This is my first letter as SDC Executive Board President. It’s a great honor to be following in Pam MacKinnon’s estimable footprints and to work with my fellow Board Members, Executive Director Laura Penn, and the extraordinary SDC staff to ensure that, as we enter a new decade, we build on the important work of the past few years with purpose and commitment.
Our Union is strong, national, and poised for even more growth and impact on the field. There are many opportunities on the horizon, and, of course, many challenges.
In our recent negotiations, we made significant advances in ensuring that our Members are compensated fairly and that our pension and health funds remain strong. We made tremendous strides in choreographer compensation on Broadway and advanced the coverage for fight choreographers in LORT, ANTC, and Off-Broadway. We continued to solidify recognition for new play development activity—from day one of work with actors—in jurisdictions large and small. Going forward, we are determined to secure recognition for Broadway associate/resident directors and choreographers, ensuring they get all the protections under a collectively bargained agreement, including pension and health, that they deserve.
These things are concrete and important. As we look at the changing landscape of the field, we are also looking at the less tangible ways in which we as a Union must serve our Membership.
Before I joined the Board, I was an at-large Member of the Education Committee, led by Joe Calarco and Pamela Berlin. This was in the final days of the drafting of our Rights and Responsibilities, the first of which are:
We have the right to own our direction and choreography.
We have the responsibility to create original direction and choreography or to secure permission to replicate the direction and choreography of others.
Our agreements with employers explicitly state that we own our direction and choreography. However, we find that we need to do even more work to educate the field about what exactly it is that directors and choreographers do. And, perhaps surprisingly, we need to remind our own Members, as well as aspiring directors and choreographers, about their obligation to do their own work, especially in an age when bootleg videos of original productions are easily accessed online and increase the danger of intentional and unintentional replication.
The Executive Board considers our Rights and Responsibilities a living document. As Pam reported in the Winter 2020 Journal, we recently expanded their scope to more explicitly address workplace conduct. We have also rightly sought to reexamine our standards for Board service, seeking to codify ethical practices and avoid potential conflicts of interest.
Directors and choreographers are leaders in the room. SDC wants to ensure that its Members work in safe and equitable workplaces themselves and that they create the conditions in rehearsal halls and theatres that allow actors, designers, and other collaborators to be free to do their best work. It is vital that we as directors and choreographers are in fact part of the solution to workplace issues, and that we work to be viewed as such.
It’s an exciting time to be working in the theatre, a time when voices that have not been heard and stories that have not been told are being brought to the stage. SDC is committed to fostering diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplaces and to celebrating and supporting diversity in all its forms. We seek to address the needs of those who direct and choreograph on Broadway, as well as of those who work in smaller, yet-to-be-organized venues. We work conscientiously to consider not only those in the prime of their careers but also those struggling to find work and those just starting out.
This issue of the Journal examines a time when rights to freedom of expression in the theatre were threatened in this country. I hope you find the story of these artists who unapologetically pursued their artistic vision as inspiring as we have.
Just as these brave individuals did 30 years ago, our Union has fought for its Members’ rights and persevered. It has also sought to follow through on its responsibilities.
I know the strategic thinking, determination, patience, and, yes, courage it has taken to achieve all that we have so far, from the first days of SDC (so beautifully chronicled in the Winter 2020 Journal) to our current efforts. And I know that it will take strategic thinking, determination, patience, and courage to carry out our upcoming agenda.
I look forward to working for and with you into the new decade.
In Solidarity,
Evan Yionoulis
Executive Board President