Arts + Kids = Scientists

This special guest blogpost was written by Impact Theatre Artistic Director Melissa Hillman. Learn more about Impact Theatre at http://www.impacttheatre.com.

When I was in grad school at Cal, I taught a number of undergrad intro courses. I taught DA10, DA1A, and DA1B, which were intro courses for acting and dramatic lit, and they drew a large number of non-majors. I learned two things very quickly teaching at Cal: If you think it’s plagiarized, it is (thank you, Google!) and disproportionate numbers of science majors take theatre courses.

I was struck over and over by how many science majors there were stuffed into these acting and dramatic lit classes. I had expected crossover from other arts and from English, but in each and every class I taught at Cal, science majors outnumbered English and arts majors. What was going on?

A new article from the Psychology Today blog might provide some insight. It turns out that scientists are built out of arts education. Provide a kid with music or theatre in elementary school, and out comes a physicist in college.

Is it really that simple? Possibly. The study outlined in the article “Artsmarts: Why Cutting Arts Funding Is Not a Good Idea,” demonstrates that science graduates are three to eight times as likely to have had arts education as the general population. When looking at science innovators (as defined by number of patents held and companies created), the likelihood of an arts education background is even higher.

I know many of you will remind me that I get up in people’s grills on the regular about correlativity not being the same as causality, but in this case, it does seem as if there’s a hard case shaping up for causality. After the famous “Mozart Effect” study of the 90s, dozens of studies about the impact arts education has on children’s brains, cognition, intelligence, and academic performance have been done, and they almost all point to some benefit. And while many are labeled by detractors as “inconclusive” or showing only correlativity, when taken as a whole, these many different studies done in many different ways do indeed point to a high probability of direct benefit.

Whether we like it or not, it appears that we’re all participants in a very wide-scale study at present. Budget cuts (and our hyperfocus on the high-stakes testing we use as nothing but a stick with which to beat teachers) have decimated arts education in most US schools. Conversely, four out of the five highest-performing nations in reading, math, and science—South Korea, Finland, New Zealand, and Japan—all fund arts education and require it in schools in some way. China does as well. Will our science graduates be competitive in 20 years? Will we still be world leaders in science innovation in 30?

Talking About Declining Arts Education, Armed with New Numbers

Recapping Research: the SPPA Follow-Up Monographs, Part 1

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to listen in on a two-hour presentation hosted by Sunil Iyengar, the head of research at the NEA. The topic was three monographs the NEA commissioned to delve into the data gathered from the Survey on Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). This benchmark report, which is fielded every four years, looks at the arts attendance habits of just under 20,000 people across the country in order to understand who’s going to what, who’s not going at all, and what that all means.

In the case of these three monographs, the researchers were asked not only to delve into the 2008 data, but also to place it in context with the large trove of data gathered by the SPPA since it was first administered in 1982.

These recaps take a while, so this just covers the first one…I’ll cover the other two next week.

The three monographs were:

• Arts Education in America: What the Declines Mean for Arts Participation, by Nick Rabkin and Eric Hedberg of the NORC Center at the University of Chicago.
• Age and Arts Participation: A Case Against Demographic Destiny, by Mark Stern of the University of Pennsylvania.
• Beyond Attendance: A Multi-Modal Understanding of Arts Participation, by Jennifer Novak-Leonard and Alan Brown of WolfBrown

All of these, as well as a useful summary document, can be found at http://www.arts.gov/research.

Arts Education in America
Building off of an initial study commissioned by the NEA in 1992 that indicated that arts education was the most powerful predictor of arts attendance in adults, this study analyzed the data in the SPPA since 1982 to understand more fully exactly how central arts education is in the creation of future arts patrons.

Nick Rabkin eased us in with some basic graphs demonstrating facts we sort of already know – that those who repot having had classes in art are far more likely to report they’ve also attended arts events across the life of the SPPA, and then that general education is itself a correlated indicator of arts attendance (more education = more attendance).

Then things got interesting. Rabkin analyzed the number of art forms respondents indicated they had studied, both as a child and as an adult, and found that an increase not only in any arts education, but of a diverse arts education yielded higher average rates of arts attendance in respondents – and that the effect was even more evident with art forms studied as an adult. To pause here for a second, this seems to go against the current prevailing mutterings from some circles that the current adult generation may be simply lost to arts apathy, and that the focus should instead completely divert to children. Here’s the graph (taken from their presentation):

F1. Arts Attendance Rate Predictions Based on Amount of Arts Attendance

Taking, then, the fact that arts education is indeed quite important, Rabkin and Hedberg began an analysis of what has happened to arts education over the course of the SPPA, and indeed, over the last century.

Starting simply, they looked at the percentage of 18-year-olds in each SPPA since 1982 who said they had had arts education as children. The numbers starkly declined from a 1982 high of 64% to a low in 2008 of 49.5%. The pace of decline is increasing precipitously as well. This itself indicates something of an issue, but then Rabkin and Hedberg did something fascinating. They extrapolated the ages of each of the respondents on every SPPA since 1982, and where from there able to figure out the year at which each person turned 18. Using that as an anchor, they laid out the percentage of respondents who experienced arts education as children for every year between 1930 and 2008, with this result:

F2. Percentage of Childhood Arts Education, 1930-2008


What this graph shows is that in 1930, about 20% of children had any arts education. The number steadily rose until 1985, when it was at about 65%. It then began a consistent downward trend, passing through 50% in 2000. Per Rabkin, this downturn was precipitated by:

• Widespread opposition to taxes associated with arts education, beginning with Prop 13 (right here in California).
• The emergence of school reform as a high national priority. The report that spurred this reform effort was called “Nation at Risk,” and was published in 1983. It encouraged raising standards and rigorous testing, and included practically no discussion of arts education. Per Rabkin, arts education has been marginalized ever since.

A 15% decline is upsetting, but the problem is actually even more disasterous than on first look. The issue is that that decline is disproportionately affecting non-white populations, and not just a little. Since 1982, arts education for white has essentially stayed constant at about 58% of students. African-Americans and Hispanics, on the other hand, have seen a decline from around 50% of students in 1982 to half (!) that in 2008. The graph is incredibly disheartening:

F3. % of Respondents Reporting Arts Education As Children by Race

I’ve written at length about the terribly disproportionate impact of arts education cuts on non-white populations. Essentially, it is a situation of discrimination by default—schools in less affluent districts (districts where neither the local municipality nor the parents can afford to shoulder the financial burden of providing arts education to their children) suffer more than schools in more affluent districts, and less affluent districts are disproportionately non-white. As I said in an article on this subject last year:

In a country where, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the 2006 median household income for a whlte family was 158% that of a black family and 135% that of an Hispanic family, the fact that ubiquity of arts education is directly tied to affluence means that it’s de facto tied to race.

