Comment by pvg
5 days ago
But the number of people who get to work in theatrical acting, set design, costuming
I think this ends up being recency bias and terminology hairsplitting, in the end. The number of people working in theatre mask design went to nearly zero quite a while back but we still call the stuff in the centuries after that 'theatre' and 'acting'.
I'm not trying to split hairs.
I think "theatre" is a fairly well-defined term to refer to live performances of works that are not strictly musical. Gather up all of the professions necessary to put those productions on together.
The number of opportunities for those professions today is much smaller than it was a hundred years ago before film ate the world.
There are only so many audience members and a night they spend watching a film or watching TV or playing videogames is a night they don't spend going to a play. The result is much smaller audiences. And with fewer audiences, there are fewer plays.
Maybe I should have been clearer that I'm not including film and video production here. Yes, there are definitely opportunities there, though acting for a camera is not at all the same experience as acting for a live audience.
> I think "theatre" is a fairly well-defined term to refer to live performances of works
Doesn't it mean cinema too? edit: Even though it was clear from context you meant live theatre.
Right but modern theatre is pretty new itself. The number of people involved in performance for the enjoyment of others has spiked, err, dramatically. My point is that making this type argument seems to invariably involve picking some narrow thing and elevating it to a true and valuable artform deserving special consideration and mourning. Does it have a non-special-pleading variety?
Well, I didn't pick theatre and Photoshop as narrow things, the parent comment did.
I'm saying an artform that is meaningful to its participants and allows them to make a living wage while enriching the lives' of others should not be thoughtlessly discarded in slave to the almighty god of economic efficiency. It's not special pleading because I'd apply this to all artforms and all sorts of work that bring people dignity and joy.
I'm not a reactionary luddite saying that we should still be using oil streetlamps so we don't put the lamplighters out of work. But at the same time I don't think we should automatically and carelessly accept the decimation of human meaning and dignity at the altar of shareholder value.
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Sitting in a moving car and sitting on a moving horse are both called "riding", but I think we can all appreciate how useless it is to equate the two.
They aren't, broadly speaking, interesting forms of expression so the fact you can draw some trivial string match analogy doesn't seem worth much discussion.
That was my point. The fact that we call people wearing CGI suits hopping around green room, and people on stage playing a character for a crowd, both acting doesn't account for the fact that doing one doesn't mean you can do the other.