Is It Just Me? An Artist's Perspective on The Knot

29 January 2024

An article by Naomi Obeng, reproduced from our full Report & Artists' Toolkit published following The Knot - available here.

Artist, playwright and critic Naomi Obeng joined throughout The Knot as a participant, with a commission to reflect on the programme from a personal and creative perspective.

Is It Just Me?

It's the end of the first day and we're sharing pizzas across three tables in a city restaurant, 24 multidisciplinary artists ending day one in a more or less collective depression. To skip ahead, these artists will come to know each other keenly through the packed week. Nesting in Guildhall School’s Milton Court building, an alchemical sense of camaraderie and community will emerge, beyond that which anyone could have feasibly planned.

But on this first evening, guts are still recovering from the afternoon discussion's punch: the executive directors and producers on the panel confirming that yes, the sector is broken, and yes, it’s harder for independent companies and artists, and yes it’s getting worse. Sprinkles of hope and encouragement, sure, but a bleak mist overall, now lingering, as we line our stomachs with extremely welcome carbs.

So that's that then. That’s that.

Like TV static crystallising into image after a year of malfunction. My eyesight wasn’t the issue, then. Reassured.

The Knot comes at the end of what has felt like, as an independent artist in theatre, the Year of Problems Ungraspable. A status quo of promising conversations with venues vanishing into the ether, previously reliable opportunities closing, festivals becoming out of financial reach, quality work being frittered away by the diktat of cold hard cash (increasingly elusive) which makes our making possible.

A brokenness that’s been hard to fathom, let alone know whether it can be fixed – let alone fixed by me. I enter day one already fatigued by these invisible forces of stagnation. I end it oddly grateful for the gut punch and bleakness. To hear it spoken aloud, to confirm that no, it’s not just me.

Relief of a sunrise. Being reminded that wonders can arise without a constant struggle to create them.

My fatigue doesn’t dissipate through the week, but I do become primed, and somewhat addicted to one of The Knot’s most simple constants, so under-shared in the rest of the sector: Facts. Knowledge. The ‘That’s that’. Facts fill my notebook in my blue scrawl. The specifics of my responsibilities as an employer? The key distinctions between a freelancer’s pay and a worker’s? Freelancers not being legally entitled to a minimum wage. I squirrel away information so crucial it seems absurd to get this far into your career with no awareness of it. A kind of certainty I didn’t know I craved.

When I check back in with members of the cohort after Will, Amahra and Koko’s ‘money’ day on company structures and fundraising, there’s a positive but significant overwhelm. A lot of information at once, I’m told. But by our final check-in session, deciding on a company structure has become a clear, immediate, newly within-reach goal for many. Learning curves have to be steep when you’re learning what you didn’t know you didn’t know. It’s thrilling.

Vertiginous. Filling pages with answers to questions you didn’t have the vocabulary to ask. A breathtaking perspective shift. A foundation.

The sessions are responsive, organic, practical rather than theoretical – and never didactic, thankfully. This is about sharing, not teaching. The more I talk to the other artists during breaks and over lunch, the more I realise that this kind of happening must be the missing engine of change in theatre. The Knot makes little sense without its cohort. I look forward to the decompression time afforded by the end of day check-outs with Emma – and to simply hearing what others have to say. There’s no session that goes by without some sharing of knowledge peer to peer, an eagerness to support each other and to democratise the knowledge sharing. It’s empowering.

On Thursday there’s no let up to the usefulness. Guy J Sanders’ reflections on design and marketing blow my mind. Simple adjustments to your thinking can set huge changes in motion. Selling a show in one image and a title? Exciting ideas tick over into the networking party – too much in my head to fully capitalise on the event, or be, indeed, much fun to talk to. While no workshop or event can be equally suited to all, I take a useful thought from every single one. The freedom to give and take as you like is baked into The Knot, and I start wondering, while I’m meant to be participating in the Christmas-themed group competition, whether it would be as successful if it weren’t a genuine, unselfish, offer. From providing lunches to the relaxed learning space and social events, it has grown out of its intention and its form matches. If it had no heart in it, it just wouldn’t work.

Accepting. To slip away from networking? Sometimes your approach works for you. Not everything needs changing.

During the final panel on the final day, I reflect on the new frameworks and notions we’ve discussed and trialed together – natural invitations for creative brains to grasp and use to make something that works for them. I’m excited to see how all these artists use this knowledge to support their specific theatremaking goals. The business is part of the art. And in times as financially difficult as these, The Knot’s permission to strategise has been indispensable. What would theatre be like if even more artists had these insights and frameworks from which to build?

Nervous. On the tube home, knowing that this space will never exist again, not in the same way.

I flick through my notes at the week’s end and try to piece together a plan for 2024. I wonder, cynically, whether the uncontrolled variables are deceiving. A new place and a new group of people, new routine, new information. Of course it will feel huge, seismic, like a shift that cannot be reversed. Anything new feels like a holiday, for a time, but keeping hold of new frameworks is surely far more difficult than learning them. Bringing them into spaces where old notions linger, old feelings, old ungraspable bleakness?

A room full of sharp minds feels different to a room alone. Parts of my knowledge map are already fading a little. But I cannot unfeel the sense that so much possibility is newly within reach – and that I’m not alone in trying to make it real.

An evaluation framework.
Mechanism of change: a feeling has occurred, and led to a change.
Confident. Determined. Designing new spaces for new work in new ways is a necessity, a possibility – no longer a hazy dream.

Naomi Obeng

Photo by Alex Brenner

Read the full report here.

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