Rabkin closed with some thoughts on the relationship between the decline in interest in the arts and the decline in arts education, and cautioned not to draw instant, direct connections between the two – at least not only in one direction. Declining arts education may contribute to declining interest in the arts, but it can also go the other way, becoming what Rabkin called “a bi-directional issue.”

Rabkin also cautioned us to understand that moaning about arts attendance and its ties to arts education isn’t going to get us very far with our legislators. In his term, he expected such arguments to be viewed as “trivial.” Rather, we need to advocate for arts education on its own terms, secure in the knowledge that instituting such reform will likely generate some increase in arts attendance in the years to come.

Perils of Free?

In Friday's You've Cott Mail, way down at the bottom, Thomas Cott includes a quick quote from Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis, given as part of a larger article in Crane's New York about how major New York arts organizations are engaging the younger generation. Eustis' quote hits pretty close to home in terms of innovative audience development, not because what he's talking about is revolutionary, but because he speaks about the shortcomings of one of the most-well-known free-ticketed events in the country, Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park. Here's the quote, with some extra context pulled from the article:

Oskar Eustis, artistic director of The Public Theater, said the arts need to be more accessible for everyone. Even the nonprofit theater's free Shakespeare in the Park creates barriers.

“By giving Shakespeare away for free, it has become inaccessible for many,” Mr. Eustis said. “Tell someone they have to wait six to 36 hours in line for a ticket and it erases 90% of population that would have considered going.”

In some ways, this is a quote that one can react strongly to without really being empathic about the Public's situation--after all, we're not all just sitting there with drastically popular, massively funded free programming where the demand highly exceeds the supply. But, here at Theatre Bay Area, we're in the enviable or unenviable position of having a similar issue. We've been grappling with this same (relative) issue in the context of our Free Night of Theater program, in which we annually distribute about 5,000 to 6,000 free theatre tickets, and also annually disappoint between 20,000 and 30,000 unlucky people who don't get tickets, don't get the tickets they want, or get overly frustrated by the (admittedly arduous, or at least not hoop-free) process of getting the tickets.



We've tried various ways to "share the wealth" of the program--we do targeted giveaways to businesses whose employees seem likely candidates to become repeat arts consumers while also setting up various roadblocks to dissuade repeat Free Nighters from being able to easily access the tickets. But it's hard, and so when I saw Eustis' quote it got me thinking.



How can we, as artists, arts administrators and (yes) businesspeople balance success with access? How can we make sure, in the case of Free Night, that we're continuing to make the arts available to new people while also ensuring, for the companies' sakes, that we're getting those tickets to audiences that are likely to return (and pay)? What does it say when the leader of one of the biggest free theatrical events in the world essentially says that the very "freeness" of the event "erases 90% of the population that would have considered going?"



In the case of the Public, they're addressing this inequity by creating a "mobile Shakespeare" unit, the goal of which is to take the art to some subset of those people who can't or won't wait in line. And in our case, we're looking at turning Free Night upside down over the course of the next year and seeing if there's a way to keep the success of the program while also improving some of the inherent problems we've tried and failed to solve in the last six years. We'll see how it goes...but we're open to suggestions.

Arts Message Gets Through!

Did everyone hear Governor-Elect Jerry Brown's victory speech last night? It was an amazing win for the arts. First, Brown chose to hold his victory party in Oakland's beautifully refurbished Fox Theater, home to Oakland's public School for the Arts, which Brown helped create during his tenure as mayor.

In his speech, Brown referenced the theatre and the school as examples of the renewal he hopes to bring to the state. He went on to say that the school and the arts exemplify the "creativity and innovation" that California needs for the 21st century.

This is a huge win for the arts. Let it sink in that our new governor, unscripted, articulated the core value of the arts in his victory speech. This from the man who created the California Arts Council more than 30 years ago.

Congratulations to everyone involved in the nonpartisan Arts in the Governor's Race Campaign, and to all advocates of the arts who have been working for so long to get our message out. Last night's victory speech gives us all reason to celebrate.

Oh, the Joys of Live Theatre

I recently made a reservation to see a show at a local theatre. I received an email back from the artistic director, who had also directed the show, saying that she hoped I still wanted to come, but that she felt that she had to tell me in advance that she would be going on carrying a script in place of an actor that had left the show. Of course I still went, not only because I know her to be a great actor and wanted to support the theatre, but also because I had great deal of interest in seeing this particular show. I replied as such and also added, in jest, something to the effect of “I hope you aren’t also house managing and running the light board!" Imagine my surprise when I walked into the theatre and she actually was house managing!

I was reminded of an opening night performance I attended a number of years ago at a large Equity house, where the lead actor had left the show a few days before opening and the director went on in place of the actor, script in hand. It was one of the most memorable and moving nights of theatre I have ever experienced. In that case, the artistic director made a pre-show announcement providing the context of “Oh, the joys of live theatre.” In both cases, the script became virtually invisible, either due to the skillful physical handling of the script, the performance/skill of the director/actor or some combination of the two.

What struck me most about both of these experiences is that there was an almost palpable electricity onstage. There seemed to be a renewed focus and increased energy from all of the players. The actors and the entire production team rallied together in a way they couldn’t have possibly done in the absence of this adversity. The end result, though likely very different from the rehearsed "product," was, in my estimation, probably a more energized, committed and focused performance for all.

The audience in both of these cases approached their experience differently as well. They were almost uniformly rooting for the team to pull it off and even looked forward to the story they would be able to tell their theatre-going friends: “I was there when….” They also were, probably unconsciously, even more attentive, observant and gracious than they would have been otherwise.

While none of us would ever wish for something to go awry during the run of a show, such instances epitomize some of the things I love most about theatre: its risk and its immediacy. As an artist, these brushes with theatre "disasters" remind me to challenge myself: am I always bringing as much focus and commitment to the work I am doing as I can?

I’m sure we all have many similar stories, at theatres large and small. What are some of your best "I was there when..." stories (either as an audience member or as an actor)? How did the theatre "disasters" affect the experience as a whole, either for the actors or for the audience members?

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!

From the road: conversations about intrinsic impact, part 1

For the past couple of weeks, I've gotten to travel to five of the six cities that are taking part in our big intrinsic impact study, and it's been a truly fascinating process. As a part of this work, we are sitting down with the artistic, marketing and management staff of each of the participating theaters for two hours to talk through the survey protocol and, more generally, to talk about where research, and specifically research about audience feedback, falls into the artistic selection process. Boy, do responses vary.

