A&HHE Special Issue December 2016AHHELogo-e1420559902593

Success and the student actor: engaging students through digital life-narrative

Tiffany Knight

Flinders University

Abstract

While many universities encourage academics to experiment with innovative methods of teaching and learning, scholarly discourse often remains locked in traditional modes of communication. This essay, drawn from the creative component of early doctoral research into actor training, uses both form and content to explore alternate ways of engaging with scholars and students. It documents a staged reading presented at a Creative Arts Symposium hosted by Flinders University (Adelaide, South Australia) in July 2015. It addresses issues of identity and agency, and notions of success and failure, in the acting industry. In particular, it considers the skills developed in actor training, and how they can be transferred into other sectors of the workforce.

Keywords:

Blogging, digital life writing, life-narrative, actor training, subjectivity, staged reading, theatre, performance.

A number of current pedagogical theories favour innovative methods of teaching and learning within the university environment (Biggs, 2012; Stewart, 2012). As the transmission of knowledge shifts from an emphasis on ‘knowing that’ to ‘knowing how’, oral and interpersonal communication, issue-based problem-solving abilities and transferable skills are key elements of emerging curricula across the disciplines (Barnett et al., 2001). This new thinking reinforces what many educators in the creative arts intuitively understand: ‘Inspiring teachers are memorable because they use surprise, novelty, emotion or attach relevance and meaning to the information. … Analogies, storytelling and metaphors are useful strategies to attach meaning to new learning’ (Stewart, 2012: 8-9). While innovative methods are given primacy on the teaching side of academia, scholarly discourse among researchers largely remains locked in traditional modes of thinking and writing. As sociologist Dorothy Smith points out,

[Academics] have learned to set aside as irrelevant, to deny, or to obliterate our own subjectivity and experience. We have learned to live inside a discourse that is not ours and that expresses and describes a landscape in which we are alienated and preserves that alienation as integral to its practice. (Smith, 1987: 36)

This essay proposes an innovative form of knowledge generation by documenting the lived experience of an actor/acting teacher/PhD candidate. It is based on a staged reading presented at a Creative Arts Symposium hosted by Flinders University (Adelaide, South Australia) in July 2015. The material demonstrates how blogging can be used as an inventive method for engaging with acting students. It is drawn from a blog called Letters to a Young Actor (Knight, 2015), the creative component of early doctoral research into the conflict between actor training, the actor’s identity and lived experience. The blog is framed as a digital Künstlerroman, or artist’s novel. It is an episodic life-narrative recounting the factors that influenced my decision to become an actor, my experiences in actor training, and the career obstacles I have faced in the acting profession as I have transitioned through the life-course. As the title suggests, Letters to a Young Actor is informally directed to current acting students and recent graduates, a number of whom regularly engage with it via Facebook referrals. For the purpose of the symposium, I presented a selection of abridged entries as a staged reading.

Subjectivity, staged readings and blogging: innovations in communication

The staged reading is not without precedent as a mode of scholarly communication, although, interestingly, examples frequently come from the discipline of sociology (Ellis and Flaherty, 1992; Paget, 1990; Spry, 2011; Pelias, 2014). The staged reading allows ‘nuances of feeling, expression and interpretation to be evoked’ that are often absent from traditional academic discourse (Ellis and Flaherty, 1992: 8). Given that many academics within the creative arts are also arts practitioners, non-traditional modes of academic writing and presentation would seem a natural fit. While scholarly rigour remains necessary, genres such as poetry, dramatic reading and memoir are opportunities to connect in innovative and engaging ways within the academic realm. Caroline Ellis and Michael Flaherty, social scientists committed to documenting the researcher’s subjectivity through non-traditional modes of expression, pose questions for academic readers that closely resemble the objectives commonly associated with creative enterprises:

Do readers experience something akin to the emotions, thoughts and bodily sensations we attempt to convey? Does the prose invoke cognitive, emotional, or physical response or identification? Were readers reminded of similar situations or different situations but with similar conditions? Have readers redefined a personal problem as a public issue as a result of reading our texts? … Do readers recognize themselves – their feelings, thoughts, and everyday experiences – in the texts? (Ellis and Flaherty, 1992: 11)

These objectives also accord with much of the philosophy underpinning current university teaching practices. According to Barnett et al., ‘Pedagogical performativity, especially through the use of technologies is, perhaps, less an engagement with knowledge so as to develop understanding’ (emphasis added, Barnett et al., 2001: 446). The aim of university teaching is no longer solely to impart knowledge, but also to provide opportunities for students to reflect, engage and apply knowledge to their particular experiences in an age of individualisation (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Barnett et al., 2001).

