Absolute Core Truths of Theatre Personnel Management

This special guest post was written by Impact Theatre artistic director Melissa Hillman. Learn more about Impact Theatre at http://www.impacttheatre.com/

This season marked my 10th anniversary as artistic director of Impact Theatre, and my 15th with the company as a founding member. When I became Impact’s AD, I quickly became aware of the fact that there’s no AD boot camp. There’s no Handbook for New ADs. Some local people were very helpful—Patrick Dooley at Shotgun Players was especially generous. Now that I’m more established, people who are planning to start their own theatre companies, or who are in their first few seasons, come to me for advice and I do my best to pay it forward.

I always give a lot of practical advice—how to handle auditions, how to get insurance, why you should join Theatre Bay Area, how to write a playwright contract, etc. One thing that’s struck me recently, however, is something I’ve never discussed in these situations: How much time we spend in the theatre finessing personnel management. I’m sure it’s the same in every field, but since theatre is where my managerial experience lies, I’m going to speak specifically to that.

Here’s what I’ve learned are the Absolute Core Truths of Theatre Personnel Management. These are probably all already printed in some management book, so feel free to tell me if I’m boring you by repeating something you had to read in business school, and I’ll go back to the ranting and inappropriate jokes you’ve come to expect from me. Here’s what I learned in the School of Hard Knocks™.

1. You don’t buy loyalty with a paycheck. You earn it by treating people with respect.

This doesn’t mean complimenting their work. “Great job!” or “You’re so good at this” only go so far with your staff if you treat their opinions dismissively and if you routinely override their expertise. Your marketing director, your lighting designer, and your box office manager all know more about their areas than you do. It’s their job to know more about it than you do. Listen to their opinions. Allow them to disagree with you. Take their opinions very, very seriously, because if they’re disagreeing with you about their area of expertise, it’s almost certain that they’re right and you’re wrong. Respect their knowledge and experience, and they will reward you in 100 ways.

2. Give your staff ownership of the company and the work.

Allow your staff the freedom to make decisions. Don’t interfere with their decisions or their processes unless absolutely necessary. Does the set design violate fire code? Necessary. Does the rehearsal schedule violate the terms of your AEA contract? Necessary. Did no one tell the director the script is a comedy? Necessary. Do you think the backdrop should be light green instead of blue? Unnecessary. Do you think the sound designer should use “Bittersweet Symphony” instead of Sigur Ros? Unnecessary. Obviously you should make your opinions known, but putting your foot down and requiring a designer, development director, or stage manager to make unnecessary changes to their products or to their processes creates disgruntled, unhappy, underappreciated staff. Give your opinion or guidance, and back off unless the matter truly requires intervention.

3. Wear your authority with ease.

Nothing says “I’m insecure in positions of authority” like someone yelling at staff or refusing to allow staff to voice their opinions. A strong leader engages staff as equals, respecting their expertise. This doesn’t mean you should cede authority. Allowing your staff to make their own decisions and create their own processes doesn’t result in an authority drain. Step in when it’s necessary to step in. Put your foot down, respectfully, when it’s important. But have the strength to recognize when it’s important and when it’s not. And when mistakes happen or disaster strikes—because it will, trust me—blaming staff or yelling at people or otherwise losing your cool is the worst thing you can do.

4. Admit when you’re wrong.

Because they all already know it. Bluffing makes you look foolish.

5. Don’t be afraid to make the hard decisions.

Sometimes people need to be let go. This is the hardest thing for me personally and something I’ve bitched out on doing a number of times, hoping for the best. Learn from my mistakes. Be gentle, be respectful, but get rid of the people who can’t do their jobs. Again, everyone else already knows, and they’re sick of covering for that person.

6. Do whatever you have to do to keep your tech people happy.

While all theatre personnel are equally important, too often techs get treated poorly, blamed for mishaps, and left out of the glory. Happy techs make a show sparkle with awesomeness, like a magical lighting and sound unicorn flew over the theatre. Happy techs can build a gorgeous set out of popsicle sticks and coffee filters. Happy techs call 427 cues without breaking a sweat. Unappreciated, yelled-at techs will still do their jobs perfectly—they’re professionals—but they will withhold the awesome and take someone else’s gig next time around. Or worse—continue taking your gigs and talk shit about you in the community.

