Is Creativity a Lifestyle, or Just Mine to Choose?

I don't think community creativity is any less of a career than the professional kind — even though most of the noise around "saving the arts" would have you believe otherwise.

Every time times get tough for the professional creative arts scene, I see the same call from paid actors, producers and performers: government needs to put more money in, or the culture dies. And I understand where it comes from. I'd love a full-time career as a producer, director or actor. Genuinely — the idea of doing this work full time, paying off debt, having a decent life for the next five or ten years off the back of my creative work, sounds great. I'm not opposed to that at all.

But I also know that anything can happen in five or ten years. Industries shift, funding cycles end, priorities change. So it's on me to make sure I can still put food on the table and a roof over my head even if none of it is coming from my creative work. That's not pessimism — it's just how work works now, for almost everyone, in almost every industry.

Here's the bigger thing underneath all of it, though. Acting, directing, producing — creativity itself — isn't new, and it was never built to depend on being someone's job. People were telling stories, performing, staging things for their communities in medieval times, in Victorian times, in Edwardian times, right through to more recent decades, long before any of it was thought of as a "lifestyle" you could build a career and identity around. That framing — creative work as a full-time profession, a career path with an income attached — is a relatively modern one. The creative act itself is much older than that, and it's always belonged to communities first.

Which is really the heart of what I'm trying to say: professional and community/independent creative work aren't different in kind. Both are a career, a lifestyle, a choice someone makes — whether that choice comes with a wage or not. And both come with the same consequence if you're not willing to grow with the times: things get harder, audiences change, the old model stops working. That's not a professional problem or a community problem. It's just what happens to any creative practice, any industry, any lifestyle, when it doesn't adapt. None of that means the culture or the creative scene dies. It means the parts of it that don't move with the times will struggle, and the parts that do will keep going — professional and community alike.

I've spent years around community theatre, and from what I've seen, community culture isn't immune to that pressure either — it feels exactly the same squeeze as everyone else, from volunteers who now work longer hours for less than the generation before them, to organisations that simply can't attract the people-power they used to. But what I've noticed is that the organisations struggling the most usually aren't struggling because of funding. They're struggling because they've refused to change with the times — running things the same way they always have, on the assumption that "this is how we've always done it" will keep working forever. The ones that are actually thriving are the ones reading the room: adjusting to new expectations, working around new restrictions, meeting a generation of volunteers and audiences who live differently than the one before them. That's not a funding problem. It's an adaptation problem — and it's the same one professional companies face, just without the safety net.

Plenty of community theatre groups do apply for funding through local councils and government — I haven't yet myself, but I've seen what people go through chasing it, successful or not. What strikes me is that the outcome doesn't decide whether the show happens. Get the funding, don't get the funding — either way, they find a way to bring it to life. Some run at a loss, year after year, just to keep producing something for their local community. That's the actual engine of a huge amount of Australian culture — not whether government said yes, but people choosing to give more than they get back because the community matters to them regardless of the answer.

I'd still love to make a living from this work one day. And I don't think that's any less valid a choice than choosing to do it purely at a community level, unpaid, for the love of it.

Both are a lifestyle.

Both are a career, in their own way.

Neither one is guaranteed to survive by standing still — but neither one is going anywhere either, as long as people keep choosing to grow with the times and keep showing up for their communities.