Letters to a Young Actor provides students with an opportunity to engage with an acting teacher on a non-traditional pedagogical platform. It raises issues about actor training, notions of success and failure, and obstacles encountered in an individual woman actor’s experience as she forges her unique biography in post-traditional society (Giddens, 1991). It invites students to reflect on their own fears and motivations as they prepare to enter the industry, and offers an opportunity for discussion, either online or later in the rehearsal studio. It also tangibly demonstrates to acting students a potential instrument of self-reflection and creative expression that they too can choose to adopt. Blogging is a ‘performative act’, a public forum in which ‘individuals and online communities are trying to challenge some of society’s norms’ (Cavanagh, 2005: 2). It is a malleable genre that allows for revision and explication, engaging other media through the use of hypertext links, images, sound and video files. The blog can function as a reflexive journal and/or first draft for further creative exploration. It also works as an effective transition between the discrete creative practices of actor and writer. Unlike the book or play, which can take years to craft in virtual isolation, the blog satisfies the actor’s impulse for engagement with an audience: the writer makes an offer in the form of a post, and the online community/audience is free to respond with comments. The life-narrative genre is an extension of the actor’s creative practice. Just as the actor engages in imaginative speculation when investigating a character’s back story, the actor-as-writer can employ similar techniques to make sense of the world, explore self-transformation and promote social change (Duggan, 2013; Langellier, 2001).

There is a rich tradition of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical solo performances created by artists who originally trained as actors. For instance, Pamela Gien’s one-woman show, The Syringa Tree (Gien, 2002), reflects on her childhood memories of growing up in Johannesburg as a white, middle-class girl during the height of apartheid. The personal narrative blog offers a new mode for the actor’s transition from interpreter to maker, an issue that emerging artists preparing to enter an industry with diminishing opportunities must ultimately confront (Latham, 2004; Throsby and Zednick, 2010; Dore, 2015; Lepore, 2015).

Letters to a Young Actor: selections from a staged reading

The following excerpt is an adaptation of the presentation I delivered at the Creative Arts Symposium. It exemplifies a number of the innovative teaching/creative practice principles I have explored in this essay. The sections of dialogue were performed as poly-vocal monodrama, which immediately established my position as an actor. The headings embedded within the script refer to different blog posts.  In performance, these shifts were interpreted as scene changes. The relationship between the performed and written text was reinforced by the use of screen-captured projections taken from the blog, which visually indicated these shifts. As I began each scene, I employed a transition effect which made the projections appear to ‘scroll’ from one blog post to the next. This device allowed the audience to simultaneously witness a live performance and imagine the experience of reading the blog on-line.

A woman in her forties approaches the podium. She silently regards the gathering of scholars, teachers and practitioners before her. Finally, she speaks:

There is a phenomenon known as the Actor’s Nightmare. It’s a dream actors have. It’s opening night, but events have conspired in such a way that you haven’t had a chance to learn your lines yet. The pages of the script are mysteriously blank, or your thumb just can’t quite manage to turn the pages in sequence, or the phone keeps ringing every time you sit down to study the script. Or you’ve learned your lines perfectly and you’re all ready to go, but when you make your first entrance you suddenly realise that you’re naked. Or, you’ve learned your lines, and you have the right costume on, and you make your first entrance – and then you realise that you’re in the wrong play. All the other actors on stage are strangers. But they look at you expectantly, waiting for you to seamlessly join in the flow. Because you are a professional actor.

If you’re lucky, this is when you wake up.

I’m waiting to wake up.

I’m not meant to be here. This is a symposium, not a play. A gathering of incisive, intellectual minds sharing significant and original ideas about relations between practice, research and pedagogy in the creative arts.

I’m an actor. How did this happen?