7. Relax. It’s theatre.

This isn’t brain surgery. No one will die if the director casts Actor X instead of the actor you liked best at callbacks. No catastrophe will ensue if your lighting designer went with a different gobo. It’s not fuckpocalypse if your marketing director thought one show was on the weak side. Breathe. Creating art is about both process and product. Don’t beat your process to death with your image of the perfect product. Nothing is going to be perfect, but it’s within your power to make it awesome.

Envisioning Alternatives

Earlier this week, we generated a heated discussion about Rocco Landesman's comments at the New Play Institute on our blog and Facebook page. I walked away from that discussion with the sense that yes, our theatrical ecosystem (from a business standpoint) is unsustainable. Many (sadly, most) theatre artists work for nothing or next to nothing. In spite of this, we are indeed witnessing a rapid increase in the amount of theatre companies springing up around the country, and that increase is concurrent with an alarming decrease in funding sources for these theatre companies. However, as the reaction around the blogosphere is indicating, simply suggesting that we have too many theatre companies without proposing meaningful alternatives to the current system is overly simplistic and frustrating to artists whose life's work is in question.

That's where this post comes in. I would like to set aside this space to envision alternatives to the traditional models that many artists follow as criticized by Landesman: to produce a play or two with friends, to identify a niche in the theatre community, or at least a solid group of artists with whom one wants to continue to work, and then to form a theatre company with said artists. I have noticed a tendency in the theatre community to view creating a new theatre company as a necessary step in legitimizing one's work and building an audience. In our current theatrical environment, this is absolutely true. But can we imagine other systems in which this might not be as much of an issue?

Should established theatre companies, for example, create more opportunities for less established artists to create? What if large companies dedicated a certain amount of resources to smaller-scale "theatre laboratories" in which fringe artists could experiment with the form without having to create an entire theatre infrastructure of their own? How would the large companies benefit from such arrangements?

Could a group of smaller companies pool their resources to establish one umbrella nonprofit coop of sorts that serves all of them (run by a centralized managing director), much as arts organizations will pool their resources to share an office or performance space? Would such a thing even be legally and/or logistically feasible? Would this eliminate enough overhead costs to justify the added logistical headaches?

What sort of infrastructure would need to be in place, do you think, so that artists would no longer need to create organizations to satisfy their artistic impulses?

Supply, Demand and Apple Trees - thoughts on the Landesman speech

This blog post represents my views and my views alone. These thoughts are not meant to be representative of the views of any organization I work for.

NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman dropped a bombshell on the New Play Institute national convening last week in the form of eight words: “We are overbuilt…there are too many theatres.”

I'm sad I wasn't actually there to hear the speech, though the full thing is here. But this statement and its surrounding arguments have sparked a fire across the theatre blogosphere. (Even the New York Times got into the act.)

Essentially, Landesman argues that we are (and have been, for a while) in an era where even as arts funding and arts attendance decrease each year, arts non-profits continue to sprout up all over the country. Here are some samples from a blog he wrote in response to some of the criticism his speech got at Art Works, gathering around the hashtag #SupplyDemand:

“The NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA)…reports a five percentage point decrease in arts audiences in this country. This is juxtaposed against a 23% increase in not-for-profit arts organizations, and a rate of growth for not-for-profit performing arts organizations, specifically, that was 60% greater than that for the total U.S. population.”

And later:

“I care passionately about the arts in this country, and I believe that they will always play a vital role in who we are as an American people. But in order to get to where we need to be, we are going to have to have some uncomfortable conversations and prepare ourselves for a not-for-profit arts sector of the future that does not necessarily look the way it looks today.”

This whole thing reminds me of the mini-dust-up we had on this blog a while back around a post I wrote on whether art needed to justify its existence. A lot of people got really mad at that idea, using many of the arguments being made back to Landesman about his proposals:

• that art is not commerce, and should not be treated in the same profit/loss, supply/demand way that commercial things are


• that arbitrating value of art is a waste of time, as the value is subjective and can be measured neither by the amount of money a piece of art generates nor by how many people see it


• that the playing field is uneven and grossly favors the largest animals in the forest.

I guess what I see here is what makes the arts world so fascinating and vibrant—the push/pull of aesthetes and economists, of artists and pragmatists (if those two things should be juxtaposed…I know plenty of pragmatic artists, although it’s worth pointing out that many of them are viewed as “sell outs”).

