get stuck in a purgatorial land of volunteering. You don’t need me to tell you we don’t go into the arts to make a ton of cash—but it’s really important to develop a sense of your worth as an artist who has a set of skills that you’ve invested time, energy and often money in to develop. If a project can’t happen without you it’s normally a good sign you should be seeing some financial reward for your work. After all, you’ve got to eat and put a roof over your head.

I’ve been in far too many conversations where the word audience does not make an appearance. At the end of the day, without people coming to see our work there would be no point in us making it. We all have an obligation to ensure we are helping to develop theatre audiences—finding new ways to bring people in who would normally not come near a piece of theatre. Making the work accessible while still challenging our audiences and celebrating what is unique about theatre. Thinking about who you are making the work for, how you’ll get them to see it, and how you can make their experience as positive as possible is crucial. Most of the companies and artists I can think of who’ve hit the ground running straight from training / university have taken the time to do this.

We all have good days and bad days. There are days where it feels we’ve taken a big step forward and days when we know a piece isn’t as good as it should have been, or we got our budgeting wrong or annoyed someone we really didn’t want to annoy. These bad days can become some of the most valuable ones if you learn how to draw lessons from them and grow as a result. Equally, being able to articulate what was successful about a project can be one of the greatest skills you’ll acquire—both for your personal development and also to explain the success of your work to others.

Tom is Youth Theatre Director at Hull Truck Theatre. 
www.hulltruck.co.uk

Tom is currently Associate Director for Dancing Through the Shadows, which runs at Hull Truck Theatre until 24 October.