I did have a presentation to offer you. Twelve pages, double spaced, Sage-Harvard citations, the lot. But I’m not going to deliver that paper today. It was too much like a draft research proposal. I’m a PhD candidate. I’m six months, part time, into my research. I have ideas and questions, but I’m just at the beginning of my journey and every day I find a new path to explore and a new obstacle to smack me in the face. So, instead, today I’m going to leap into the void. I’m going to talk about what has impelled me to do this research. Today, I’m going to tell you my story.

One of the things that I’m doing as part of my research is writing a blog about my experiences. It’s called Letters to a Young Actor and is informally directed to the acting students I teach (Knight, 2015). It’s become a surprisingly fruitful form of communication with students and has provoked some exciting discussions and unexpected responses. It was inspired by a conversation I had a couple of years ago while directing an Honours student in her graduate showcase:

  • How do you manage it?
  • Manage what?
  • How do you manage being an actor and a mum?
  • Uh, well … that’s a good question –
  • I mean, it looks like it’s going to be hard enough to just support myself when I get out there. How do you know when it’s the right time to have children?
  • Well, like they say, there’s never a good time. You just have to –
  • I mean, I’ve just invested four years of my life into this and I know that I probably won’t make much money doing it.
  • Well that’s probably true –
  • I don’t want to miss out on having kids.
  • You don’t have to –
  • Maybe this was a huge mistake.

I blustered my way through an answer. But the conversation haunted me. And so I started to write.

Letters to a Young Actor

Dear Lucy. Dear Holly. Dear Ashton. Dear all the young women who are in the process of becoming actors.

This is to those of you who dream of being famous; or, like me, simply long to be a part of the theatre. The ones who also think they might one day want to have a family. This is my story. I tell it to you because when I trained to become an actor, none of my female teachers were parents. When I entered the theatre professionally, there were only one or two women whom I admired as successes who also had children. And it was complicated for them.

I was born in the early seventies. My mother was a feminist. I know this because she told me off when I was six years old for saying that sweeping was women’s work. I also know it because she told me I could be anything I wanted  – as long as that wasn’t a nurse or a teacher. I didn’t realise then how new feminism was – or the second wave of it, anyway. My mother was a trailblazer in her own modest way. Women had only started fighting for equal rights in the workforce a decade or so before I was born. We don’t have a sense of the past when we’re children. We assume that the way life is for us is the way it has always been. I assumed, because my mother worked and told me that I could be anything, do anything, that women had successfully been doing that for generations.

How do you define success as a woman? As an actor? I wanted to become an actor because I wanted to be a part of a community that accepted me. Because I saw Star Wars when I was five years old, and wanted to dissolve into the theme music I could hear swelling up through the floor boards from the stereo downstairs. I wanted to be an actor because it was something more than stifling suburbia; more than terrifying Australian sports culture and tedious, bourgeois, good-girl-private-school studiousness. Because Shakespeare was able to articulate all the huge emotions I was experiencing, and gave me the words to finally express them. Because I was good at it. Because people praised me for it. Because it was the first place, after being unwillingly transplanted from my home in Canada to a foreign land, where I really felt I belonged.

I was born in Toronto to an Australian mother and Canadian father. They had two children, my younger brother and myself, before divorcing seven years later. I remember how my mother’s Australian accent set her apart from the Canadian mums; in comparison, her voice was beautiful, lilting and exotic. When she spoke, I wasn’t a dual citizen, but a ‘jewel citizen’; something to be infinitely proud of. She gave me a pair of duty-free pearl earrings when we moved to Australia. My new stepfather had found work in Sydney because she was desperate to go home. Even as a nine year old, I knew those pearls were a bribe, compensation for being taken away from Canada and my real dad. I thought duty-free was ‘Judy free’ because of her Australian accent. I didn’t know who Judy was, or why her pearls were free, but they were far too big for my little, perpetually-infected ear lobes. My memory of leaving Canada is standing in the airport bathroom with tears streaming down my face as she forced the posts through my pus-encrusted lobes, shouting, ‘They’re Judy Free! They’re cultured pearls!’ They eventually ended up in her jewellery box.