In some cases, the staff seem to have a healthy conversation going with their audiences, creating what researcher Alan Brown, who is conducting the study via his firm WolfBrown, calls a "feedback loop." In other cases, the response seems muddy, and often indicates that the internal conversation about this question hasn't yet happened - or at least that a coherent consensus hasn't yet been reached. And then there are the companies that have a very clear view of things, and that view is that audience feedback sits nowhere near artistic selection.

I don't know that there is a right answer here, although coming at it from a marketing point of view I see some real downsides to not at least taking audience feedback, especially the type of "intrinsic effects" feedback we are talking about in this study, into account at all. After one of the meetings, Alan talked to me about how he is fascinated by those maverick artistic directors who don't really engage in a conversation with their audiences, but manage to succeed (sometimes fabulously). Artists like that exist, and their existence is fantastic - they are able to build experiences that audiences don't even know they want. These people remind me of visual artists like Pollock, Picasso and Van Gogh, who created from their own vision, and who managed to tap into the public's vision over time.

What is hard for me is that it seems clear that for every Van Gogh, there are thousands of artists out there who don't quite hit the zeitgeist, but think they will. When you loop it back to theatre, these are the leaders of theatre companies who think they are thisclose to being visionaries, to creating monumental work, but are in fact creating a bunch of insulated work that isn't really connecting. Maybe these artists are aware of this problem but don't feel that changing is a valid way forward. Or (more likely, I think) maybe these artists don't actually know whether or not their work is affecting in the ways they want it to be.

Ultimately, of course, the work becomes unsustainable if no one will pay to see it. But what if incorporating just a little hat tip to the audience's emotional, intellectual and social connection - seeing how, as we will be able to do with this intrinsic impact study, the audience's experience matches up against the goals of what theatre companies want them to experience - could shift that trajectory and make that many more successful pieces, that many more affecting experiences?

I'm interested in hearing how the conversation evolves over the year, and discovering who uses this information and how. We are prepared for some companies to simply set these results on a shelf and never look at them, though we hope that won't be the case. But even if in the end the leaders of a company decide that this type of work isn't their cup of tea, hopefully they'll figure out why they are resistant, and what the perceived threat is, and how real it is. That's a conversation, and in this case, that's success.

A summary of Audience 2.0, the new report on tech and the arts from the NEA

Last week, the NEA came out with Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation, a 150-page report discussing, as you might expect, the effect of technology on different types of artsgoing. The report uses data from the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), and is dense, fascinating and prescient—and as NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman notes, “In the arts, we are deeply invested in the…necessity of the live experience. Technology is often seen as our nemesis.”

Right off the bat, the report lays out its main finding, which is that “people who engage with art through media technologies attend live performances or arts exhibits at two to three times the rate of non-media arts participants.” This finding is repeated over and over in various contexts in the report, and the data seems to at least show a correlation between the use of technology to appreciate art and the frequency of attendance at live arts/exhibitions. What seems unclear to me is how much that can be attributed to technological assistance leading to more tech-based arts experiences and in turn more live arts experiences, and how much it’s simply that people who like art like art of all kinds, more and more often, than those who don’t.

Of note is that, according to this report, arts participation through media does not seem to replace live arts participation, personal arts creation or performance. In fact, the report points out, arts engagement through media is correlated with higher rates of participation in those activities. This again leads me to question whether this just means people who like theatre in real life are more likely to track down that YouTube performance of Patty Lupone, but the report suggests that that relationship needs much further prodding to fully understand it.

As Audience 2.0 goes on to note, “It’s is unclear…whether participating in the arts through electronic media directly leads to live attendance at arts events. Other possibilities are…live attendance leads to arts participation through electronic media or arts participation through electronic media and arts participating through other means reinforce each other.” Indeed.

Despite the inability to actually definitively link non-live attendance causally to more live attendance, which is going to involve some much more in-depth research, this report’s a good read, and it is interesting to see the NEA palpably trying to dispel the fears associated with the internet and other media for arts organizations of all stripes—something which is obviously particularly evident for theatre companies, artists and unions.

Here are some of the report’s more fascinating findings about what percentage of people that have participated in a performance through electronic or digital media:

• 21% of US adults say they’ve used the internet to view/download an arts performance
  8% and 7% of US adults say they’ve watched a musical or play, respectively, through electronic or digital media (fascinating given that only about 16% and 9.5% of the entire adult American population attends musicals and plays in a given year)


• 22% of US adults participated in both media and live performances—more on what doing both may do to frequency of attendance later


• A full 50% of the entire American adult population seems to take part in no art of any sort—media-based or not—a problem particularly prominent for Hispanics and African Americans, in which populations 61% and 59% respectively “neither attended live events nor used media to engage in arts activities.”

The report also adds nuance to one of the most startling findings from the 2008 SPPA: according to the 2008 SPPA, “In 2008, 67 percent of people with graduate degrees attended at least one benchmark activity, compared with only 38 percent of people with some college education and 19 percent of people with only a high school diploma.”

Audience 2.0 overlays the media aspect and finds something sort of startling—while that same negative correlation between education and attendance exists if you’re looking at people who both attend live and media-based arts experiences, if you look at people who only experience art through non-live media, the correlation actually flips, and people with less education and lower income tended to show higher rates of viewing/listening to art than those with higher incomes/education levels. While the obvious answer here is simply that if you’ve got the education and income, you probably can afford to attend live events in the way others can’t, and so you do, it’s still interesting to note that media accessibility means that art of all forms is now flowing more directly out to many of the constituencies our live events simply can’t touch.

Given this info, it’s probably not surprising that, when you zoom in particularly on theatre, specifically (surprisingly enough) straight plays, non-whites “attend” (watch/listen to on media) non-live theatre performances at a higher rate than they attend live theatre events, and in fact match fairly closely to the overall population of the country. Take a look:



Note particularly the drastic jump in Hispanics and African Americans who say they have experienced a straight play via non-live media (13.5% and 14.7%) versus those who say they've experienced a straight play live (6.1% and 6.6%). Also worth noting, almost twice as many African Americans have experienced a musical via non-live media than have seen one live (10.2% versus 5.8%).

