Complexity theory applications in the creative and cultural industries field (Comunian, 2019; De Bernard et al., 2021) postulate a set of always- and already-present interdependency relations among any creative and cultural ecosystem's parts currently unmapped. In particular, independent organisations have been investigated punctually, and hardly ever from an economic perspective, overlooking their systemic relations with the dominant production models. Furthermore, independent organisations and those who populate them currently fall in the gaps of cultural policy, lost in the grey area between the professional workforce they may not meet the formal requirements for (Potts et al., 2008) and the proactive audience of the "creative citizenship" model (Hargreaves & Hartley, 2017) they also do not match by their aspirations and professional training.
To compensate for such a partial understanding, the paper inspects theatre workers' careers in the London theatre ecosystem. In addition to the one sizeable economic and cultural value, the British theatre industry also presents one of the most vivid independent scenes, the Fringe, of which peak manifestation is that of the Edinburgh Fringe, currently the largest performing arts festival in the world.
The methodology consisted of 39 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted online with London-based theatre workers (21 performers and 18 non-performers). Participants were all asked to retrace their careers from their first interest and contact with theatre to their current working arrangements. Particular focus was dedicated to the reasons and modalities behind their actual or missing engagement with the various ecosystem parts of the broader industry's practice.
The sampling choices in focusing on workers, rather than the industry's leading creative figures only, e.g. directors or producers, contribute to precisely filling the gap of the workers' – and not just their ideal counterparts, "the creatives" – of independent spaces. These have been investigated as a historical account or looking at their community dimension and the reasons of their participants (Bennett & Guerra, 2023; Moore, 2007), the counter-narrative they carried (Strachan, 2007), and the differences in artistic direction (Szabo, 2010). When an economical approach was adopted, it focused on the organisation as the unit of analysis (Hesmondhalgh, 1998; Whitson et al., 2021). If indeed the features of creative labour are by now established knowledge (Bille, 2012), the efforts spent in independent spaces of production have been surprisingly considered as something else, suffering from one "de-labourised" understanding.
The findings demonstrate that the experience of workers in Fringe is profoundly stratified. On the one hand, they chime with the literature's expectations: Fringe is the place for unbridled creative freedom, where creatives experiment with new and artistically daring theatre pieces. With no money to be lost and such tiny audiences, Fringe frees creatives from the binds of the accountability of the subsidy and the profit-drive of commercial producers.
On the other hand, the small scale of Fringe projects and their overall economic unsustainability means that the creative labour in Fringe goes unpaid. Participation in Fringe productions often results from workers' exclusion from the institutional spaces; accessing the latter is far from straightforward for most theatre workers. The job opportunities are few compared to the aspiring workers, and critically, securing them largely depends on peers' recommendations and previous collaborations. Although the value of holding social ties in specific strategic locations and/or hierarchical positions applies in traditional industries (Granovetter, 2018), that is especially valuable in the creative and cultural industries. As creatives eschew objective evaluations – what truly defines a "good actor"? – one's social credentials may complement skills as an influencing factor in employment. Moreover, opportunities are hardly public; thus, holding good social capital is also valuable as it facilitates the flow of information.

Workers' mobility is thus self-generating: as an individual navigates through diverse social and work environments, e.g. productions, companies, venues etc., their reservoir of personal contacts expands, potentially serving as mediators for further opportunities in mobility. Emerging workers are found in a paradox. They need participation in projects to expand their network and yet precisely lack the connections to reach jobs in the first place: working in Fringe ends up being their only choice, often well beyond the earliest career phase. Theatre workers' portfolios essentially include a mixed composition of jobs, partly in Fringe and partly in the larger stages of not-for-profit and commercial productions. Nonetheless, if participation in Fringe productions is necessary, too many threaten one's livelihood precisely because Fringe labour is unpaid. Being able to sustain one's career relies on those jobs occasionally secured in Fringe's institutional counterparts.
Crucially, the individual workers' dynamics at the micro-level result in macro-level phenomena: the typical fluctuation between properly paid jobs on the main stages and the hope labour of Fringe means the former's fees contribute to supporting the Fringe community in its members' livelihood. On the other hand, public and private organisations harvest fruits they have not cultivated, accessing one well-trained workforce and their innovative theatre pieces that have been tested during workers’ time spent in Fringe.
Policy-wise, the implications are crucial. To follow the thread of theatre workers' professional arcs unfolded major interdependency among the various spheres of the London theatre ecosystem, in stark contrast to the past policy model's atomistic understanding of cultural production.
Moreover, demonstrating that the core functions of one creative and cultural industry, that of training and experimentation, firmly depend on relevant communities that operate in total or partial disregard of economic values should kindle not only policymakers' but especially creative communities' consciences to demand a more extensive involvement in setting policies' aims and design, precisely by virtue of their essential and defining presence in the ecosystem. Complexity theory might represent a potent empowerment tool for overlooked communities and economies to demand their voices to be included in cultural policies.

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