Australia wasn’t a happy place for a long, long time. I didn’t fit. The crows sounded like strangled babies. The hot dogs had red, leathery skins that squeaked between my teeth. The ketchup was sauce. The kids called me Yank. My year five teacher would send me to the corner shop at lunch to buy his cigarettes, and make me hide them under my jumper on the way back. The sap from the gum trees formed hard, sticky balls that would hurt when the boys threw them at you. And if you didn’t play cricket, footie or netball, you didn’t exist.

But in year six my class did a play and I made people laugh. For the first time, people saw past my thick glasses and crooked teeth, my preposterous height and clumsiness. By seeing me as someone else, for the first time they saw me.

This is the story of what made me decide to become an actor

I dropped out of university at the end of first year. I was doing Communications at UTS. I only did it because I didn’t get into NIDA,[i] and I had to do something. NIDA had seemed like a foregone conclusion. I had won the Globe Shakespeare Theatre Competition, judged by the great Australian Shakespearean actor, John Bell. I had won a trip to London to do a workshop with some actor called Mark Rylance on the foundations of the yet-to-be-reconstructed Globe Theatre. NIDA was a no-brainer. It was the be-all and end-all in theatre training as far as I was concerned. Judy Davis had studied there. Her performance in My Brilliant Career had become my private touchstone. That film taught me that Australian women were among the first feminists, and that an ugly duckling could transform into a beautiful, talented and independent swan. My Brilliant Career finally made Australia feel like home.

But I didn’t get into NIDA. Someone pulled me aside after the second round and advised me to ‘get some life experience’ before auditioning again. It’s very odd to be the person who gives this same advice to eighteen-year olds all these years later. I wish there was some way I could express to them how well I understand that feeling of utter desolation.

Communications at UTS was a prestige course: very popular, which had driven the entrance marks sky-high. Without a serious plan B, I decided to give it a whirl. If I couldn’t be an actor I could always be a journalist. It was immediately apparent that I was in the wrong program. I found myself at an institution where my beloved Shakespeare had been chucked on the dust heap of Dead White Males, and deconstructionism held sway. I learned two things that year: how to roll a joint, and that I was never going to be a journalist.

One afternoon I skived off classes and found myself at matinee screening of Henry and June, a film based on the diaries of the erotica writer, Anaïs Nin. The world of 1930s Bohemian France, filled with sexual experimentation, intellectual debate and modernist art set my suburban existence in stark relief. I left the cinema inflamed – on multiples levels – and utterly determined to take charge of my own fate. A fate that bloody well better have some good sex in it.

This is the story of how determined I was to go to theatre school

The six months are up. It’s time to head back to my real life in Australia. Back to a uni course I hate, and a second stab at NIDA, I guess, but my heart’s just not in it. I’ve had a glorious summer in Toronto. Making theatre. Learning to like coffee. Falling into what seems like love. I’ve met a long-haired Southern Baptist who wants to be an actor but makes a living as a furniture salesman for his family firm back in North Carolina. I direct him in a Pinter play. He’s a gentle bear of a man who introduces me to home-grown organic vegetables, smudging ceremonies and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

I think want to stay in Canada.

I discuss the matter with a loon floating on Little Clam Lake. It’s an Indian summer, and my dad and his wife have rented a cottage in the Muskokas. I spend hours propelling myself about the lake in a tiny rowboat. What to do, what to do? How do I tell my mother that I want to make a life 13,000 miles away? She’s going to freak. Think of the positives. Imagine how excited Dad will be. The daughter he has missed for so long wants to stay! Wants to move in with him and his wife! Only – now this is awkward. This is delicate, how I approach this memory and not hurt anyone. But it’s part of the story and I have to at least acknowledge what happened, because it triggered stuff that won’t make sense otherwise. Bonehead decisions that I made. Serious ramifications barely dodged.

The deal was six months – I would stay with them for six months. It never crossed my mind that it would be a problem with my stepmother if I wanted to extend the invitation. It was completely unexpected that I wouldn’t be wanted.

I wasn’t angry when my father told me the news. Definitely surprised. Hurt, I guess – but hurt mainly at how torn he was. Divided loyalties. Awkward. I don’t want to be the cause of this. I go back to Australia, but I’m already hatching Plan B. The long-haired furniture salesman. I’ll stay with him, just till I get on my feet. Find a job, get a place, and apply for theatre schools. He’s more than happy to let me crash at his pad.