So what does this mean? The takeaway for me, which isn’t new, but is perhaps now more urgent, is that there is a percentage of the population who wants theatre, but is currently only getting it, in whatever limited way, through non-live media. That percentage of the population is mostly non-white, mostly less affluent, and mostly more rural (another finding of the study), and it seems to me that this report serves as a call-to-arms of sorts to get it in gear and figure out how to translate our place-based medium into something that can function as powerfully and impactfully online.

To read the full report, visit Theatre Bay Area’s DataPoint Research page.

The Responsibility of Art Is Not Just External

Reading Michael Feingold's latest essay in Village Voice reminded me of the ongoing conversation prompted by Clay Lord's post on whether art needs to justify itself.

Actually, Feingold's essay is slightly askew of Clay's topic, but some comments to Clay's post talked about how some artists and shows don't seem to consider the audience. Feingold's essay swings the conversation to the other extreme: what happens when "art" listens to its audience too much.

Consider this quote, but I encourage you to read Feingold's entire essay before responding:

"The big question is what our theater can do in the face of such intense mass-market pressure. Corporations run the world; we can't pretend they don't. Through the mass media, they also run the popular mind, to the ongoing consternation of individualists like you and me. Ours is a small, embattled group, with few allies, and it, too, feels mass-marketing's tug: As Facebook has taught me, a disheartening number of theater folk share the tourist audience's preoccupation with mass culture, to the point where I sometimes feel like the hero of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, watching his friends turn into stampeding animals."

The Responsibility of Art Is Not Just Internal

When I was sitting at the Dynamic Adaptability conference a couple months ago, at one point an artist got on stage ostensibly as part of a panel on how to raise money for individual projects. He led a rousing 10-minute example of how to engage an audience to donate money to a hypothetical project and encouraged audience members to shout out questions about the project, things like “what is your budget,” “what is the format of the event,” and some variation of “what is the point off this event.” And it’s this last one that caught me, because in response, without hesitation, and to the great joy of the many artists in the audience, the speaker said, “Art does not need a reason to exist; art does not need to be justified.”

As an advocate for the arts, and as a person with a mind for marketing, I find this line of argument both reductive and damaging. Of course art needs to justify its existence, just like any other potential investment opportunity – to claim otherwise is simply to say to claim that art sits above all other aspects of the world. To argue that the simple existence of a piece makes the world a better place, regardless of the quality, message, aesthetic and form of that piece is the same as saying that the mushroom scrubber is in fact a useful invention simply for the fact that it exists. And ultimately, I think such an attitude, of choosing to say “if you don’t get it, too bad” as opposed to trying to puzzle out the intricacies of translating the vocabulary of an artist to that of a lay person, is at the heart of a lot of the perceived irrelevancy and marginalization of the field in the larger population.

I get extremely agitated when I hear a person in one sentence say that they make art from a personal place and feel no need to understand how it engages or doesn’t engage with the community, and in the next sentence say that they want to (or, often, “deserve”) to make a living doing just that.

When it comes down to it, I feel that there are certain people, the greatest artists of all time, for whom such an attitude might be true (although, to point it out, many of those artists did not in fact make a living off of their work during that time, and were instead only celebrated later). And I don’t claim to be able to judge which of the many thousands of individual artists in the city are the ones most likely to be the next great, society-touching savant. But I know, for me, that I love being an artist – taking photographs, designing quilts, writing short stories, painting, drawing, doing theatre – and I don’t especially feel a need to create that work with the world at large in mind. The difference, I think, is that I also don’t have any expectations that a room full of people will throw money from the balconies at me simply because I tell them to, nor that were I in that position, I would not have to answer that person in the third row who shouts out, “Why does this deserve to exist?”

Taking Intrinsic Impact to the Next Level

This morning, in You've Cott Mail (which if you aren't subscribed to, you should be!), Thomas Cott highlighted an article from the Guardian UK about some work being done there on measuring the emotional response of audiences to theatre. What was so interesting about the article is that it mirrors some major research we’re about to launch here at Theatre Bay Area and in six cities across the US.

The article is a summary of a new effort in the UK to measure the emotional response of audiences to art. Working with WolfBrown, the research firm that piloted a lot of this intrinsic impact research (as it’s called), we’ll be building a similar survey and doing follow-up research with 25 theatre companies in six cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, New York, and Charleston). Throughout the 2010/2011 season, we, with arts service organization partners in each city (LA Stage Alliance, Theatre Puget Sound, ART/New York, League of Chicago Theatres, League of Charleston Theatres), will be working with the theatre companies to set intrinsic impact goals for three productions in a season, measure the effect of each of those productions using the survey, and then generate a final report for each company and work through, with the artistic, administrative and marketing staff, the implications of the research and how it matches (or doesn’t match) the company's hoped-for goals.

In addition, as part of this work, we’ll be developing a web-based interface that we hope will eventually allow any theatre across the country access to an affordable, fee-for-service program in intrinsic impact. Companies will be able to produce the survey themselves, learn how to set goals for the various axes of intrinsic impact, and then log the results themselves and see how they stack up. They’ll be able to develop a portfolio of their impact on their audiences, with a lot of possible implications as more companies participate. Over time, by making this an affordable service [which it currently decidedly is not – this research project, with projected generous funding from three national foundations and assorted local foundations (more news on that once the contracts are signed), will have a total budget upwards of $400,000], we hope to provide companies with a new way of measuring the effectiveness of their work on audiences. In addition, we hope these measurements eventually will become an alternative way of demonstrating worth to funders, audiences and trustees.

Our work will begin over the summer as staff from Theatre Bay Area and WolfBrown begin traveling to the partner cities, identifying theatre companies with the partner ASOs, and beginning the induction process. We’re incredibly excited about this new work – especially now that we see that there’s a parallel effort going on in the UK. We expect to be able to report out on this, at least preliminary results, in time for our Annual Conference next spring, and plan on doing final reporting on the project at TCG and NAMP in 2011.

P.S. As some of you know, we did a pilot of this project a few years ago around Free Night. The results of that pilot are available here. It’s the report called "Assessing the Intrinsic Impact of the Bay Area Free Night of Theater Program."

Start Making Art

Today's "You've Cott Mail" included an item from David Byrne's (Talking Heads) blog that should twist operas,' symphonies' and museums' panties in a bunch. In response to the LA Opera's staggering $32 million price tag for The Ring Cycle, and its $14 million bailout from the county (according to his post), Byrne suggests that state funding for opera, symphonies and museums should cease, or at least be drastically curtailed, in favor of arts education.

Sacrilege!

