[SML] Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival Fwd: Campus Closed This Weekend

[Kristi R-C]

 I don’t believe the FLSA is new since the 90s - Perhaps Richard can answer that for us. 
What happened is enough folks figured out they were victims of wage theft and started to spread the word. Let’s be honest, minimum wage isn’t that much anywhere in the country and that’s ALL it takes to not be an “intern.” 
#6 here talks about interns and what they can do. Fact Sheet #71: Internship Programs Under The Fair Labor Standards Act

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Fact Sheet #71: Internship Programs Under The Fair Labor Standards Act

Wage and Hour Division Fact Sheet - U.S. Department of Labor
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The material handling rule is: if the object is longer or taller than you are tall, you need qualified, competent help moving it. An intern by definition is studying to be that, but isn’t yet. I dearly, with all my momma/teacher heart hope the intern involved with this is getting the mental health support she needs and deserves. 
As for the rest - there were many things I did in my younger days because no one had educated me that it was unsafe or just plain stupid. It could have been me instead of Kat, but when the workbox started tipping onto me as we were four-corner hand-carrying it up two flights of stairs, we had enough bodies to be able to grab it before I was crushed. 
Our arena riggers would shimmy out on a beam and tie a rope around their waist then to the beam “so if I fall the rope will catch me” and a lot of folks did that until Bill Sapsis designed affordable fall arrest/prevention things specifically for our needs and taught us why the old way was 100% wrong.
We know better now, so we do better now. We can’t defend “we’ve always done it this way” anymore. We’ve seen too many people hurt, careers ended and loved ones killed from that attitude. 
Any entity using “interns” as the majority of their summer technical theater staff is going to be in the wrong. If you can’t afford to do it right, don’t do it. 
Kristi RC

    On Friday, August 8, 2025, 03:36:16 PM CDT, William Knapp via Stagecraft <stagecraft at theatrical.net> wrote:   
[BIG SNIP BY KRISTI TO GET TO THE RELEVANT PART]| About intern staff.

As I understand it, interns are meant to work alongside professional staff, not replace them. I’m not a labor lawyer, and I haven’t read the law directly, but that’s my understanding. As we all know, the practice in summer theaters is that interns work right next to professionals.

I know Jacob’s Pillow has changed a lot in recent years to comply with evolving labor laws. But when I was there in the 1990s, there was a supervising staff — and all crew positions were filled by interns. Those were gentler times, mostly "lights and tights" production. Many interns were dancers who had realized, through injury or other circumstances, that they would never dance professionally but still wanted to be in the dance world.

We’d have about a dozen interns. During the initial setup period, we’d train them in stagecraft. Over the season, they’d rotate through all the production positions — board ops, wardrobe, APMs, flys. It was on-the-job training, and if you paid attention, you left with a marketable skill set. Many connected with companies that came through and went straight from The Pillow to touring work.

It was, a bit, like a theater program at a school with an associated professional theater, learning meant doing — except at The Pillow you got a stipend and worked with your heroes. Experiences varied, of course, but the vast majority of people I’ve met who spent time there remember it fondly, hard as the work was.

That model doesn’t align with today’s legal definitions of internships; the staff situation at The Pillow has professionalized considerably since.  But to suggest that this nonprofit dance festival is just another example of a craven capitalist producer cutting corners to save a buck isn’t accurate either.



  
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