What Professional Artists Can Learn from the Amateur Model

We readily accept that amateurs have something to learn from professionals. The reverse seems less obvious, even slightly provocative. Drawing on an article by Sonia Leplat about amateur practices, I want to show what professionalisation erodes and what the amateur model has kept: meaning as the driving force, the process as the work itself, and a reciprocity between those who perform and those who watch.

Why it should be for professionals to learn, and not the other way round

Putting the question this way round has something slightly provocative about it, I am aware of that, and I do it deliberately. We spontaneously assume the opposite: professionals have a training, a technique, an artistic standard that amateurs do not always have, so it is amateurs who have something to learn from professionals. That is true when it comes to mastery of the means. But it does not settle everything, because the question of learning cannot be reduced to that of technique.

There is, first, a matter of cultural rights, that is, of respect for everyone’s dignity in their autonomous practices. To recognise, as Sonia Leplat points out, that nearly 25 million people in France take part in the cultural life of their area, is not merely to record a figure, it is to admit that these practices have a value of their own, that they do not wait for the professional sector’s validation in order to exist, and that there may be something in them to understand rather than to correct.

There is, next, a distinction I believe to be decisive between two kinds of standard. Amateurs do not necessarily hold the same artistic standard as professionals, though some do. But they often hold a standard of another order, one that could be called humanist: what are we living through together, here, now, in this practice. And that standard is not a by-product of the first. It may be more important, because it touches on what we make art for.

The sensitive point lies in a confusion that professional theatre often maintains without naming it, between artistic standard and a form of human superiority. When we sit down in a theatre, a whole protocol places us, and places the artists we have come to see, in positions that are not only those of sender and receiver, but that slide towards hierarchy. We come to admire people we have set above us. The cultural industries, for their part, understood long ago that they had to work on the direct bond between artists and what is called their community, and they work on it very well. But if you look at the social media accounts of theatres, you do not see a bond, you see artists interviewed as very important people, speaking pretentiously about the importance of what they have made. What is shared there, at bottom, is that some dominate and that those who are dominated must thank them for it, and admire them.

Making the experience sacred without making the people sacred

It could be objected that this reasoning leads to a relativism in which nothing would have value, in which one might as well stay home talking with friends. That is not at all what I mean. It is good that there is a ritual, so that people concentrate, give importance to what they are living, and truly make the most of what they came for. But what this ritual makes sacred is not first of all an object, it is an experience: the fact that we are gathered to live together a moment that is not the moment of everyday life, and to which we give importance precisely because it is not. Without this ritual, the experience loses its meaning.

Amateur actors show this clearly. During a performance, they put all their effort into making what they produce that evening of the best possible quality. The object they create matters, it is not pushed into the background, it is what concentrates the efforts and the desires, it is through it that people meet, it is what they take care of. But what is made sacred is not the object itself, it is everything that allows it to exist, the experience, the energies, the goodwill, the wish to share, what is built in common around it. If the object, that evening, had not lived up to all the effort put into it, that would not matter: something would have been learned from it, the experience would have been enriching in any case. It is this nuance that counts, the third-term object is what one takes care of, but what is held sacred is what makes it possible.

I see a counter-example in the great professional orchestras. I have known closely musicians who played in them, often caught up in guild-minded attitudes, a touch of boredom, sticklers about their hours. They come there to exercise skills learned and worked on, an instrumentalist’s technique that touches nonetheless on the sensible, since it is a matter of making a work. But in their human presence, they are no longer in the desire of that presence, even though they make a daily effort to remain competent. There is necessarily a desire in them to do it, but that desire is not made sacred, it slips into the background, almost instrumentalised by the person themselves. This is of course not the case for all professionals, and I do not want to make the simplistic criticism that they no longer take any pleasure in what they do. It is only to make the gap perceptible: one can tend to an object with technical perfection without still holding precious the desire that carries it.

The difference therefore does not lie in the presence or absence of a common work. It lies in what is made sacred. One can make sacred the moment of collective attention, the experience we go through together, and that is legitimate. To make sacred the people who produce the work is something else, and it is domination. Popular music shows this clearly: there is a very strong relational work between the artist and the audience, an encounter around the shared experience, an address to the other, a generous proposition in which the artist gives themselves and puts in real effort. I am not saying that everything should be done as popular culture does. But there is in it a generosity of address that subsidised theatre has sometimes forgotten.