In a conversation yesterday about Landesman’s speech, one person who was there expressed how upset he was about what he saw as a lack of understanding that what Landesman was proposing would essentially rip the rug out from under many artists who have toiled away at this work for decades. Another said that she thought she probably agreed with a lot of what Landesman said, but that his tone was so off-putting she couldn’t be sure. I can understand both points, although from reading what has followed from Landesman, I’m not sure that’s what Landesman meant to convey.

When you strip away the tone, rhetoric and personality associated with the ideas, I find (for myself, here) that I can’t really find flaw in the equation. I think of the apple tree in the backyard of my old apartment building, which sat untended and overgrown. Every year, what seemed like thousands and thousands of blossoms would pop open on the branches, and then all of them would be pollinated and, since we none of us owned the tree, no one would pinch off any of the fruit. The tree, every year, would become burdened by all the fruit—the branches would bend, the leaves would start to look weak, and the fruit itself was small and sallow—a victim of its own ubiquity.

If we as an industry (as we have) have set ourselves up to believe that there’s always room for one more apple on the tree, that the default to success is to create a non-profit theatre company of your very own, then we shouldn’t be surprised that we’re all feeling a little malnourished. In this, of course, we need to lay the blame where it belongs, which is with everyone on every step of the ladder from top-heavy arts organizations that favor known artists over new blood to funders who only fund organizations (and then of a certain size, with a certain pedigree and production history) to, yes, service organizations and other support groups that have for years encouraged unchecked proliferation of organizations and an egalitarian, everyone-deserves-equal-support-regardless attitude.

Might we not, as Landesman seems to be arguing at least in part, all feel a little healthier if we spent some time tending to ourselves? Setting aside for the moment the large, scary questions about what that really means, and setting aside the reality that art is commerce, and needs to function on the same set of rules as anything else (namely that if supply outstrips demand, the correct answer is not to prop up the extra supply) – setting aside all of that, I still have to wonder if we’re best served by the current system, or if perhaps the foundation world (and it’s not just Landesman—former Mellon program officer Diane Ragsdale has written similarly, and Hewlett program officer Ron Ragin has warned of the perils of assuming organizations' permanence) is going to force us to take a long, hard, healthy look at our industry.

Perhaps we’re at an inflection point where “more is better” needs to turn into, as Landesman writes, “we are here to ensure the survival of the most creative and most dynamic.”

Proving what we know is true

This post originally appeared on ARTSblog.

As artists and arts advocates, we all know, deep down, that Art Matters. But we continue to grapple with how best to talk about that value, to “justify” (a loaded word) or “prove” that the continued investment in infrastructure, arts education outreach and daily artistic input into the population-at-large is necessary to the creation of a tolerant, educated, empathic and energized society. The great work of Randy Cohen and Americans for the Arts on the economic front, including the creation of the Arts and Economic Prosperity Calculator, have gone a long way towards standardizing the arguments around economic impact of arts and culture, and has essentially gotten us all on the same page. But, and this language is getting to be a cliche, economic impact is only part of the answer – half of the answer at most, really – and getting to the point where we can talk about the intellectual, emotional, social, empathic impacts of the arts in the same specific, data-driven way as we can talk about the economics may open up a brave new world of advocacy for money, time and respect from the government, the funding establishment, the education system and our patrons.

Of course, in some ways, we’re already good at getting at some version of what researcher Alan Brown calls the “intrinsic impact” of art – mostly in the form of testimonials from arts patrons. A well-formed interview can get you incredible stories of the transformational power of art, and such things, when well-packaged, can prove very valuable in the conversation with arts skeptics about the value of artistic work. But interviews are really, truly only part of the answer here, and as part of the National Arts Marketing Project Conference session, Did the Campaign Work?: Integrating Impact Assessment into your Strategies, we (Theatre Bay Area) will be unveiling a year-long research and development effort to create a web-based service for theaters and other arts organizations across the country to quantify the intrinsic impact of their work, generate easy-to-read dashboards, and provide sample survey and interview protocols to generate a new type of conversation using a new vocabulary. Working with research firm WolfBrown and arts service organization partners in Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, DC, Minneapolis and Philadelphia, Theatre Bay Area will generate a year-long set of activities focused around in-depth work with 18 theatre companies (including some of the most influential regional theaters in the country from Arena Stage to the Public Theater) across the course of a season. This work will include a whole battery of efforts from surveying to long-form interviews, video testimonials, web interface development, and a series of community forums in fall 2010 and summer 2011 – all in an effort to spark a change in the way we, as artists, evaluate and value the arts. Because ultimately, no matter how much we believe it in our hearts, we can’t effectively argue for the value of the arts to anyone if we can’t speak about the parts of art that go beyond restaurant tabs, parking fees and tolls – in a language our debate partners understand.