I’m in Australia for six weeks, on the dole, packing up my life and avoiding my mother’s tearful gaze when my long-haired lover calls long-distance. Hysterical over the phone. His mother has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. My jaw aches. My gums are flaring. I’ve been gargling hydrogen peroxide for weeks to stave off infection in my impacted wisdom teeth. They have to come out. My mother and stepfather are sympathetic, but you’re nineteen now and no longer under our health care package. If you want to have your teeth removed you’ll just have to spend your airline ticket money. Canada isn’t going anywhere, darl – maybe after you finish your degree you can think about going back.

Forget it. If you won’t support me I’ll figure it out on my own. I’m getting used to that now.

The School of Dentistry in Haymarket offers free services – as long as you’re prepared to be a guinea pig for the students. I wait for hours in the dusty corridors. They’ve been offering ‘modern and efficient treatment for the impoverished’ since 1940. I don’t think much has changed. Tired migrants and cranky mothers with packs of runny-nosed children are my companions. When I am finally ushered into the theatre I smile brightly at half a dozen wide-eyed students, all about my age. ‘You all look even more scared than me!’ I joke, attempting to break the ice. When no-one cracks a smile I know I’m fucked.

Two weeks later, although the pain has largely receded I still can’t completely open my mouth. I wedge a MAGLIGHT between my teeth and peer into the bathroom mirror. Mystery solved. One of the students has accidentally sewn the inside of my mouth to my gum. I sterilize the toenail scissors over a Bic lighter and manage to cut the stiches free. It’s lovely to be able to yawn again.

The night before I leave, I make a compilation tape of the classical music I’ve grown up listening to, and play it for my mother. We sob in each other’s arms to the strains of Dvorak’s New World Symphony.

When I arrive in Toronto I’m met at the airport by the long-haired furniture salesman. I don’t recognize him at first. His face is pasty. His hair is lank. A spasm jolts through me: this was a huge mistake.

This is what I think about in the middle of the night

I believe I am trivial.

That my work is trivial. That acting is trivial, and research about actors is therefore also trivial.
I believe that actors aren’t as important as the other artists who make theatre. I believe that the makers are more important than the interpreters.

If I believe that I am trivial, how can I believe in my work?

I believe that certain types of actors are more important than other actors. Stage actors are more important than film actors. Famous actors are less trivial than not-famous actors. Working actors are less trivial than unemployed actors.

Failed actors are the most trivial of all.

Correction: I am the most trivial of all.

What if that is not true? What if that is just internalised bullshit? What if acting is as important as any other job in the theatre? As any other job in the world? It’s one of the oldest jobs, in many ways. The storyteller, the bard … (The whore, whispers the little dark voice).

What if you are doing research about actors to illuminate the importance of that job? The real importance: not how much money you can make, or acclaim you can garner, or jobs you can list on IMDb.[ii] What if you are exploring the importance of the skills that make acting valuable to society? The ability to tell a story. The ability to connect with others using your voice, your eyes and your presence. The ability to be honest and vulnerable. The ability to be spontaneous and take risks. The ability to express emotion. To be playful. To say yes, let’s! The ability to walk in another person’s shoes.

These are not trivial things. These are things that are worth taking off the stage and carrying into other domains. It is not a failure to take these qualities off the stage and into other domains.

I think it is important to introduce young actors to the industry with integrity, honesty and kindness. For them to know that their skills are valuable, no matter what they end up doing with them. Actors are important. There is no theatre, no film, without them. But moreover, their ability to connect, to be vulnerable and empathetic, to be human, can be the foundation for the lives they lead and the biographies they forge.

The woman thanks the audience and returns to her seat.

Teaching and learning through blogging: a process of discovery

I began writing Letters to a Young Actor on the advice of my PhD supervisor. She suggested that I experiment with life writing as a way to unpack my motivation for undertaking research into the identities of actors who become mothers. The letter form satisfied my impulse to interrogate some of the obstacles I have personally encountered, as well the responsibility I feel as a teacher towards young actors training for an increasingly precarious industry. Turning the writing into a blog was not my original intent. It required a considerable degree of deliberation and deep breathing before I published the first post. Although I am connected informally to a proportion of the student body via Facebook, I did not inform students about the blog, nor send them posts directly. Their responses have been offered voluntarily.

