How to Get the 18-40 Crowd to Put Down the Controller and Go to Your Theatre

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

“How do you get so many young people into your theatre? How can we do that?”

I’ve been asked these questions over and over and over. And over. The real answer is: I’m not sure. All I can tell you is what we’ve done, how we’ve done it and what I think you can do to better your chances of attracting the 18-35 audience. Will it work for you? I don’t know. Did it work for us? Yes, indeed.

Bear in mind that you need to do all of these things, all at the same time. This isn’t a pick-and-choose situation.

1. Do the kinds of plays young people want to see.

I am astounded by the fact that some larger theatres seem to believe young people should *always* be willing to translate, and blame self-centeredness, lack of interest in culture, lack of education and general boorishness when the 18-40 crowd don’t turn out in droves for a production of Dinner with Friends or Love Letters. Yet these very same theatres won’t slot a new play by an emerging playwright for fear of their subscribers’ reactions. They expect young people to translate, and heap condemnation upon them when they don’t, but they see older audience members’ potential lack of interest as their due. (P.S. Believe me when I tell you that 65 is the new 35. Many older Bay Area theatergoers are more adventurous than you think. TRUST. Moving on.)

While it’s always a good thing to have an active interest in the stories of people not in your age group (or ethnic group, or regional group, or religious group, etc), everyone longs to see their own stories, hopes, dreams, fears, realities and fantasies reflected in honest ways. Young people are no different. The key phrase here is “in honest ways.” A play by an older playwright with roles for young actors may or may not speak honestly to your desired potential younger audience members. Some older writers write very well for younger characters. Many do not. Large numbers of young people are not going to spring for tickets to a show that portrays them as mindless, boorish assholes. Find plays that speak honestly about the lives of young people in some way.

But how do I do that, Melissa?

I’m so glad you asked.

There are over 400 theatre companies in the nine-county Bay Area. We do more world premiere plays than almost any other region in the country—last I checked we ranked third. Yet it’s very common that staff from theatres who purport to want young audiences don’t come to world premiere productions at small theatre companies. How many emerging playwrights have you read this year? If the number is under 10, you’re slacking. Impact Theatre, my company, has produced a world premiere by, and/or entirely introduced to the Bay Area, these playwrights: Sheila Callaghan, Steve Yockey, Prince Gomolvilas, Enrique Urueta, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Liz Meriwether, Lauren Yee, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Joshua Conkel, Trevor Allen, Jon Tracy. This is a partial list—I stuck to people you’ve probably heard of. Most importantly, we’re a tiny dog on a very, very big block. There are a wagonload of companies doing precisely what we do. Find them. See their shows. Spy on the playwrights they use. Companies like mine are your R&D department.

Find directors who can make classic plays relevant and interesting—because they are. There are directors all over the country who draw loads of younger audience members into theatres to see Shakespeare, and a bunch of them are directing at these aforementioned smaller theatres.

2. Be realistic about your pricing.

It’s always annoying to hear people say, “But they’ll spend $60 on a concert ticket! Why won’t they spend $60 on theatre?” It’s like wondering why someone would drive all the way across country to be with her beloved but not drive just as long in the hope that she will meet a hot stranger in a bar. People drop bucks on concert tickets because they already know and love the artist and have every expectation of seeing a great show and having a great experience. Condemning those people for refusing to drop a similar amount of money on a show they may know little about that will, let’s be honest, likely bore them because it’s aimed entirely at someone else, is a bit much, yes? If you’re going to condemn the under-40 crowd for not dropping $60 on your play about middle-class, middle-aged white people and their midlife crises, you should also condemn Grandma because she’s not stocking her DVD collection with $60 of Robot Chicken.

So keep your ticket prices accessible. Some companies do an under-30 rate, which, quite frankly, I’m not wild about. That 30-40 crowd is young enough to need enticing into your theatre but old enough to be on the brink of having enough money to become donors and subscribers. You want them. They’re routinely ignored and that’s not going to pay off in the long run for your audience building. Make an under-40 rate if you must. Make some performances pay-what-you-will. Make your less attractive seating areas $20 for the first few weekends. Whatever you need to do, do it.

3. Market to young people.

If you’re not active on Facebook and Twitter, you need to be right now. Learn how to use these powerful tools properly. This isn’t a social media marketing post, so I’ll assume you can figure out where to get this info and move on. The blog on your website is going nowhere unless you’re pushing it with Facebook and Twitter, by the way.