We’re not trying to replace anything, we’re trying to add. In his book No Culture, No Future, Simon Brault notes, “…[A] one-dimensional and instrumental approach that would only justify or value artistic creation solely where it has calculable economic impact would be immensely more devastating for our society than underestimating the cultural sector’s economic contribution.”

The expansion of the argument for the arts, which began to work its way into the social and intrinsic impact spheres in the 1990′s, must now move from half-million-dollar-plus one-off studies to egalitarianized, easily accessible, standardized tools that anyone from the smallest to the largest cultural institution can use to demonstrate and analyze their own value and their great effect on the social fabric. We need as many tools as possible, and must, in Brault’s words, “come to terms with variable logic and negotiate with a multitude of new partners.” To that, I’d only add, “in a language as concrete and standardized as that which we use to talk about economic impact.”

For more in the Intrinsic Impact: Audience Feedback 2.0 study, visit http://www.theatrebayarea.org/intrinsicimpact, or come to our session!

Lights Up: Theatre Bay Area's 2010 Annual Conference

Theatre Bay Area had its 2010 Annual Conference last Monday, May 10, and hooboy was it action-packed! Titled Lights Up: Sparking Conversations on Excellence, this year's conference at the War Memorial & Performing Arts Center featured keynote speech by arts advocate Eric Booth, community conversations and breakout sessions on rethinking new play development, arts education advocacy opportunities, exploring alternatives and adaptations to the nonprofit structure, navigating theatre coverage in the new media landscape, the state of the Bay Area acting pool, measuring the effectiveness of your social media strategy, community engagement as part of the artistic process and much, much more. We also had a number of bring-your-own-breakout sessions, plus playwright-director speed dating and a networking bingo game to help break the ice. People were tweeting all through the conference at the #tba2010 tag, adding another level to the ongoing conversation.

At the conference we also unveiled Theatre Bay Area’s strategic plan for 2010-13, which we’re pretty excited about. The next few years’ chief focuses will be on promoting excellence within the organization and the field, building diverse and devoted arts participants in our audience development efforts and strengthening and preserving an arts-friendly ecosystem. The strategic plan is also online, so check it out.

The day wrapped up with a closing address from Theatre Bay Area executive director Brad Erickson, which we wanted to share in its entirety. Enjoy!

Beyond “Nice”

What an amazing day this has been. Thank you to Eric Booth, and Todd London, and our old friend David Dower, and all the panelists and speakers today. Thank you to Dale and Rebecca, who co-produced today’s conference. Thank you to all of Theatre Bay Area’s staff, our board, our Theatre Services Committee, or Individual Services Committee. Thank you to our volunteers, to everyone here at the War Memorial—and thank you to all of you—400 people here today. Amazing.

Now, before we head upstairs for a drink and Expo and our After Hours programming—yes, there’s more to come—I want to spend a few minutes flipping through this curious playbill type thing we gave you today. Our 2010 Strategic Plan, our roadmap for the next three years—our “Plan in Three Acts.” (Thanks to Rebecca Novick for this great formatting idea.)

Everyone here who works in a theatre or dance company, or almost any other kind of organization, has almost certainly been involved in a strategic planning process. Sometimes they’re invigorating and insightful, sometimes you want to kill yourself. Sometimes you’re just doing it because someone somewhere said you needed to—a funder perhaps?—and really you can’t wait to just get the damn thing done and put it on a shelf where you never have to look at it again.

And then sometimes you really do need to ask—because you really don’t know—Where exactly are we right now? And where in the world are we going? For us, this time around, the questions were more like that.

A couple months ago, Theatre Bay Area hosted the annual conference of performing arts service organizations—or APASO—here in San Francisco. One of our speakers was Diane Ragsdale, the arts program officer at the Mellon Foundation. Diane talked to us about “Surviving the Cultural Change.” She reminded us that for all the real dangers brought on by the recession, the greatest challenge for the performing arts today was recognizing and adapting to huge shifts in our culture. She quoted Dana Gioa, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who observed that “the primary issues facing the American arts at present are not financial. They are cultural and social. We have a society in which the arts have become marginalized.” Diane referred to Russell Willis Taylor of National Arts Strategies who has stated that her greatest concern for the field was that arts organizations cannot easily explain why they matter. (Which made me remember that Ben Cameron, former head of Theatre Communications Group and now at the Doris Duke Foundation, has remarked more than once that the most pressing problem facing theatre today is not a fiscal crisis but a crisis of relevance.)

