Being an artist is like standing on the edge of a cliff. Half the time, we are flying, and the other half, we are falling.
Our work is stitched to our skin. It is not something we clock in and out of. We carry characters in our bones, applause in our dreams, and sometimes silence in our pockets.
We live in two worlds. In one, people recognize us from a poster, a commercial, a festival stage. They think, “You’ve made it.” And in the other world, the one we wake up to every morning, there is rent due, dignity threatened, and an empty fridge humming louder than our dreams.
Fame and fortune, or fame and famine.
And famine tastes familiar.
The hardest part? Fulfillment doesn’t pay the bills. Rehearsal breakthroughs don’t cover electricity. We give birth to stories from the depths of our bellies, but too often we hold babies no one pays us to raise. And when reality grows louder than the dream, many of us grow tired. Some leave. Some numb the ache with drinks, with drugs, with sex or pills and some of us just simply lose our way completely.
That is why we are inviting you to be here. Because this pain, this tension, this tug-of-war between art and survival is not mine alone, it is ours. It is a shared wound.
And if the industry cannot yet hold us, then we must ask: how do we hold each other? How do we keep the dream alive without killing the dreamer? How do we build a language, a practice, a circle strong enough to carry us when the curtain falls?
The day is not about perfect answers. It is about honesty, about naming what hurts, and about remembering that although no one is coming to save us, we still have the power to save each other. Because the work matters. But we, fragile, brilliant, human beings, we matter more!