The etymology of theatre throws light on this in a way that surprised me. The word comes from the Greek theatron, the place from which one watches, and tragedy comes from tragôidia, literally the song of the goat, probably linked to the sacrifice of a goat offered to Dionysus during the festivals that gave rise to the performances. At its origins, theatre is bound up with a sacrifice: something or someone is offered for the gathered community. This anthropological root tells us that the actor, originally, is in a position of giving, not of standing above. He sacrifices himself for the others, he does not place himself above them. The contemporary confusion between artistic standard and human superiority reverses this gesture exactly: it turns the sacrifice of oneself into domination over the other.

What talent shows stage

Talent shows such as The Voice are, to my mind, built on this principle of reciprocity, and that is what explains their popular success. Their lineage is by now a long one. The format was born in the United Kingdom with Pop Idol in the early 2000s, and spread to France almost at once: Popstars brought out the group L5 in early 2002, Star Academy began on TF1 on 20 October 2001, À la recherche de la nouvelle star, which became Nouvelle Star, took up the Pop Idol format on M6 from 2003, and The Voice arrived on TF1 in 2012 with its coaches drawn from French pop and its blind auditions.

These shows are often reduced to a mirage, to the promise of the unknown person who becomes famous. They go further than that, though. They stage seasoned professionals who discover, in people still amateur, capacities they did not expect, and an encounter takes place, a form of artistic equality, an admiration that flows in both directions. It is this reciprocity that the format makes visible, and it is this that pleases the crowds. The people who attend subsidised theatres are not the crowds: they are a precise section of society, a few class defectors, and pupils brought there by school obligation.

This reciprocity that talent shows manufacture as grand spectacle, the amateur model has kept without having to stage it. Sonia Leplat traces it, drawing on the work of Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux and François Oguet, back to the very origin of amateur practice. Platform theatre, urban, fixed, played on market squares, differs from trestle theatre, mobile and without sets, which rather inspired the theories of acting and professional theatre. From this settledness, amateur practices have kept a reciprocity between stage and house: today’s performers may be tomorrow’s audience, which creates a unity of place, a familiarity, a sharing of commons. Professional specialisation, by contrast, has built a clear separation between those who perform and those who watch, a separation that has its aesthetic justifications but that places the audience in the position of receiver, and installs a distance that is not only spatial, but relational and symbolic.

What I call reproduction, and what I do not conclude from it

I believe that the regular audience of subsidised theatre finds in it a system of reproduction that reassures them. This is an old and well-documented reality, and I want to name it for itself before drawing anything from it. Pierre Bourdieu showed how going to the theatre is an act of social classification, a way of marking and confirming one’s position. The history of theatre itself points the same way: in an Italian-style theatre, the boxes are political places where one does not come first of all to see the show, and artistic quality is among the symbols that give importance to that social moment. Marjorie Glas, in Quand l’art chasse le populaire (PUG, 2023), retraces how the subsidised sector gradually set aside what linked it to the working classes. Domination is in place there, hierarchised, and the fact that it passes through culture confirms the stability of the social order.

If I write this, it is in no way to feed an elected official’s argument for withdrawing funding from professional theatre. That would be a complete misreading of my approach. A populism that abolished subsidies would leave room only for commercial culture, and commercial culture produces very little diversity. The problem is that subsidised culture, caught up in bourgeois reproduction, produces very little of it either, and that is a great pity. The observation therefore does not serve to dismantle the sector, it serves to work on it from within. I write for professionals, so that we question ourselves, make our practices evolve and put forward new proposals. For that we have a tool that is written into law, cultural rights, which come from no far right but from the return of popular education to the heart of culture.

This model of reproduction settles in, moreover, from training onwards, and I have seen it at first hand in a school like the FEMIS. The teachers there are working professionals, and I perceive in them domineering, guild-minded attitudes that are passed on to very young people. Some of the students do not go along with it, because they carry within them other relational ethics. They were not born into a world as hierarchised as that; they were born into a world where access to knowledge has become more democratic, with the Internet, which did not arrive in their lives but which they were born with. There is something strange in seeing young people who come from another world repeat, in their relational ways, domineering traditions from another age. It is out of place, surprising, and above all sad, because it amounts to putting energy where humanity has, to my mind, no benefit in cultivating it. The places that would deserve that energy are those of generosity, of cooperation, of love, not those of competition, ego and domination.

The process can be felt in the work: what I experienced watching Bartabas

To make oneself believe that artistic quality would go hand in hand with domination is a mistake. One sometimes hears it said of a great artist that he is violent but produces magnificent things, as if one could separate the work from the way it was made. I do not believe so, because it is the whole that counts, the approach as much as what it produces, and because one can feel in a work the logic that made it, provided one’s perceptions are a little open. Art cannot be reduced to its object.

