By Valeria Orani
Pierre St. Lucie, “La Grande Danse Macabre” (1568), Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1923 – Donazione al Pubblico Dominio dal Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/348335
"Accident: sm [noun use of adj. prev.]. - 1. Unexpected event that interrupts the regular course of action; mostly, unhappy event, misfortune "
Anyone who has experienced an accident in their life knows that it comes unexpectedly, without warning. You walk from point A to point B and suddenly you find yourself in a point X not contemplated in your path, which will prevent you forever from arriving at point B and will force you to an unexpected and often indefinite stay in the aforementioned point X. Often this point X is a hospital.
But there are many variations of accidents, not all of them are very serious to take you to the hospital. Some just take you home.
By dint of accumulating accidents, we often learn that in the life of an organism an accident is necessary; like an autoimmune disease, it has a function. Whether you see it or not, understand it immediately or never, interrupting the regular course of action gives you the key to understanding that the time has come to stop and reflect, to correct your path.
The despair of entire work sectors, stopped by the incidence of the coronavirus and the disease it causes, Covid-19, which requires everyone to stop their daily lives to avoid or not create opportunities for small or large crowding, is an "accident". We all understand its usefulness in theory. Crowding could be lethal and lead to the collapse of any health system, with very dangerous consequences for all. We are called to a civic sense, individual and collective.
Collaboration is requested from everyone and decrees are issued with which those who govern us, and therefore have the faculty, impose new and indispensable habits on us.
It is not something that afflicts a single sector, but despite this, there is the perception that the live entertainment sector can be more penalized than others.
But on closer inspection, sectors such as tourism, hotel accommodation, and transport are suffering much more devastating effects than ours. Or, without going too far and remaining in the same ordinance that touches the theater, let's think about how much the events sector can be penalized, whose function - and with it the future of companies with many employees - passes entirely through sales. The Salone del Mobile in Milan, or VinItaly, are showcases of sectors that move the Italian economy and involve thousands of companies and workers. All of them, like the others, find themselves facing a terrible uncertainty, which if we want is even more terrible because we are talking about private companies, without any public support.
So why does our live entertainment industry feel more penalized? At the beginning of the epidemic, indignation was raised high by the fact that theaters and not supermarkets had been closed. On what kind of rational calculation was that controversy based?
A Buddhist fairy tale tells of a bird, named Konkucho, who is damned by the cold at night and swears to himself to build his warmest nest as soon as the sun rises. Then in the morning he wakes up with the high and hot sun, forgets the intentions of the night before and does not strengthen his nest, and then ends up suffering and cursing again the following night.
The ban on demonstrations, like the Konkucho bird, comes on a cold night.
Unexpected like all things that hopefully will not happen, but predictable because all of us, when we sign a contract, know that our rights are protected except in the case of force majeure. It is not the first time that in Italy in recent years there have been causes of force majeure that temporarily blockwork.
Natural disasters such as earthquakes or floods have blocked the lives of entire communities, closed theaters, and canceled entire seasons, although, of course, the live entertainment industry in its entirety has never been as affected as today.
A few weeks ago, before the general lockdown, there were many declarations of protest and disappointment, in which it was aired more or less quietly that our sector was more mistreated than others, and its state of necessity was emphasized as a pre-eminent issue a necessity of society as a whole as if not going to the theater was as important as not eating. But today our problem, the collective one, is how to eat and how to keep us healthy, while the problem of those who do not live with the live show ends up in the background, together with the economic crisis that will hit all the production sectors of the country.
Today we rightly ask for protection, we ask for consideration, help, support… Today we ask. But yesterday?
