Infrastructure for the people behind every production.

The Guild exists because the infrastructure didn't.

Skilled lighting technicians, stage managers, set builders, props coordinators, sound operators, and costume designers are doing professional work and walking away with nothing formal to show for it. No verified credit. No professional home.

Productions feel this from the other side. Finding reliable crew means calling people who might know someone who might be available. The industry normalised this because nothing better existed.

The rate problem runs alongside it. Backstage theatre professionals in South Africa, formally trained, experienced, and skilled, routinely take whatever is offered because there is no published standard to negotiate from. When neither the worker nor the production knows what a role is worth, the person with the least leverage accepts the least. That is not a market functioning normally. It is a market with no information in it at all, and a lack of information is exactly how exploitation takes hold.

According to Statistics South Africa's Quarterly Labour Force Survey, youth unemployment among those aged 15 to 24 stands above 60%. Skilled, trained young backstage professionals sit inside that number, invisible inside it, while the industry that needs them has no formal way to find them.

Botle Ba Matsoho.

"Botle Ba Matsoho" is Sesotho for the beauty of hands. It speaks to the value of what hands create, and to the fact that every stage that has ever been built was built by someone whose name the audience never knew. The name is a deliberate acknowledgement of that work, and a commitment to making it visible.

"Stagehands" at BBMGOS is not used narrowly. It covers the full ecosystem of people who make a theatre production possible from behind the curtain. If your work is part of how a production comes together and the audience never sees your name in the spotlight, you are who this Guild exists for.

Why BBMGOS exists.

BBMGOS was founded by Bokang Ntsutle, a South African theatre practitioner, playwright, and director, after she experienced first hand how difficult it is to find verified backstage crew in this country, and how little information exists on what their work is worth. As a performer she had access to an agent and a casting network. Working behind the curtain, on her first production as a playwright and director, she found neither existed.

The professionals she reached out to for that production were formally trained and experienced, and not one of them knew what to charge. That gap, between real skill and no system to value it, is the gap BBMGOS was built to close.