I experienced this very concretely, and it is a personal view that commits no one but me. When I saw a Bartabas show for the first time in Avignon in 1987, the Cabaret équestre of his company Zingaro, I was seventeen, and I was deeply disturbed. I saw in it machismo, domination, a beauty that leaned on the horses and on a whole imagery of exoticism, and that held out to us a mirror of admiration. We sat in the house admiring those magnificent scenes offered by people who, it seemed to me, despised us, and we projected ourselves onto the image of valiant riders in communion with nature. We were projecting ourselves, in fact, onto a domination, and it worked very well, because it reassures us about our own power.

I had no preconception at the time. It was the start of Bartabas’s career, his reputation was excellent, I knew nothing about him, and yet I felt all of that. Thirty years later, I went back to see one of his shows, and I experienced exactly the same thing. Only afterwards did I speak with people who had worked with him, who described to me the violence in the working relations and who defended it in the name of the beauty of the forms produced. I also knew the story that circulated, of a funder’s desk turned over, of funding obtained through threat. What this trajectory confirms for me is that the process can be felt in the project, that the adolescent, a mere spectator, that I was had perceived, knowing nothing, what accounts came to tell much later. The subject of art is not the object alone, it is a whole process.

The standard set on the process, and the freedom that grounds it

This is where amateurs have something to teach professionals: a standard set on the process, and no longer only on the object. Sonia Leplat puts it in a phrase I find apt: “The process makes the work, it is in itself a celebration and allows those involved to take full part in cultural life.” The final show is not alone in counting; the whole collective process of creation, over time, is in itself a complete cultural experience. This is the idea John Dewey developed in 1934 in Art as Experience, where art is the lived experience and not the object produced. To see it confirmed from the field, by someone who supports around 900 projects a year within the MPAA she directs in Paris, gives it a solidity that philosophy alone cannot reach.

What makes this standard possible is the driving force of amateur practice. Asked what engages them, the members of the teams who rehearse at the MPAA reply, 80% of them: the pleasure of creating, far ahead of encounter, the stage, or the expression of their identity. Sonia Leplat links this pleasure to the etymology of the word, amator, the one who loves, and which also carries action, the doing. The amateur needs no external reason to practise; the driving force is internal, prior to any recognition. It is precisely this force that professionalisation shifts, without suppressing it, by overloading it with other demands, the project to defend, the recognition of the milieu, the funding, the place in the field, the career. These logics are not bad, they are unavoidable where one’s professional existence depends on them, but they complicate the relation to the practice to the point of sometimes making it unrecognisable to oneself.

If the process makes the work, then the way we work together, what we put each other through during rehearsals, the kind of relation we maintain, is an artistic dimension in its own right and not a technical preliminary. Rehearsal is not the means of the show, it is already theatre. Professionals know this, they have often experienced it in those rehearsal moments where something more alive happens between people than what will be on stage. But the system of production, evaluation and funding pushes them to treat the process as a cost in the service of the finished object.

The difference lies in freedom. I am not saying it is easy for amateurs, nor that everything there is perfect: there too there can be issues of domination within groups. But they know why they are there, because they are free not to be. They are volunteers, they live from another job, and from that freedom comes the fact that what they do always keeps its meaning. Professionals, for their part, may suffer in their work or let themselves be mistreated, because it is their job, their skill, their social standing, and because they cannot do something else from one day to the next. That is respectable, and it is also what makes them vulnerable to the loss of meaning.

There is no reason, for all that, to idealise the amateur model, nor to believe that amateurs would do better than professionals because they would be closer to the essential. Sonia Leplat is clear-eyed about its limits: works that are almost invisible, shows performed once or twice on average, venues that are hard to reach. She takes up Michel de Certeau’s phrase to describe amateurs as “symbolic poachers”, who compose in the gaps of the institution, with the art of appropriating and diverting the available tools. But this invisibility is not a non-existence: it says only that the cultural sector, in its hierarchies of legitimacy, has decided not to see these practices. What Sonia Leplat places at the centre of her thinking, and what connects with the point I started from, is dignity, the right to give the best of oneself in the making, to feel alive and fully among others.

This energy that amateurs do not have to manufacture, because it is the very condition of their presence, is nonetheless the essential thing. It rests on the question of why we are here together around an artistic experience. Amateurs cannot avoid it, having no other reason to get up; professionals can learn to put it to themselves deliberately, even when the agenda, the budget and the calendar seem to answer it in their place. It is in this question that the most important thing is at stake, because art is in the service of the human bond.