Yesterday it was normal to sell shows to theaters that (under) pay for the work, who pay their wages after three months when it goes well; yesterday it was normal to go to collection and to derogate from the regulation that would like the theater to deliver that collection the day after the rerun; yesterday it was normal to no longer be able to circulate the shows due to the new ministerial decrees - which sanctioned in a granitic way the exchange of shows between National Theaters, which fix the value of an artistic product in the number of paying spectators, which require that circuits pay exclusive attention to the companies of their region. Spending tens of thousands of euros to produce shows that are thrown away immediately after their debuts is the norm for many theaters, those with a capital T, but today - we are asking for support - everyone seems to have forgotten it. And again, yesterday a state of affairs was normal in which tenders are always won by the usual ones, where there are no transparent expressions of interest, where the CCNL is put into practice only by a specific number of Productions and Theaters, while everything else the sector does not care happily, without creating the bases of minimum protection for employees and putting them in a position to face any accident with the allowances provided by the INPS. Yesterday it was not a real problem that freelancers had not created, as is the case for all other sectors, social security funds for their protection. where there are no transparent expressions of interest, where the CCNL is put into practice only by a specific number of Productions and Theaters, while the rest of the sector does not care happily, without creating the bases of minimum protection for employees and putting them in conditions for dealing with any accident with the indemnities provided by the INPS. Yesterday it was not a real problem that freelancers had not created, as is the case for all other sectors, social security funds for their protection. where there are no transparent expressions of interest, where the CCNL is put into practice only by a specific number of Productions and Theaters, while the rest of the sector does not care happily, without creating the bases of minimum protection for employees and putting them in conditions for dealing with any accident with the indemnities provided by the INPS. Yesterday it was not a real problem that freelancers had not created, as is the case for all other sectors, social security funds for their protection. without creating the bases for the minimum protection of employees and putting them in a position to face any accident with the indemnities provided by INPS. Yesterday it was not a real problem that freelancers had not created, as is the case for all other sectors, social security funds for their protection. without creating the bases for the minimum protection of employees and putting them in a position to face any accident with the indemnities provided by INPS. Yesterday it was not a real problem that freelancers had not created, as is the case for all other sectors, social security funds for their protection.
Today we have an accident, the coronavirus, which perhaps more than a virus is an antibody, an expedient to understand how much we should immediately run for cover to inhabit a "system" that we have modified to make it unlivable, mistreated, and mortified by our own actions. We have canceled trade unions and associations, built small niches of belonging. Divisions, small watertight compartments where we were only able to cultivate, and often badly, our garden, also authorizing the new generations to think that it was normal to live to onboard, allowing unfair competition, pirate management, undeclared work.
Things are slightly better for theaters that have staff with fixed-term or permanent contracts, where social safety nets can be adopted in a more systematic way. But the freelancers who also lend their work in those theaters? And the others? Theater companies in general?
For six years I have lived in the United States, where welfare is non-existent, as well as public participation for many working sectors. It is true that taxes are lower and you can download more expenses, but everything costs much more. Insurance, for example, costs a lot, figures unthinkable for us, which in any case do not cover 100 percent of medical expenses, which in turn are much higher than those we are used to in Italy.
By staying here and doing my job, I had confirmation of how important the social organization of the art and live entertainment sector is. Here there is no professionalism that does not compare with unions and trade associations, which admit you only after evaluating your professional skills in terms of concrete work and curriculum.
The protection of the sector must be our priority: safeguarding professionalism, excluding those who do not follow the rules, having professional funds, being able to participate in the distribution of funds and tenders, networks, work, money, life.
The need to act as private entrepreneurs is not an ideology, it is to read reality for what it is, for what we really have available, to live in the real world forever abandoning the illusion that someone can save us more than we can. themselves.
An entertainment worker in Italy is much luckier than an American peer, at least in theory. We have public funds, social safety nets, services, allowances. We don't know where to start, yet the world, the life we have chosen, is no longer that of the bohemians or eternal "miserable". We all deserve dignity, we work, it is not correct that show business workers are perceived as a burden for civil society. We are not, just as workers in other sectors are not. We take this opportunity as an expedient to improve, and we begin once and for all to be a category. We should be radical and even a little ruthless in preventing the circumvention of the rules, we should have legal offices on our side, build supplementary funds, we should respect the professionalism that we have achieved so hard by creating paths that open to the new but not indiscriminate. In a word, we should be united. Union.
The time to act is the cold night, let us remember that under the hot sun all suffering will be forgotten and we will still postpone the solution of our problems by delegating to others the perception of our value.