The part that Cott distributed was certainly controversial, but Byrne's post is actually about much more than that. It's about making the arts accessible. That is, it's about making arts-making accessible, rather than throwing money after "dead guys." Now, when I read Cott's outtake, I was at first annoyed at what seemed to be yet another example of either/or. Either we fund large institutions or we fund arts education. Either/or arguments really annoy me--maybe I'm an idealist, but I tend to reject these--what do you call them?--false dichotomies?

So I'm glad I went back to read the whole post. I would excerpted a later paragraph, specifically this one:

"I sense that in the long run there is a greater value for humanity in empowering folks to make and create than there is in teaching them the canon, the great works and the masterpieces. In my opinion, it’s more important that someone learn to make music, to draw, photograph, write or create in any form than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol or Bill Shakespeare — to say nothing of opry. In the long term it doesn’t matter if students become writers, artists or musicians — though a few might. It's more important that they are able to understand the process of creation, experimentation and discovery — which can then be applied to anything they do, as those processes, deep down, are all similar. It’s an investment in fluorescence."

Theatre Bay Area has always--naturally--supported theatremaking. But we've also been following the trend--which has mostly been in the realm of audience development--of artmaking. That is, to get your audiences more engaged, they need to be part of the theatremaking process.

And now more than ever, people seem to be engaged in some mode of creation. Technology has helped: blogs, the relative cheapness of video equipment and editing software, etc. We have a huge DIY movement, and that's got to spill over into artmaking, which has got to spill over into the classroom--that's my hope, at least.

I can certainly see how teenagers, for example, could get a better grasp on Shakespeare and other "dead guys" but engaging in theatremaking to begin with. After all, Shakespeare didn't write for libraries and classrooms, he wrote for the stage.

No, really, we must start thinking about diversity!

I feel like I've been going on forever about how white populations are precipitously heading toward the minority in the Bay Area, since I saw this presentation from the San Francisco Foundation that said, well, that white populations would in fact be the minority in all five Bay Area counties SFF serves by 2050. In fact, there will be no majority population much more quickly than that, and certain counties like Contra Costa and Alameda will reach a Hispanic majority within the next 20 years.

And now here's this New York Times story by Sam Roberts that essentially outlines the same projections for the entire country, per the U.S. Census Bureau. Depending on whether immigration continues at the same level as it has been or continues at a slower pace (those are really the two options), whites will be in the minority nationally between 2040 and 2050.

Why is this important? It is faulty logic to think that an arts infrastructure that creates work for and relies primarily on the attendance of white audiences will be able to sustain itself when projections are showing 20-30 percent drops in white population in the next 40 years. And right now, no one seems to care. Recently, we did a study of how our 100 Free Night of Theater companies are approaching non-white audiences. Here are some bullet points from the study, which is still being processed:

• 39% of companies claimed no African-American or Asian-American audience share. Almost half (44%) claimed no Hispanic audience share. For comparison, the SFF study puts the current ethnic distributions for those three communities as 8% African-American, 23% Asian-American, and 22% Hispanic in the 5 Bay Area counties.


• Of those that claimed some non-white audience share, the average claim was 7% for African-American and Hispanic, and 12% for Asian-American.


• 85% of companies were producing shows that they self-reported as not particularly resonating with non-white audiences of any ethnicity.


• 88% of companies were planning no particular outreach to non-white populations.

I find these numbers incredibly frustrating. I know it's hard, and I know there's a lot of nuance in the conversation. And I know it's such a hard conversation to have with companies, especially because there are few stories of organizations who have (1) had the impetus to become more inclusive and (2) succeeded. But this isn't a thought exercise anymore.

Mission Paradox, in a post spawned from discussions on Arena Stage's diversity conference (read more at their New Play Development Program blog), argues that companies all fall into one of the following groups, and then suggests a path forward:

1. The Sincere Effort Group - They have the support, the money and the time. At most these groups will need help and guidance on the strategy side of the ledger. They want to diversify, but they may not be sure how, or confident in their ability to do so. This group deserves all the help, encouragement and guidance they can get.

2. The Scared - These people have some sort of fear barrier stopping them from diversifying. Fear of losing audience. Fear of losing money. Whatever. This group should be supported and encouraged . . . to a point. Some organizations spend their entire life cycle scared, that's just how it goes.

3. The "Other Priority" Group - These organizations have decided, for whatever reasons, that other initiatives are more important then a diversity effort. I think we, as an industry, should respect the decision this group makes. Maybe it's a bad decision. Hell, it is probably a bad decision. But groups have the right to make bad decisions.

4. The "No Desire" Group - This group has no desire to diversify. Who really cares why they feel that way? The only thing that matters is that they made that choice.
Again, that's a perfectly acceptable decision to make.

I think our job as a field is to look at each organization and figure out which "diversity category" they fit in.

Then we deal with them accordingly.

Our job is not to move people from one category to another. That's a choice only they can make. Embrace the ones that want change. Support the ones that need help. Wish the rest of them the best of luck and send them on their merry way.

It's a hard line, but honestly if we're talking about a crisis of relevance (and when aren't we talking about a crisis of relevance?) then diversity has to be part of the conversation.

What group do you belong to?

Building Cultural Participation From Sea to Shining Sea

Over the past two days, I’ve had the incredible good fortune to be part of a small group invited to convene as part of the Project Audience program in Chicago. (To my Chicago friends and family, I’m sorry I didn’t see you – we were sequestered and didn’t breathe outside air for the entire time. Sorry….) Project Audience, funded by the Mellon Foundation, has been going on for just over a year now, with virtual monthly convenings for the last six or so months. I was one of 28 participants in that community to be invited to attend this in-person convening, and I’ve got to say I feel truly fortunate to have been chosen (especially having now come out the other end of it with positive action in sight).

This program is a unique collaboration between the Mellon Foundation’s arts program and another funded program there called Research in Information Technology. This is the first collaboration of those two programs since RIT was founded in 2000. Project Audience’s goal is to facilitate a community of practice (that is to say, a community of action, not philosophizing) to tackle the continuous and problematic lag between the audience development needs of the arts community and our late-adopter stance on new technologies. The participants span the globe, from New Zealand to England, with many of the arts services organizations and certain consultants, individual organizations and other interested parties in the US also in the mix. The goal is to, through this community of practice, develop a community-source (i.e., open source) tool or tools with an eye toward revolutionizing the way we as arts and culture organizations develop and maintain our audiences. And incidentally, the goal is to only do it once, nationally, collectively--a substantial shift from the current de facto model in which organizations in different communities huddle in their garages with their heads down creating new solutions without checking about to see if others are also working on that problem.

