Skip to main content
NSDF Logo NSDF
Donate
What's On
NSDF HUB
What We Do
What We Do
What is NSDF all about?
NSDF HUB NSDF CREATES Access Toolkit How to Enter a Show Our Yearly Festival The Bigger Room Project
Support Us
Support Us
How can you support NSDF's work?
Alumni Supporters Scheme Our Supporters Make a Donation Leave a Legacy
Our Story
Our Story
Find out more about the 65 year old Festival.
Our Mission Our History Our Principles Our People Our Alumni
The Fourth Wall
The Fourth Wall
Read articles from Noises Off, our Festival Magazine, and catch the latest from Team NSDF at Blogs & News
Blogs & News Noises Off
Register
Noises Off Article

On Emerging

Published on
10th April 2022

Zoe Callow tackles the terminology of ‘emerging’ with Meg Perks, Joe Kent-Walters and Ali Pidsley

Share this article

I. I think it’s just something that people have said to us. 

Meg Perks and Joe Kent-Walters started their company, The Devil Wears Dada, in the first summer of the pandemic. Meg can’t remember if their show, Meg and Joe are Trying to Connect, suffered two or three failed Arts Council bids in that time, but Joe won’t forget in a hurry: Two arts council, one local council, he cuts in.  

I’m here to ask them what it means to be emerging, and Meg, like me, isn’t sure. I think it’s just something that people have said to us. Maybe we’re not fully established as a company yet, still finding our footing a bit. 

It’s uncanny to hear an almost identical answer from Ali Pidsley the next day. A founder of Barrel Organ, he now mentors new companies through NSDF and remembers the word being used about himself nearly ten years ago. It’s someone else telling you that you’re at the beginning of a journey.  

Emerging, then, isn’t just about being in a process of growth and development. It’s a word which is nearly always used by others to describe early career artists, and rarely used by artists to describe themselves on their own terms.

I’m going around in circles, wondering whether the word is just the inevitable product of our industry’s hierarchies, or whether it plays a more active role in creating them. 

 

II. Battling gatekeepers. 

That’s what emerging means to Joe. Ironically, even the word itself is tangled up in this gatekeeping process: opening some doors while moving other opportunities out of reach.  

Meg tells me about Open Source Arts, whose free programme for emerging grassroots artists enabled them to livestream their performance after the paralysis of funding rejections. Being described as emerging can provide access to resources, and with it a sense of legitimisation.  

But this legitimisation comes at a cost, Joe explains, when certain theatres or organisations will be like, ‘we won’t programme you for our actual theatre because we’ve got all these things for emerging artists.’ The word becomes shorthand for a desire to support early career artists without taking the perceived risk of actually programming them. 

I’m still going around in circles, but I’m beginning to think that this is the point. The language of emerging has something of the chicken and the egg in its relationship to the power dynamics of the cultural industries, coming both first and second, a product of hierarchies which goes on to sustain them.  

Payment is always the final gate to be kept. While Meg and Joe have benefitted from free rehearsal space, they have relied on donations from audiences, family and friends to attempt to cover their running costs. To be ‘emerging’ reads as needing help, but not payment for work.

 

III. This idea that out of nowhere you can just like… ‘Boom! Yeah I’m a genius!’ 

Joe draws on his comedy work, telling me about the nominations for the Best Newcomer category for the Chortle awards. I’ve seen people on that list, and they’ve been going for ten years. What does it mean for emerging to be an identity occupied by both a theatre company making their first show and a seasoned comedian?  

The industry wants to feel like they’ve tapped into some undiscovered talent, he suggests. And artists can play into this: It can feel quite good to be like ‘oh yeah I’ve only been at it for X many years,’ and then people are like ‘Oh woah! Cool!’ 

It’s frustrating that this irritatingly persistent faith in the concept of ‘raw talent’ obscures the work which goes into winning a comedy award or getting a show selected for NSDF. It’s not really genius, it’s just hard work, says Meg.

 

IV. Will I always be emerging? 

It’s impossible to escape the idea that my emerging – both the stage of my career and the label that comes with it – will be over soon. I’m swayed by Ali’s suggestion, that because of the way that our minds work or because of capitalism, when you think of a journey you think of the end result, you think of where it’s a journey to. 

Out of this comes a pressure to get the emerging over with, where both success and failure come at a cost. What happens if you are still emerging when you turn 26? Or if you feel you have progressed to a new stage and can’t shed the label? I ask Meg and Joe what’s next, and Joe can only answer my question with more of his own: It fills me with a lot of anxiety, like how long are you emerging for?

  

***

Although I’ve had an aversion to ‘emerging’ for a while now, writing this article has shown me that the real problem is how the word is used: the way it perpetuates existing hierarchies, reinforces the myth of the child prodigy and plays an active role in gatekeeping access to opportunities and payment. 

Replacing it with another word won’t solve these problems, but acknowledging artists on their own terms might be a step in a good direction. This is what Meg wants: Maybe instead of just saying the word emerging, you could just give a bit more background about the company, what we’ve done, who we are.

-

@noffmag / [javascript protected email address]

Latest from Noises Off

Latest from Noises Off

See all
NSDF 2022

Powerful discomfort

14th May 2022

Nathan Hardie on the confronting NSDF Late show MANIC

Read More
NSDF 2022

To meet us here

15th April 2022

Taiwo Ava Oyebola interrogates the history and heritage of Them

Read More
NSDF 2022

Up down up down

15th April 2022

Zoe Callow gets to grips with the staging of Great Mother - Iya Ayaba

Read More

Sign-up to our newsletter

Sign-up for our newsletter
Follow us
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube
Contact Us Frequently Asked Questions Young Person Protection Policy Website Accessibility Privacy Policy
© NSDF Site by Grandad.digital
Sign-up to our newsletter

Sign up to our newsletter to stay up to date on all our upcoming events, information and news. Read our Privacy Policy to learn more about how we process your data.