A few tools for shifting our practices

All that precedes would remain an observation if I did not try to draw ways of working from it. Here, then, are a few concrete proposals, which cross what I have learned from the amateur model with what I practise in mediation and in facilitating collective intelligence. None is a recipe, they are footholds for questioning our working habits.

• Make rehearsal an object of care as much as the show. If the process makes the work, then the quality of what we put each other through in rehearsal deserves the same attention as the result. This goes through simple gestures: opening a rehearsal with a time when everyone says where they are, planning moments where we look together at what we are making rather than only pressing on, and naming explicitly, in the creation schedule, that relational work is not a waste of time but a part of the work. One can also ask, at each stage, whether the way we work is consistent with what the show claims to say.
• Produce the account of the work, make the process a shared documentation. We can identify our movements as the creation unfolds, keep a journal written by some and by others, hold on to photographs, impressions, and share them among ourselves, and why not publicly. The process then produces its own account. There is nothing egocentric or pretentious in this, it is not navel-gazing, it is documenting our stages, becoming aware of all that is moving, and anchoring things. This account tells the dialectic between process and result, and the fact that the process is already the result, since the show one comes to see is itself a process under way, being live performance.
• Bring in outside eyes regularly during the work. We can decide together to invite, during the creation, people who are not from live performance, who come from other fields, to share their experience, their point of view, their feeling about what is being made. It is extremely enriching, because it opens things up and makes one think differently, and it connects with the question of the account. I used this way of working for the editing of a film on new pedagogy, spread over six months: I met each month with the team that had commissioned the film, but between two meetings I showed it to different people who gave me their opinion. These openings were fundamental. Far from making me lose my point of view, they allowed me to understand it better and to affirm it more, in an open dialogue with viewers, without fear. I did not do what I was told to do; it is the interaction itself, sometimes a single word, a spontaneous reaction, the fact of daring to show, that made me understand things and that produced a film at once more open and more personal. People often believe that showing one’s work in progress manufactures compromise and weakens the point of view. I experienced the opposite: less fear, less protection, more daring, and a more singular project. Opening up to others is not a situation in which one has something to lose, it is a situation in which one has everything to gain.
• Introduce a third term between people rather than working in a dual relation. In any direct working relation, director and performer, project-holder and team, there is a risk of a power relation. The symbolic third term, this notion drawn from psychoanalysis, designates the object or the frame that comes between and deflects the projections: instead of projecting onto each other, people project together onto a common object. A shared protocol, an open instruction, a device that each appropriates in their own way, shift the relation and make the encounter possible without submission. This holds between professionals as much as with audiences.
• Build a frame that authorises, because what blocks creation is not incompetence but fear. In a group, what stops people from taking a risk is the fear of judgement, the fear of losing status, the fear of being excluded for non-conformity. Olivier Houdé’s work on inhibition shows that anxiety disarms the very faculties that allow one to create. A clear, reliable frame, which signals that whatever comes out will be received whatever it may be, lifts these blocks better than any encouraging speech. For the one who holds this frame, the work begins with oneself: arriving early, preparing the space without haste, regulating one’s own anxiety, because it is transmitted and because one does not authorise in others what one does not authorise in oneself.
• Reverse the feedback, let others’ gaze speak rather than the author. When a piece of work is presented, habit has it that the person who made it explains it. One can reverse this: the author stays silent, and it is the others who look and comment. This reversal enriches the creation through the outside gaze, and it builds the value of what one has done in the very place where one tends to underrate it oneself. It is a simple tool, transposable to a rehearsal feedback between professionals as much as to a workshop.
• Prefer diversity and interdisciplinarity to excessive expectation laid on a few projects. The system pushes us to concentrate a great deal of expectation, funding and stakes on a small number of productions, which impoverishes diversity. One can make the opposite wager: expect less of each project taken in isolation, and open up more propositions, more crossings of disciplines, more short or unusual forms. Less weight on each object also means less fear, and therefore more freedom to search.
• Allow oneself to criticise the dominations one depends on to live. This is the hardest, and I do not want to play it down. La Boétie, in the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, had already described this mechanism: each person draws a small advantage from their submission and fears losing it should they rebel. In our sector, to denounce a dominant system is to risk the funding, the programming, the place. Economic dependence silences criticism. One does not lift this by individual will alone, but one can help oneself collectively: creating among peers spaces where critical speech is protected, pooling positions so that no single person is exposed alone, and using cultural rights as support, since they are written into law and give a legitimate ground to this work of self-questioning.

This article draws on a text by Sonia Leplat, director of the Maison des Pratiques Artistiques Amateurs (MPAA, Paris), devoted to the work of amateurs and to the cultural meaning of work, in the light of the Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights.