Dear Flow Festivals: Pay Your Teachers 

Agreed in full on all points! People can't specialize if there aren't incentives for them to do so.

I would imagine so! When you invest in quality you create a much deeper experience for everyone!

Will do! (also: please call me Drex rather than Ben! Thank you!)

You're not wrong! That's a topic that really should be its own video and contains a lot of its own complexities and layers. Definitely just as important as talking about the relationship between festivals and their instructors, too, though, so thank you for bringing it up!

Thank you! 😃

Yeah I'm not gonna lie...see the workshop lineups at many of the festivals this year it appears that quite a lot of people have reached the point where they've realized they can't eat validation.

Kind like when a company sends you a product and asks for a review. As if the product is payment for the time it takes to review the product

I'm going to take these points on one by one: "I bet for your tours, you are spending far more time organizing, promoting and thus getting paid for it. Parks are probably even being used without permits to increase profits, but no judgement there. I've done the same." Nope. Every single one was held in a dance studio that I rented out for my tour. I carried insurance and gave myself a $30/day per diem for food and entertainment. The one and only place I cut corners was on accommodations: I slept on friends' couches during the tour rather than renting hotel rooms. "All in all, society pays people by the value they create. Hence why corporate entertainment pays more. It's also why having a following helps demand higher rates- because you can help sell tickets and increase the money coming in to the event." Can you clarify here whether the value you believe I'm creating is in my audience size, work I'm doing to organize and promote a tour, or in the lessons I teach? Because honestly I believe all three of these create value but it seems like you're only acknowledging the value in the first two. I could be wrong, though, which is why I'm asking for clarification here. "And IMO, through that lense, having those 30 mediocre teachers, but talented spinners around the fire circle is better than having 5 trained teachers spinning. More people communing and making friends is critical to a memorable event and part the reason why I still attend." That's cool...I know no shortage of people that go to festivals that have a lot less interest in expanding their horizons and just go to hang out with or make new friends. That is absolutely one of many reasons why people go to the events. But I am curious: why do you believe these two things are mutually exclusive? As you've framed it here, it sounds as though you believe that underpaying teachers is essentially a subsidy to get more people to the event to hang out. If that's the case, there's plenty of ways to get people out to an event that don't involve making a significant drain on the event's budget. Lots of events are experimenting with scholarship tickets (especially for BIPOC spinners and I love to see it) and other forms of subsidized attendance. When an event offers up a comp ticket to someone, that's by and large not money that's coming out of their pockets. For most venues where these events are hosted it doesn't cost the event anything to have additional people on property. Paying travel or compensation for instructors, however, is something that comes out of the event's budget. So you can still easily have situations with both subsidies to get more people to come as well as thinner teaching lineups to ensure everyone on them is getting paid commensurate to their value and experience. "The truth is that there isn't a lot of money with the 300-600 attendees and you mentioned that they probably can't afford to pay their teachers that." I mean...that depends on what the average amount the event makes off of each attendee is. I've seen 300 person events that barely break even and 300 person events that are massively profitable, depending on what revenue streams they use and options they make available to attendees with the means to pay for them. I think scale here is less a problem than how exactly events manage their income and budgets. "You probably have more insight as to where the money goes with your past production experience, but the people producing the event are probably working for less than minimum wage and taking far more risk on an hours involved perspective." They sure are and that is a topic we also should be talking about! I didn't want to bring it up here because the relationship between instructors and events is one of contract work whereas those involved in producing the event should have much more of an employer/employee relationship and that is a whole other type of relationship to be untangled. Focusing on instructors here isn't meant to say these people don't also deserve to be paid but to shine a light on the specific dynamic between festivals and instructors and how and why it's become so dysfunctional. "If you want to look at compensation and you value the ticket at $200 or w/e it cost, you are probably making more per hour than some of the people running the event." Once again, it depends on how the finances are being managed, but I also think it's kind of besides the point. This shouldn't be a competition between instructors and event producers for who deserves to be compensated more fairly, because honestly in both cases it's the event managers that are to blame, not either the instructors or producers. Setting up these two actors as rivals or antagonists to each other really directs attention away from the people holding the purse strings in the first place. That's where the problem lies for both parties.

​@@DrexFactor Adding bullet points to help clarify conversation flow 1. All of the above create value. I'm saying that some things are more valuable than others. The first two are probably more valuable to the festival. The lessons that you teach help build the audience, but it's ultimately that audience that comes from the content that create the value. If the market doesn't like the content, then you need to find content that they want to grow the audience, which you have admittedly done. From a financial perspective the market says it's more valuable to society for you to get paid $2000 for performing at a corporate event rather than $300 at a kids birthday party. Time spent may be the same, but it's what your doing from 1 scenario to the other that creates more financial value to society. From the view of a festival if you can sell 30 tickets you are far more valuable then a teacher who can sell 1. That's all with the supposition that the festival's needs are ticket sales, which i'm guessing it is, in order to meet your goal of paying instructors more. 2. It is a subsidy on a macro level. It is a way to get more people to the event to create a bigger community and share knowledge in a more decentralized way. A few great teachers vs having more mediocre teachers aren't mutually exclusive. It just becomes that way without creative thinking to fix the problem. So what happens is that it does ultimately come down to how many teachers can we get for X budget. So it does quite literally come down to the 30 mediocre $100 teachers vs 5 amazing $600 ones and what is more valuable to the event? And decisions need to be made there. If a great teacher can create enough value to justify a $2000 festival paycheck, then they should receive it. The onus then is on the teacher to know the value they bring, communicate how they can do that, and then ultimately execute well on it. To me, the easy answer is ticket sales. I know some festivals have tried links for instructors, but it probably became more trouble than it's worth on a macro level. Scholarships are kind of the same thing as comped instructor tickets. So we are back to the conversation about 30 mediocre workshops vs 5 great ones. We just may ultimately disagree on that. 3. Yeah profitability is a thing producers have to clarify to bring confidence to those asked to donate time. Transparancy is ultimately key to know whether they are doing the right thing or not. But when I crunch numbers on expected costs, there's not much money in it, especially for the work involved. I think we both agree that it comes down to management. If the purse string holders can find more efficient ways to cut costs on big expenses like the venue, etc, they can afford to pay more in other places. We ultimately don't know that without seeing their balance sheet. I don't think producers/teachers are antagonists to each other, but part of a collective whole of people that need to get paid. Those are just the critical people requesting funds and there are a lot of them. IMO, it ultimately comes down to who is providing more value to the event and capital is allocated to them first. Unfortunately, I think there's not much capital to go around. So the event becomes so volunteer based. But Ironically, it's also the love the community puts into it and the love for the art, that makes the event so special. So again, we are back to transparancy, are the managers doing the best they can? or are they siphoning off funds from a brand they built because people are willing to work for free out of love? I don't know and I could be wrong, but my intuition says it's the former, not the later.

I've broached the topic with at least a half dozen other instructors and all also reported feeling an enormous amount of fatigue and pressure to deliver on the expectations of people coming up to them all weekend. I can also tell you this was a major factor in at least one poi superstar leaving the scene entirely. I don't know how widespread these feelings are or if many other instructors even have a way to put them into words but it is definitely not just me experiencing it.

@@DrexFactor I've felt this before. It got to the point where I wanted to plan on attending flow fests and specifically NOT teaching so i could actually focus on the learning side of the experience. As a teacher at events I often felt too pressured by my workshops and fielding questions from those who missed the workshop to actually focus on what i wanted to learn. Of course, I have ADHD and this factors into my experience. The decompression time required after events was from over-socialization and being placed on a continual pedestal, not from too much partying, FWIW.

Burning hot, one might say 😉