Find ways to make your outreach to young people honest and, most importantly, unpretentious. One of the main things keeping young people out of the theatre is that they’re afraid they won’t fit in—they’ll feel awkward and out of place. As my friend’s dad was fond of saying, they’re afraid they’ll “stand out like a sheep turd in a bowl of cream.” You want to make them as comfortable as possible. A big step towards that is to use your marketing to make them feel welcome. Not pretend welcome, as in, “We want to sell you tickets,” but truly welcome, like “Come over and play with us! We just got a new toy!”

Theatre is not medicine. We don’t go because it’s good for us. We go because we think it’ll be awesome. Make sure you’re approaching your marketing properly. “It’ll be awesome” + “You’re totally welcome and will be comfortable” + “We’re not stuffy and pretentious” will go a long way. Make sure you’re delivering those goods onsite as well. Nothing drives someone away from your company forever as efficiently as an undelivered promise.

And that’s pretty much it. This is what I believe has worked for us over the past 15 years. I hope it’s successful for you as well. We all need to work together to build audiences for our future as an artistic community. There’s not a single one of us that exists on an island. We’re all in this together.

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.

The New Play Sector Talked (and talked, and talked, and talked) in the Capital

This special guest blogpost from Playwrights Foundation Artistic Director Amy Mueller first appeared on Playwrights Foundation's Blogspot. Special thanks to Amy for letting us repost.



Recently, I represented Playwrights Foundation at the New Play Convening at Arena Stage’s new Mead Center for American Theater, hosted by the Bay Area’s own David Dower, founder of Z Space Studio, who is now Arena’s the Associate Artistic Director and architect of the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage. It was an incredibly full four days, with a powerfully eclectic range of people from very different aesthetic/geographic/gender/age/cultural/ethnic identities, representing producing theaters of all sizes from all over, individual playwrights, ensemble theater makers, presenters, festivals, and yes, new play development labs and organizations like Playwrights Foundation.

We did a lot of talking together, and a lot of listening. And those many conversations were a part of a national dialogue, all recorded, tweeted and livestreamed across the country. But all that listening and talking led us somewhere – somewhere that is intangible, and very hard to talk about succinctly. Nonetheless, the momentum of this event will, I believe, succeed in pushing the national agenda about the practices of developing and producing new work and the learning about ourselves and our (un)common work forward.

Not everyone who deserved to be in this circle got to be, and I feel a responsibility to keep writing about it, to share my experience and bring your thoughts and words into the dialogue. If you were in the third circle, on twitter or live stream video, or, if you weren’t, and you want to tell me your thoughts, please respond to my posts here or on Playwrights Foundation’s Blogspot.

It seems fitting that we met up in DC where our elected reps are right now fighting tooth and nail to keep the NEA from becoming irrelevant. The NEA (a relatively tiny agency) plays a critical role in upholding our nation’s value for the arts, and its meaning to “We, The People” in a Democracy. If you haven’t expressed your opinion about cutting the NEA yet, please take this opportunity to do so! I did it in 5 minutes yesterday, and yeah, I felt that glow of citizenship wash over me. No, really, it is extremely important for us to speak up! Do it NOW, and then finish reading this. Okay, so...

Online there is a rich debate raging about NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman’s controversial and frank discussion on the issue of supply and demand in the American theater. You can read lots of interesting commentary on these links Diane Ragsdale and Arena Stage Blog and NEA Blog and I suggest you do. These are some awesomely challenging times for us. It is dangerous, I think, to be dismissive of the firestorm of anti-intellectual, anti-culture backlash. To imagine that our relevancy to the majority is a shared value is myopic. But in the face of a real and present danger, losing faith is not an option. As cultural workers, as the planters and sowers of cultural seedlings, we are damn sure we are relevant but are challenged by issues of solvency.

One of my favorite quotes from the New Play Convening was from Diane Ragsdale, who herself was quoting a professor: “A model is the representation of your beliefs about causality.” Think about it. I don't know about you, but at PF, we are constantly questioning our beliefs about our outcomes, and by inference our models of development. We are constantly making, deconstructing and redesigning our 'model(s)' (for organizational structure, staff roles, governance, and programs for play and playwright advancement). I love the notion that at the heart of all those developing models is belief about impact, a belief about what we mean to cause and how.

So we new play makers are stuck here between blind, passionate belief and the requirement to quantify our impact. Believing in our work, believing it actually does make a difference, in so many ways, as we so claim, believing in art as a transformative experience of beauty, is absolutely essential to making the work – and yet, (and yet), we must become experts in making the case for its relevancy, and become savvy in the business of solvency.