There’s some irony in the fact that convening a national group to tackle a complex problem once instead of many separate times is so revolutionary, but there you go.

It turns out that these RIT processes actually encompass three distinct phases, each of which is contingent on successfully finishing the prior one (and submitting a new grant application demonstrating your success). This convening culminated phase 1 of the project, which essentially is the phase during which the needs/goals/fears of the community at large are hashed out and the very slight skeleton of a next step is collaboratively created. It’s been a daunting, at times frustrating, but ultimately rewarding time.

Having come to Chicago with a limited and hazy understanding of this project (a haziness that it turns out was shared by many of the others there at the beginning), I had doubts about the ability of organizations from Theatre Bay Area to Culturebot.org to CTG to Seattle Opera to the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission etc. to come to a consensus on anything of such scope, especially given that we arrived to what was essentially a blank canvas knowing neither the scope, nor the intended targets, nor the timeline. Over the last two days, much of that has crystallized, and that which hasn’t has been consciously shelved until later.

As an introduction to the convening, Diane Ragsdale of the Mellon Foundation admonished us to think beyond selling tickets and look at using art to create long-term, sustainable connections and conversations between people and people, people and art, people and institutions, and institutions and institutions. Through Project Audience, which currently has over 180 members providing their voices through the online forums, discussion strings and conference calls, we will actually develop (not just talk about developing) new cutting-edge technologies (still undefined) to break down the barriers between ticket streams, customer relations, community building, conversation and arts making. It will be available at a low cost and will be owned by the community, and it will be open to augmentation by anyone who has the expertise and inclination to try.

Project Audience is meant to raise the bar--increasing audience involvement, attendance and ownership of art and culture on a community by community basis. The involvement of Mellon, particularly through the RIT program, is exciting because, thus far, in the nine years the program has existed, it has shepherded 50 projects to fruition, and all are still functional (two-thirds independently, having finished their funding cycle with the foundation). All this to say, and rather excitingly, that this will happen. Anyone is eligible to participate in the forums and public interactions of Project Audience, though that schedule is now up in the air as we transition into Phase 2: the development of a community design process and workshop to actually tackle the logistics of this project’s creation. At each transition (from Phase 1 to 2 to 3), the leadership on the project changes, so Alliance for Audience and ArtsFund, which shepherded Phase 1, are stepping aside and a nine-member volunteer committee (of which I am one) is currently figuring out how to assign organizations to take their place. We will, in the next week or so, be creating materials to select a steering committee which will submit the grant to fund Phase 2 and will oversee its successful completion during 2010.

To learn more about Project Audience, I encourage you to visit www.projectaudience.org. I’ll be writing more about the learnings from this past convening in the next few weeks, and in the meantime you can register to take part in our Tangler online discussions. There are many voices on the conversation already, but the goal of this project is to be pan-arts, pan-geographic, pan-size, pan-budget model, pan-experience in scope, so everyone is invited to take part. This new technology, after all, in whatever form it finally takes, will be created for, and rely on the buy-in from, large swaths of the arts industry. I’m proud to have been involved, and hope (and expect) that Theatre Bay area’s participation will continue.

The Best Theatre of the Year? Not Really, But Still Worth Your While.

New York Magazine is fueling the fire behind the Minnesota Wedding Video recently featured on The Today Show. David Kois calls it the "best theater he's seen all year." Sure, the video is heartwarming. It's always good to see people having fun on what should be one of the best days of their lives. But is it the "best theater of the year"? It's great, but it is no longer theatre.

On this blog, we have been discussing how theatre relies on the possibility of interactivity (see Rebecca Novick's post from June), and the debate we've been having about the behavioral mores of the theatre is a moot point when you can watch this video sitting at home in your underwear. Clay pointed out that movies and theatre are vastly different media. I think that's apparent here. What makes theatre theatre is that it's live. You don't watch the video recording of Cats and say that it was the best (or worst) theatre; you need to qualify it with "recording of theatre," or "filmed theatre," or even just plain "movie."

Yes, this may have been "theatre" for those who attended this Minnesota wedding. It was fun, tried for a spontaneous look, and got people excited. That's theatre at its best, of course. But it has now passed into a new medium. To the more than 16 million who have seen this video so far, this ain't theatre, it's film, it's documentary. Those 16 million people are watching it at a remove, on the same website that brings us Salad Fingers and Charlie the Unicorn. They are at a remove of time, space and distance, watching something that happened in the past, like a memory. That makes this cinema.

Furthermore, it is the fact that this happened at a real-life wedding -- not one created merely for your personal viewing enjoyment--that makes this so endearing on video. We are in the reality television age, where fiction doesn't cut it, and where joke videos on YouTube are the new topics of water cooler conversation. The difference for this video is that, among all the scripted phoniness of reality television and the insincerity of those joke videos, this refreshing, genuine, sincere bit of cinema. It is surprising and quirky--but on a stage it simply wouldn't be. I think that if we saw this type of a choreographed routine in a wedding on a stage, it would quickly become something cheesy that belongs in a Disney musical. On a proper stage, this would lose all its charm. With a script, a plot, and outside of a real church during a real ceremony, it becomes ridiculous.

So is this theatre? No, not anymore. Not to David Kois, who did not attend this wedding. This is cinema at its best--real, heartfelt, and entirely secondhand viewing.

And theatre is firsthand. It's right there next to you, making you wan to get up and join in. So the people who were at the Minnesota wedding where this took place should feel very lucky. They got the theatrical experience. All we 16 million got was a record of it. Still great, but definitely not the same. So go check it out, if not to restore your faith in the theatre then to restore your faith in vitality and humanity.

Do you think it's theatre? Or are you into semantics like me and think this is an altogether different experience? What makes theatre to you? Let us know in the comments section.

So, Theatre's in Trouble, Eh?

Victoria Nguyen has a fairly substantial article in this week's San Francisco Bay Guardian (on newsstands now!) on the state of the theatre community in the Bay Area, specifically looking at small and midsize companies. It's interesting to see the article in finished form, as Victoria has spoken to me and other Theatre Bay Area staff at least three times in the process of writing it. Verdict? It's about what I thought it was going to be.

I've got to say, the picture she paints is not necessarily pretty, and I sort of knew that was coming. In our discussions, Victoria particularly requested that she be pointed towards companies "struggling to stay afloat" and employees "suffering from 'burnout'." While I took some time to let her know that hunting out those stories doesn't make them the standard for the community right now, she seems to have continued on that path and written an article that paints a bleaker picture than I think is really representative of the current situation.

