FRAY DEV, helping the next generation of talent.

FRAY DEV began, like a lot of things, out of necessity.

During COVID, with the industry shut and our studio quiet, we set ourselves a weekly creative challenge. A brief would go out, people would use new tools to respond to it, and the whole thing gave us something to work towards in what were strange and uncertain times. At the same time, we were being contacted by a lot of students and recent graduates. People who had no placements to go to, no access to the professional world they were trying to enter, in an industry that had simply stopped. It made sense to open up what we were doing and make it available to them. That was FRAY DEV's first incarnation: a three-month structured programme where participants responded to briefs based on real work we had received, and we mentored them through the process.

When the industry came back, the shape of what people needed changed. Students got busier. We got busier. The intensive format gave way to something more flexible: a mentoring practice where early-career people could bring questions, ideas, work in progress, and ambitions, and talk them through with professionals who had been where they were trying to go. That is FRAY DEV in its simplest form. A place to ask questions and get honest answers. A place to identify the skills you want to develop, work out how to develop them, and start building the body of work that will get you hired.

We have just completed our first incarnation of the mentoring programme, having worked with seventeen participants from across the world over the past six months. People came with different needs. Skills development, portfolio feedback, career direction, and very often just the basic questions about how the industry actually works. Those basic questions are not small. They matter enormously.

We work in an industry that has no rule book. There are no certification standards, no professional bodies you are required to join, no regulated framework that tells you what is and is not acceptable. That opacity is part of what makes live entertainment exciting. It is also part of what makes it easy to exploit people at the beginning of their careers. If you do not have access to someone who can tell you whether what is being asked of you is reasonable, whether you should be paid more, whether it is okay to ask for what you need, you are navigating that entirely alone. Having that access, outside of a formal education setting, is something I benefitted from enormously when I was starting out. People like Dick Straker, Paule Constable, Michale Levin and Simon McBurney l gave me their time and their knowledge. That mattered. It shaped how I work. I do not think I would be doing what I do without it.

One of the things I find most satisfying about FRAY DEV, a few years in, is when a participant reappears in a professional context. You run into them on a show. Or they send you their showreel a couple of years after their time on DEV, and the work is ready. They are ready. A small investment of time at an early stage compounds in ways that are genuinely moving to witness. That cyclical quality, where the small input we gave comes back to us in the form of a working professional, feels like the programme doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

Which brings me to why we do it at all: I think those of us who are established in this industry carry an implicit responsibility to make sure there is a pipeline of new talent coming in, that people can find their way in safely and fairly, and that access to this world does not only belong to those who were lucky enough to reach it through conventional routes. It should not only be for people with the right education, the right contacts, the right geography. FRAY DEV is one small answer to that. It is not the whole answer. But it is ours.

I am in what I think of as my mid-career. There are still people much further along than me from whom I learn constantly. The conversations need to keep flowing, the knowledge needs to keep moving, and new people need to come in with new ideas and expand what we collectively think is possible. Otherwise we end up making the same show forever.

FRAY DEV is now recruiting its next cohort. I am genuinely excited to meet the people who are going to join us, to find out what they are curious about, where they want to go, and what kind of work they want to make. That curiosity is always surprising. It is always energising. And one day, I have no doubt, some of them will be running programmes just like this one.

The work passes forward. That is the whole point.