Feedback from both male and female students has centred on the fact that they appreciate being presented with a frank account of an actor’s experience. ‘We all admire where you’ve got to in your career,’ explained one individual, ‘but it’s so good to know that you went through the stuff that we’re struggling with too’ (personal communication, May 2015). Another response stated, ‘Your blog is one of the most beautiful things I have ever read. … It’s so vivid and brutally honest and I am so in love with it. Good on you for being so damn brave’ (personal communication, May 2015). This student has subsequently begun to experiment with digital life writing herself.

While I have not yet employed the blog as a formal teaching tool, the response suggests that it provides students with a unique forum for communication and reflection. Additionally, it serves as an example of an actor experimenting with a creative form to wrestle with issues they too may eventually encounter.

Conclusion

It is well established that innovative methods of teaching and learning are called for in the contemporary university environment. Digital technology provides a host of opportunities for lecturers to engage creatively with students. What is less evident is how the skills universities privilege among graduates – the abilities to reflect, communicate and problem-solve – can also be practiced intra-collegially. The celebrated American playwright, Thornton Wilder, considered theatre ‘the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being’ (interview, Goldstone, 1956). Actors and acting teachers play fundamental parts in this process. However, the scholar of acting also has an opportunity to create theatre, by transforming the lecture room into a site-specific performance space. Academic discourse has the potential to become an opportunity for reflection and connection among peers, when acting and creative arts principles are incorporated into the research domain.

Notes

[i] UTS: University of Technology Sydney. NIDA: National Institute of Dramatic Art (Sydney).

[i] The Internet Movie Database.

References

Barnett R, Parry G and Coate K (2001) Conceptualising Curriculum Change. Teaching in Higher Education 6: 435-449.

Beck U and Beck-Gernsheim E (1995) The normal chaos of love. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Biggs J (2012) What the student does: teaching for enhanced learning. Higher Education Research & Development 31: 39-55.

Cavanagh K (2005) Comments in the margins : life narrative, publishing, credibility, and blogs. Sydney: Blogtalk Downunder.

Dore M (2015) Mourning the end of ArtStart. ArtsHub News (3 June). Available at: http://www.artshub.com.au/festival/news-article/features/festivals/madeleine-dore/mourning-the-end-of-artstart-248273 (accessed 7 June 2015).

Duggan S (2013) To an audience of ‘I’. Qualitative Research Journal 13: 25-32.

Ellis C and Flaherty MG (1992) An Agenda for the Interpretation of Lived Experience. In: Ellis C and Flaherty MG (eds) Investigating Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience. California: Sage Publications, pp.1-16.

Giddens A (1991) Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Gien P (2002) The Syringa Tree. New York: Dramatists Play Services.

Goldstone RH (1956) Thornton Wilder, the Art of Fiction No. 16. The Paris Review 15. Available at: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4887/the-art-of-fiction-no-16-thornton-wilder (accessed 3 February 2016).

Knight T (2015) Letters to a Young Actor. In: Letters to a Young Actor. Available at: https://tiffanylyndallknight.org (accessed 8 June 2015).

Langellier KM (2001) Personal Narrative. In: Jolly M (ed.) Life writing: autobiographical and biographical forms. Chicago, Ill.: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Lepore S (2015) Facing Facts: Artists Have to be Entrepreneurs. HowlRound: a commons by and for people who make performance. Available at: http://howlround.com/facing-facts-artists-have-to-be-entrepreneurs (accessed 1 July 2015).

Latham C (2004) Survival of the Fittest: The Artist Versus the Corporate World. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency House.

Paget MA (1990) Performing the Text. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 19: 136-155.

Pelias RJ (2014) Performance: An Alphabet of Performative Writing Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.

Smith DE (1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: a Feminist Sociology. Boston: North Eastern University Press.

Spry T (2011) Body, Paper, Stage Writing and Performing Autoethnograph. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.

Stewart M (2012) Understanding learning: theories and critique. In: Hunt L and Chalmers D (eds) University Teaching in Focus. Melbourne: ACER Press.

Throsby D and Zednick A (2010) Do You Really Expect to Get Paid? An economic study of professional artists in Australia. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Australia Council for the Arts.