This is not to say that her article is inaccurate--as our Pulse Survey (which she references in the article) shows, things are not all sunshine and lollipops for companies right now, and it's a little unclear whether companies are reacting as proactively and forcefully as they might. And she highlights some great realities in the field right now, like a potential over-reliance on ticket income and a potential dearth of large-cast plays because of the financial realities of mounting them. I can nitpick that she claims that companies of all sizes are seeing reductions in ticketing income and individual donations, which doesn't actually seem to be true across the board (see this mention on PianoFight's blog and this article about DC's Arena Stage, for example). Anecdotally, two of the companies mentioned in the article (Impact and City Lights) have both told me that someof their shows have actually seen larger audiences than predicted, in some cases record-setting numbers.

Ultimately, while I'm a little sad that the positive stuff (the increased cooperation within the community, the new innovations occurring every day across size and scope, the new spaces being created by Z Space, Intersection and others) didn't make it in except insofar as it was mentioned as a direct effort to stay afloat, I am absolutely thrilled that the Bay Guardian spent five pictures (including the front page) and two pages talking about some of our best and brightest small companies.

And there is one bit of wisdom that is always good to remember. In the last paragraph, Victoria quotes Z Space AD Lisa Steindler saying, "We're artists--we're a smart group of people. We've just tightened, tightened, tightened. And who knows? Maybe we just caught it in time."

Here's hoping.

In other news (and running counter to my relative optimism), the Magic officially announced today that they're exiting stage right (okay, actually exiting the stage on the right as you go up the stairs to their venue in Fort Mason). They're dropping out of the Sam Shepard Theatre at Fort Mason and keeping only the thrust. The space is available for rent through Fort Mason, if you're interested.

Photo: Anne Galjour in Z Space Studio's upcoming production of You Can't Get There From Here. Photo by Clayton Lord (hey that's me!) Find out more.

Smackdown: Audiences Vs. Donors! (Maybe)

A report out a couple days ago from Barclay’s Bank, reported on in the Daily Telegraph and brought to my attention by You’ve Cott Mail (click on “You’ve Cott Mail” in the left menu) presents an interesting picture of what’s happening with high-end individual donors across fields. And as they say, there’s good news and there’s bad news. Click here to download the whole White Paper (PDF).

Essentially, Barclay’s surveyed 500 wealthy donors and found that 75 percent of them have not reduced their charitable giving in the past 18 months--and that more than 25 percent have actually increased their charitable giving during that time. Per the Daily Telegraph:

“Now that governments are overburdened with debt, the rich felt it more important than ever that wealthy individuals did their bit for charity, the report said. When asked where they would make cuts if the downturn continued, respondents said they would be more likely to stint on luxury goods, holidays and eating out than curb their donations to charity.”

Good news, right? Well, maybe.

The bad news is that Barclay’s also reports that “traditional recipients of charitable donations”--the arts and religious organizations--are falling out of favor with these same donors in favor of more concrete causes like health care, children and environmental causes. In the words of the report, “This trend [will] accelerate over the next decade if the causes in question [Hey that’s us!] [fail] to engage in a meaningful way with the next generation of givers.”

Suddenly, the question of relevance is no longer an esoteric debate (if it ever was)--but now it has to be argued from both the audience development side and the donor cultivation side. Recently, this blog has had items (and very insightful comments) about what relevance actually means, specifically centered around the ability to develop new audiences. That discussion has primarily been fueled by representatives from smaller, more innovative companies who are reacting against exactly the comforting long-term sameness that I would argue most major donors (yes, a grand generalization) are drawn to. And many of their arguments, I think, are going to be hard to scale up to the larger companies, many of whom, as it happens, are the cultivators of more major donors. This is not to say that the “next generation of givers” that Barclay’s references will also be drawn to the traditions that are wrapped up in theatre, but I do think news like this begs the question: How do we both engage new audiences (new segments, people who are not looking for your same old presentational theatre experience) while also revitalizing the high-end donor base that (at least in large and some midsize companies) is supposedly the steadiest source of income over the long term?

Trends during this downturn locally (via the Pulse survey and anecdote) seem to indicate that loyal donors are indeed staying loyal, at least at a higher rate than foundations, corporations and non-donor attendees. I hope that continues. But that gets me to a quandary (which I realize is at least partially based in a stereotype of who those backbone donors are and what they enjoy): how can we innovate our way as a field into the hearts and minds of a new audience (more diverse, plucked from more distractions, used to on-demand everything and less appreciative of presentational cultural modes) while also continuing to court those staider, more traditional and, yes, more loyal would-be donors? Especially when competing (a sad word in this context) with things like poverty, heart disease, cancer, global warming, AIDS, etc.?

Theatre, Relevance and Hush Puppies

The back-and-forth between PianoFight head Carl Benson and me continues, having migrated from Chloe Veltman’s lies like truth over to the PianoFight blog. And now it’s getting interesting--we’ve essentially set aside Free Night of Theater (which was how the whole thing started: I think Free Night works, Carl doesn’t, and never the twain shall meet) and have moved onto ground where we more or less agree about the problem, if not the solution.

Our discussion now (as you’ll see, if you take a look at the initial post at PianoFight and then the subsequent comments) centers around what is driving down theatre attendance--essentially, what is precluding people from considering theatre to be a good way to spend their free time. In my mind, the issue is actually a series of smaller issues on a continuum, namely:

- People don’t get exposed to theatre in formative years
- They develop methods of interacting with other media (TV, music, even visual arts, to some degree), but don’t learn the (rather complex, if you think about it) mores of being a (even passively) participatory audience member at a theatre event
- When presented with an option to attend a show, they not only feel disconnected from the need for live performance, they feel at least somewhat worried/nervous about fitting in and/or acting correctly
- This feeling, coupled with the cost of attendance and what the WolfBrown intrinsic impact study is showing to be a significant lack of social networks interested in attending live performance, keeps people out of our doors--even though there’s a good chance they’d both fit in fine and enjoy the performance once they were there
- Rinse and repeat.

“This is absurd,” you might say. “Who doesn’t know how to behave in a theatre? It’s just like watching a movie.”

But it’s not, not really. People don’t dress up (not even a little) for a movie. They don’t mill in the lobby beforehand. They don’t pay an average ticket price of $35 for a ticket (which raises expectations of what’s going to be offered). There are no people that breathe on stage, and say the words, and change things up and forget lines and sweat and spit and move about. Movies are voyeurism at much more of a remove than anything theatre has to offer.

