Performer, sell thyself
SFU program helps artists reconcile making art with making a living
Johnny Wu didn’t anticipate the market — dancing backup for big name Asian singing stars visiting Vancouver — but the opportunities not only exist, they are growing fast.
“We were lucky enough to do backup dancing for Christine Fan’s concert at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre,” said Wu, 21, a Simon Fraser University theatre and criminology student, dancer and aspiring actor. The same dance crew also opened for Taiwanese superstar A-Lin in 2013.
Not many Asian dancers make it in Vancouver, said Wu’s artistic director Lily Hsu, owner of LH Performance Productions, a small company that specializes in providing Asian dancers for entertainment events.
Hsu, 29, started her company two years ago to meet a growing niche demand for Asian dancers, and to help young dancers transition into the mainstream market. The number of well-known Asian entertainers booking Vancouver has doubled in two years, Hsu said, with 10 Asian concerts since January alone.
But Wu has mixed feelings about dancing for the Asian market. On the one hand, he’s glad for the work and happy to be able to show younger dancers it’s possible to work. On the other hand, he’d rather be acting.
“I’m still trying to explore who I am (creatively),” said Taiwanese born Wu, who’s lived in Canada since he was five.
Managing the entrepreneurial side of a creative career is a challenge with which Howard Jang, 55, SFU professor and former Arts Club Theatre executive director, is intimately familiar.
Younger artists always ask how to make a living at their art, said Jang, who started out as a bass player and this year taught a pilot program in creative entrepreneurship at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts.
Dig deeply for “who you are as an artist,” Jang advises. After all, he got it wrong the first time.
“Artists are now figuring out ways they can truly and sincerely build a life around what they do,” Jang said. “I didn’t think I had any control over it. The only thing I could think of was getting into an orchestra,” and that meant practising his bass and learning to audition well.
But then he realized he could find deeper satisfaction helping other artists to succeed. Jang’s successes include working on Grammy award winning projects with artists like Kathleen Battle and Wynton Marsalis.
Jang encountered the blunt realities of financial management as Ballet BC’s new executive director some 20 years ago. His first job was making that week’s payroll.
“I didn’t have a clue what to do. I really wasn’t very strong on reading financial statements,” said Jang, who thought he’d scored a great job hanging around with dancers. He did find payroll with the help of an angel benefactor, but quickly “began to realize I couldn’t do things off the back of a napkin. I needed to understand planning. Structure follows strategy. That became the mantra.”
“Most creative people just want to create,” he said. “A lot of them think ‘If I do it, they will come.’ There’s a sort of Field of Dreams moment. I learned pretty early on in my career that it doesn’t work that way.”
“It’s one thing to have passion about something,” but it really helps to understand “where to find the money, what does financing look like, how do you work with CRA, what’s the difference between a shareholder and a partner.”
Jang’s done some hair-raising things for his artists.
Desperate to get his dancers away from the dangerous splintered floors and discarded needles of their Downtown Eastside studios, he’d finally found a wonderful space with a sprung-floor ballroom, but the landlord was quirky and wanted to cancel the deal because Jang had shown up with 11 postdated cheques instead of 12.
“I was really afraid he was going to walk away and not come back, so I left my son there as collateral and I drove like a bat out of hell,” he said. “We signed the lease. It changed that company. It was the moment in time we realized we could actually create great art.” But art needs an audience. Artists spend time thinking about their product, the art, the event or the performance, “but what are you doing to build anticipation for it?” Jang said. “You might want to call it marketing or relationship building, but how are you going to create a memory for it?”
“There’s anticipation, the event, and then there’s memory. The longer you can help someone to remember what they experienced, the more likelihood they will want to experience it again.”
At the Arts Club, he would sometimes have a photo taken of a show’s set, and send a postcard to everyone who attended the show.
Today, Jang hopes students like Wu will remember his lessons. He will teach creative entrepreneurship again this fall.
Meanwhile, Wu is juggling full-time studies with auditions, practices and shows. Last year, he worked 60 days on film sets, mostly as a “specialty extra.”
One of Wu’s biggest concerns is how to sell himself.
“How do you say ‘I’m good, pay me to be good?’ ”
Jang’s course taught him that “saying ‘I’m good’ is not the same as telling people ‘This is why you should support me. This is why I matter.’ As a creative entrepreneur, you are the product.”
He’s trying to figure who he is as an artist. “How do I brand myself as someone that’s castable?”
He no longer worries about “selling out” or the conflict between money and art.
“Now I don’t feel that money is the enemy. After taking the course, I realize money is the fuel for the machine. We don’t buy the car for the gas. The gas kind of helps make the car work.”
As on-call performers, “we’re always waiting by the phone. We have all these great things prepared and we’re sitting at home waiting for someone to say, ‘Yes, you can do that.’
“With the Creative Entrepreneurship program, you start thinking ‘ OK, I still kinda have to wait by the phone, but how do I get that person to say yes? Is there another way for me to do this?’ ”