This past week, Theatre Communications Group (TCG) announced that its job search engine, ARTSEARCH, would not only be free of cost to all users, but would additionally require all prospective employers to list a salary range for all postings. This announcement comes on the heels of seismic changes within the theater industry aimed at dismantling inequity and financial exploitation.
“So much of the arts coverage focuses on the product and not the process,” says Hiltner, who knew she wanted to be a costume designer beginning in high school. “I have always loved arts, people, personalities, and history, so costume design was a pretty natural merging of those things.”
Frustratingly, if raw materials such as paint go over budget, the money is usually immediately found. Says Hiltner, “It just feels like the money is treated differently when it’s going to individual artists rather than a tangible, visual thing that is seen by the audience.” Part of what makes everything so challenging is that there isn’t an accepted standard as to how fees are established. Few theaters are transparent about their process and can’t explain why they choose arbitrary hourly or flat fees other than the vague metric of “experience.”
Hiltner feels that the solution to all of this is transparency—“having a community and culture in place that allows these conversations to happen without individual artists getting blamed, being called difficult to work with, having offers rescinded, not being called back, all the things that happen currently when artists attempt to negotiate on their own behalf.” Some companies are beginning to offer transparent equal designer fees across the board, like Collaboraction, which pays everyone $18 per hour.
As theater productions struggle with the limitations of Zoom, one cannot help but notice that productions with the more sophisticated lighting, sets, and costumes have the ability to transform the online experience into something more cinematically stunning. Hopefully more theaters realize the power of this advantage and pay designers accordingly.