I remember seeing a production of Edward Albee’s The Play About the Baby at the Studio Theatre in Washington, DC (photo of that production at left) when I was in college. It was a school assignment, and I was there with the 15 or so students from my class and my hippie-dippie teacher. This is a space with maybe 100 seats, surrounding a thrust, and here suddenly are these two nubile, prancing, very naked 20-somethings with all the bits and pieces out on display--and here’s a man nursing on a girl’s bare breast, and yes, here’s some witty Albee-esque repartee, but who can remember that.

Of course, it’s not just nudity. Helen Mirren in The Queen was great, fantastic, all the accolades you can think of--but look at the words they’re using for her current turn as Phedre at the National in London. I can just imagine the energy, the crisp static energy that must be running through the theatre there--it’s something that is absolutely irreplicable anywhere except live on stage. And I would bet for someone who didn’t have much experience, it would be both electrifying and off-putting all at once.

More mundane differences--there’s no intermission in a movie (unless it’s Gone With the Wind, and jeez-oh was I glad about that). What’s the appropriate thing to do there? Do you sit? Do you go out and mill? Are you allowed to talk about what you’ve seen--should you judge it in progress, or are you expected to wait? When can you clap mid-show? What level of verbal reaction is appropriate, and when do you need to muffle? What if you really like something, but you’re the only one who gives it a standing ovation at the end? Is everyone just sitting there judging you? And why, oh why is everyone sitting around me so damn old? And after, what if you hated it, and everyone else is ecstatic? What if, as I’ve heard more than once, you “just didn’t get it?” Do you talk about it with your friend, or do you keep it quietly to yourself?

What is the acceptable reaction/interaction/action after, for example, seeing a man die on stage in At Home at the Zoo? What is the acceptable reaction to watching a dying woman give up and walk into the light in Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer-winning Wit?

Carl, in his latest comment, makes a great statement, with which I agree, but to which I must add a caveat. First the statement: “Theatre has got to take at least some of the blame for this drop in attendance, awareness and relevance. If we do not collectively take a long, hard look at our art and our business, Free Night of Theater won’t save us, it’ll just prolong the death spiral.”

I think there are theatres that are already working to address these issues--theatres, actually, like PianoFight, where, in Carl’s words, the audiences are “loud, raucous, and quite frequently (though not always) inebriated.” Not that drinking’s the way out of this particular hole, necessarily, but the sentiment is there: break all the boundaries, examine everything, and see what’s left. This, however, is the realm, mostly, of small companies, who are flexible and nimble enough to sample the latest Hot New Thing. Sure, ACT can allow drinks in the theatre, but it traffics in opulence and, somewhat, in familiarity. If you take the dress-up out of the affair, it loses something irretrievable and essentially valuable to that particular type of theatre. And even Berkeley Rep, the new-play-presenting brother company across the Bay, may do new organic work drawn from the community. They may even commission the stage version of American Idiot, complete with punk-rock craziness and the director that brought Duncan Sheik to a stage near you. But I promise you it’ll be a different (not quantifiably better or worse, necessarily, but different) experience from the inebriated experiences of PianoFight.

A study by Theatre Development Fund in New York (runner of the TKTS booth, but also a substantial research engine for arts nonprofits) recently noted that while theatre attendance is on the decline, overall audiences are actually more likely than ever to pay the exorbitant price of a Broadway ticket--once or twice a year. It’s a special event, often done at the same time every year, wrapped in amidst splurges like a nice dinner and a dress-up date. It is theatre as an event, and I think that’s fabulous. The downside, however, is that theatre as an event is special in the same way that the hush puppies I experience when I visit my parents in North Carolina are special: delicious, decadent and available for a very limited time. If I had hush puppies every day, well…you get the idea.

Where Carl wants to get to, I think, and it’s a noble place to be searching for, is a place where some portion of the theatregoing audience is going for a more, dare I say, minor experience--a little after-work way to blow off steam, less a full entrée, more an amuse bouche. There are only so many momentous events one needs in a day, a week, a year. Carl talks about how Shakespearean plays were originally done before rowdy restless groundlings.

I should also say, unequivocally, that I don’t think theatre is in a death spiral. I just think it’s changing. The rumblings in the rising generation of leaders are all about relevance, pertinence, theatre for the people. The Neo-futurists, the Civilians, the Rude Mechanicals, the (now separated) Tectonic Theatre Project (and here in SF, individuals and groups like David Szlasa, Banana Bag and Bodice, foolsFury)--we’ve had companies playing with form, function and relevance for years. And now the presenters are starting to follow--gay nights, young nights, pre-talks, post-talks, in-show texting, drinking, audience-driven narrative, Twitter plays…phew. Theatre’s not going to die, it’s just not going to be how it was. And that’s okay.

How to Lose Your Audience in One Easy Step

A couple of months ago, I was in downtown Berkeley with my 2-year-old daughter Sophie and happened upon an outdoor dance performance that was part of National Dance Week. We sat down on the grass to watch, and Sophie was absolutely transfixed by what I realized was her first live performance experience. She couldn’t take her eyes off the dancers and gradually got up and began to imitate them. My husband and I, theatre folks from way back, were thrilled by her enthusiasm. I’m such an arts participation geek that I even leaned over to him and said, “This is how you build future audiences.”

As the dancing continued, Sophie began to stray a bit further into the performance space (keeping in mind that we’re talking about a lawn here, not a stage). Right away, someone from the group came over and very angrily told us to “control our kid.” And of course, as soon as I put her on my lap and told her she had to keep still, she lost interest and we had to leave.

Now, I’m not saying that my child should be allowed to run wild and trip the dancers. But this made me think hard about the way we set up the divide between the performers and the audience. Maybe this particular performance was endangered by a toddler dancing on the sidelines (more likely she was just in the videographer’s shot), but why set it up that way? Here was a performance that was free, outdoors and part of a program whose mission is to build new dance audiences. Why not come up with a performance that encouraged the audience to share the experience?

Watching through the eyes of a 2-year old you see very clearly that dance is something you do with your body. Why not capitalize on the impulse at the core of dance in the structure of the event instead of asking the audience to watch in a way that disengages them from why they got interested in the first place? As a parent, I’m always looking for ways to introduce Sophie to the joy and delight of making and experiencing art. That is, I’m looking for allies in my work of raising an arts lover. As a theatremaker, I haven’t always thought about my work in that light--I’ve generally just chosen the kind of plays I was interested in, and then put them on in the traditional way: on a stage, in the dark, mostly at night. But now, I really want to think carefully about how the work could have fewer rules and more pleasure, could be accessible to people of different ages, and could help expand our vision of what an arts experience looks like.