Diane pointed us to a book by Laurence Gonzales called “Deep Survival” which examines why some people in life-threatening situations manage to survive and others perish. “Gonzales,” Diane told us, “explains that the way we navigate in life is by forming and following mental maps: Literally pictures in our minds of particular areas or routes. Gonzales says you get lost when you ‘fail to update your mental map and then persist in following it even when the landscape,’ (the real world), ‘tries to tell you it’s wrong.” In other words, “Whenever you start looking at your map and say something like, ‘Well, that lake could have dried up,’ or ‘That boulder could have moved,’ a red light,” Diane told us, “should go off. You’re trying to make reality conform to your expectations rather than seeing what’s there. In the sport of orienteering, they call this ‘bending the map.’”

Over the past two years, major markers on all of our maps have shifted radically. Oceans have evaporated and mountain ranges have turned to plains. Our economy has crashed and is now rebounding. Perhaps. If Greece—and Portugal, and Ireland, and Spain—don’t take us all down again. Great Britain has elected a hung Parliament and is struggling to form a government. And our own elections loom just a few months away.

Our world has changed and is continuing to change. Where are the mountains, and the lakes, and the boulders on our maps in May 2010? Are they where we expected them? Are we bending our maps? How many of us need to tear up the Rand-McNallies in our mind, and draft entirely new mental maps that show the world, the Bay Area, as it is today?

For our “Plan in Three Acts” we have chosen for our guide-star one particular word—a hard, sharp-edged, metallic, glinting kind of word, more diamond than down comforter. It’s a word that elicits strong reactions—personal, idiosyncratic, immediate, emotional. Love it, hate it, the word is compelling. The word is excellence.

“Excellence” and our relationship to it—as an organization, as a field, as individual theatre artists—was an idea that emerged from a number of sources during our planning process. It came from board members. It came from members of the community—artists, funders, theatre leaders—it came from a wide spectrum of people whose interest was that Theatre Bay Area should hold itself to the highest possible standards—and that we should also find a way to broach the subject of greater excellence in the field.

And so, we have Act I, Scene 1: In Which We Take a Hard Look at Ourselves and Address Weaknesses and Areas for Improvement—Setting excellence for ourselves as an organization, as our first goal. It’s a scene in which we push ourselves past OK, past good-enough, beyond “nice” to tougher assessment of our programs and services. We are committing ourselves to strengthen what’s good about what we do, to fix what’s not working, and to throw out what’s just plain broken or no longer relevant. It won’t be easy and we’ll need your help. We invite you—no, we beg you—to be honest with us about what’s of value to you, what’s not, what needs to be improved or expanded, what’s just fine the way it is, and what needs to be thrown away.

Next, Act I, Scene 2: “In which we foster excellence in the field.”

This for us is the scariest scene of all. During our planning process, we had months of energetic, even heated, debates about whether we should even tackle this issue head-on. Staff was hesitant. Leaders of theatres and individual artists were excited, though, even insistent. Was it not possible to dare ourselves as a community to spark conversations—candid, no-holes-barred discussions about evaluating the overall quality of our work.

No one imagined some Olympic-style panel of judges in our theatres assigning numeric grades to the work—9.8, 4.7, 6.3. But there was enormous energy around confronting and challenging a Bay Area cultural norm—one I think you’ll recognize—our pervasive, our persistent, our invidious NICENESS.

Niceness, as a human trait, is for the most part a—very nice thing. People from around the country have often commented on the remarkable collegial quality of our theatre community. This trait was called out recently in Theatre Development Fund’s study of new play development, “Outrageous Fortune.” (Todd London, one of its authors, is here with us today, and many of you participated this morning in a conversation around those findings.) At the close of the book, after laying out serious issues in new play development nationwide, Todd and his co-authors point to several examples of success, case studies of what is working well in bringing new plays to life. And the Bay Area is called out for our communal approach. “It Takes a Village” the segment is titled, and it describes the way our theatre companies and new play development groups swap plays and playwrights, share resources, trade information and have formed an informal but interconnected network for supporting playwrights and theatres. This organic system is fantastic and I believe it is directly related to our culture of collegiality and community support, to our over-riding niceness.

But I will also posit that our deeply-rooted niceness—our reluctance to hurt one another’s feelings, and even our innate skepticism of absolutes of all kinds—which is surely one of the reasons for the Bay Area’s long reputation for open-mindedness and tolerance of difference—that this propensity for niceness that we share actually gets in the way of candidly evaluating the artistry and the impact of the work on our stages. Or, perhaps to put it more accurately, our niceness stops us from sharing our candid assessments with the artists themselves. Oh, we can be quite upfront about what we think in lobbies and bars after the show—that is to say, behind each other’s backs. But face to face? Awfully hard for us to do. It’s not considered “nice.”

Act I, Scene 2 asks us to make a resolution as a community to move beyond “nice”—beyond a superficial sort of sweetness—towards a deeper respect for each other as artists, a deeper caring, a deeper valuing of the work itself—by creating constructive mechanisms for seeking out and sharing honest evaluation of the art we produce.

Today we distributed a questionnaire asking each of you about your own practice of self-assessment. How you do reflect on your own work? Whose opinions do you trust? Who understands your aesthetic, who gets what you’re trying to do, and who will tell you what you need to hear to be better?

We’re looking at the role Theatre Bay Area can have as an organization in facilitating these conversations, in sharing practices of assessment and reflection. Can we create connections and forums for talking about enhancing the quality and the impact of our work?

I learned from Eric Booth during one of our breakouts today that the etymology of the word “assess” is “to sit with” or “sit alongside.” What a beautiful image: to sit beside one another, supporting each other in our individual efforts to reach greater excellence.

And what amazing work we have to assess. How exciting it’s been over the last several weeks to follow the huge success of Bay Area theatres and Bay Area shows on the national stage. The New York Times in April ran a Sunday feature citing our region as the place in America where “musicals dare to be different.” The story pointed to genre-bending work from Berkeley Rep, TheatreWorks, Brava and Shotgun. Then, last week, following the announcement of the Tony nominees, Rob Hurwitt in the San Francisco Chronicle, framed this year’s competition in New York as the Battle of the Bay, with so many plays, musicals and artists with Bay Area origins now top contenders for this season’s Tony Awards.

When we talk about the excellence of Bay Area theatre, we’re talking about building upon these kinds of successes to fully support the highest reach of all our artists and companies, in all their artistic and cultural diversity.

Why?

Because surely the excellence of the work, and our growth as artists, directly affects the relevance of what we do for the communities we live in and deepens the impact of our art on the individual lives of people who come to our shows and engage in our programs. Because ultimately, what we do is about them.

A year and a half ago, in conjunction with Free Night of Theater 2008, we launched a study with renowned researcher Alan Brown looking at finding ways to measure how the work on our stages was impacting, deeply effecting, the audiences in the seats. Something like 80 theatre companies around the Bay Area participated in this pilot study, the first ever to concentrate on a single arts discipline and one of the very earliest inquiries ever into what Alan calls “intrinsic impact.”

What is “intrinsic impact?” I don’t think Alan likes it when I put it this way, but here’s how I describe “intrinsic impact:” We often say that theatre is a transformative experience. Well, this study seeks to measure that transformation. You were transformed? How transformed were you? And how long did that transformation last?

Intrinsic impact is that difficult-to-describe effect that art can have on person’s emotions, intellect, memory and imagination. Why is this important? Well, isn’t this why we make theatre in the first place? To move people, and move them deeply—whether that’s to laughter, or tears, or intense debate, or just to have people leave the theatre humming a song, arm around their companion, and feeling better than they did when they arrived.

Interestingly and less altruistically, the more powerfully audiences are impacted by the art on the stage, the more likely they are to return. And so we have a key to addressing the most astounding statistic I’ve heard in the past 12 months. Here it is. For all the work we have done as a field to attract new audiences to the theatre, and to all the arts, 75% of these new audiences never return. This is true for theatre and dance and symphonies across the country.

What’s wrong here?

If we’re to keep the audiences we bring in, we must understand if our work is connecting with them, if it’s making an impact.

This year, with fantastic support from the Doris Duke Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a host of other funders, we will be launching a nationwide study of intrinsic impact, looking at 25 theatres in 6 cities around the country, working with their artistic directors and managing directors and marketing directors to find ways to measure and strengthen the impact of the art on our stages to the people who see our shows.

Act Two of our strategic plan is all about these folks, the people who come to see our plays. We’re thinking differently about audiences these days. We’re picturing them not just as targets for our marketing, not merely as butts for your seats, not even just as something to be cultivated over time, as in “audience development.” Rather we’re reframing our focus towards engaging the people of the Bay Area as life-long participants in the arts. Now, will we continue to market to residents and visitors alike? Of course. Will we keep trying attract attendees, especially new attendees, to your shows? You bet. Will we continue working to develop audiences for years to come? Absolutely. But we will move beyond the perfectly nice goal of higher attendance towards a more radical purpose of creating theatre participants—of building a wider and wider network of people, all over the Bay Area, who act, and direct, and write, and design—who volunteer and serve on boards and give money—who advocate in Sacramento and City Hall, who vote and teach and—oh, yes—go to plays. Lots and lots of plays.

All the research shows that more and more, people around the country, of all ages, of all demographics, are increasingly becoming creators of art in their own right. They are singing in church choirs and playing musical instruments—more guitars are being sold in California today than ever before. They are making videos and uploading them to the Internet, “curating” musical collections on their iPods, creating web pages, stepping up to open mikes at poetry slams, and, yes, taking acting classes. People are making art even while attendance at “big box” arts events—that is, theatre and dance, along with opera and symphony—continues to decline. These mountains of audience engagement have moved, and our mental maps must reflect the changed cultural topography or we will surely lose our way.

We will succeed in bringing in new audiences in so far as we succeed in making them real participants in the art we put on our stages, and in making them real partners in the companies we run. We will succeed in so far as we are truly connecting to the communities in which we live. To today’s California of 2010. To tomorrow’s California of 2020. Diversifying our audiences to look like today’s California—not the mainly white, mainly middle-class California of the 1950’s—is not just a nice thing to do, something to be embraced by nice, liberal-minded, well-meaning people like ourselves. No. Making sure our audiences look like today’s California is an urgent priority for our companies and for theatre itself, and is as much a matter of survival as balancing our bottom lines. Theatre in the Bay Area must reach and speak to a new California that is increasingly Latino and Asian-American. That is both younger and older than ever before. That is populated with children and adults who haven’t seen comprehensive arts education in the public schools in 40 years.

In Act Three of our plan, we will endeavor, with all of you, to change our region and our state, to make the Bay Area not just a nice place to be, but to make our region—and here’s our big Vision, pull out your playbills—“to make our region a global model for how to create and sustain a diverse society—one that values the arts as an integral component of individual and communal life, as a key element in the exercise of democracy, and as a crucial catalyst for promoting understanding, sparking creativity and fueling economic prosperity.”

When we drafted this vision statement, one of our board members commented that not even the United Nations embraced such lofty goals. I’m not sure if he meant that as a criticism or a compliment. But how appropriate it seems, standing on this stage where the U.N. charter was signed. In any case, this vision comes from you. From this amazing theatre community of artists, and administrators, and advocates, and supporters, and audiences—and from the larger community of creative people of all kinds—who for centuries have flocked to this Bay to reinvigorate their work, to rebuild their lives, to re-imagine their communities.

We are incredibly blessed to live and work in a region that goes so far beyond “nice.” That reaches superlatives in so many ways. That inspires one of our television news stations to state, with a straight face and as a matter of journalistic fact, that they serve the Bay Area—the best place on Earth. Let’s match that, and make this the best theatre community—on the planet.

Annual Conference wandering the blogosphere

Barry Hessenius, the former director of the California Arts Council and currently a consultant and author of Barry's Blog, mentioned one of our Annual Conference sessions in a blog post recently. His post, which was specifically about the Omni-Directional Mentorship session being hosted by Edward Clapp, was also more expansively about the role and state of arts administrators in the field. It's a hard topic -- are we getting top-heavy as an industry, with more administrators than artists, or are we in fact experiencing the opposite, as Michael Kaiser believes: a dearth of competent arts professionals to keep the industry not just afloat but thriving in an increasingly competitive landscape?

Who knows? But we'll certainly be discussing that juicy tidbit and much more at our Annual Conference this coming Monday, May 10 in San Francisco.

To register for the Annual Conference, please visit http://www.theatrebayarea.org/lightsup before noon on Friday!