For me, sitting together with colleagues, new and old friends, and talking about our shared passion and our shared responsibility for carrying this work forward, that is, making new theater possible, was exhilarating and inspirational. I did cry a few times, and laughed a lot. Mostly, I listened, actively, heartfully, thoughtfully. It turns out that listening was itself the springboard. And you can listen, too: it's all available at #newplaytv.

Here's to: carrying the flame of passion, the innocence of blind belief, and the wicked ass savvy of financial know-how.

- Amy Mueller
Artistic Director, Playwrights Foundation

Invitation to the Party

A while back, I was asked to be a panelist at a local event: SQUART (Spontaneous Queer Art), curated by local artist Laura Arrington and sponsored by The Lab. At the event, 40-some artists assembled at the venue and were split into four teams and given parameters for a performance. Two short hours later, each team performed a piece that they had developed collaboratively. After each team presentation, four panelists from the field commented on the work (check out the January issue of Theatre Bay Area for some more thoughts on that experience!). Scores were given based on agreed-upon parameters (and even some wild-card parameters: on my night, nudity got extra points). The highest scoring presentation won a small cash prize.

I was, in a word, amazed. Even though some of the performers didn't know each other, let alone know their teammates' respective skills, I was completely impressed with how well they handled being thrust into a collaborative performance. The ability they all demonstrated in being able to come together, absorb the given parameters and present a performance was remarkable to me.

Acting as an audience member in the performances was just as exciting as being a panelist. The festival actively engaged audience members in the performances by adding an "audience participation" component to the given parameters. Because of this component, an interesting dynamic arose. One of the performances began in a darkened room and delivered very stern, clear instructions about how we, the audience members, should watch and behave during the piece. The piece continued and no further instructions were given. The performance progressed to the point that if an audience member (like myself) continued to follow the initial instructions, he wouldn't be able to see or hear anything that was happening. The other panelists quickly abandoned the initial instructions and followed the mass of people in the middle of the room to see what was happening. I found myself with a choice: do I follow? Or should I trust that the initial instructions will offer a payoff that I might miss otherwise? I opted for the latter and was somewhat bitter that there was no payoff and that, from my vantage point, I missed 95% of the performance.

I don’t mean to criticize the artists involved. In fact, I was told from the people who did experience the full performance that it was actually quite extraordinary. But my experience does highlight an interesting question: In the fully-staged productions that we work on for weeks, or months, or years, how do we give our audiences an invitation to the party? Or do we invite them at all?

As an avid theatergoer, I am in tune with the protocol of attending theatre. But do patrons new to theatre know what traditional protocols tend to be? They might wonder: Why is texting or tweeting during a show such a hot button? Why can’t I get up and walk on the stage during the show? How quiet should I be during the performance? What if I have to go to the bathroom? In an age of shrinking arts education in schools, where people often miss any early exposure to theatre, these are real questions. Does an audience member’s uncertainty around doing something wrong generate a fear that keeps them away? Have they attended theatre before and felt burned by doing something others thought was inappropriate?

During my SQUART experience, I didn't feel like a theatre veteran. I felt as a person entirely new to theatre might feel. How often do our audience members feel like they are missing out on the full experience of being an "insider?" Do they feel "invited" to the experience? And if not, what are we doing to welcome them? This issue isn't simply about house manager announcements or usher rules or instructions. This is about the artistic choices that we make. What do you do to involve theatre "outsiders?"

Check out the next SQUART happening Sunday January 09, 2011 at SomARTS. Info available at www.lauraarringtondance.com

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.

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?

Is this theatre? Who gets to decide?

I'm in the midst right now of writing the third article in my series on community and theatre that's appearing in Theatre Bay Area magazine, following on the first two about physical spaces and neighborhoods (August) and diversity and demographics (September). This third piece is all about technology, and the new form of community that the web and other technologies has created in the world--a community that is increasingly popular for a wide swath of the population. And in particular it seems to be about where the boundaries of "theatre" really are.


So I was very interested to see this article that just appeared at nytimes.com, filed under the theatre section, about a communal bike ride with soundtrack. It sounds really cool, but it hit me in a particular way because it made me wonder: what is the essence of theatre, and when does something stop being theatre and move on to being something else? Is a group of avatars performing an original play in the virtual world World of Warcraft theatre? Is, as was recently written about in the Times, a show put on for an audience of one in which the audience member is pushed from one upsetting situation to another like a television station changing channels theatre? Is a bike ride with music theatre, if it's done by 50 people at once and is choreographed to use the city as the actor?

In my interviews for this piece so far, there's been a throughline, particularly with artists, that theatre can be so much more than it is without losing its specialness. I've heard people argue that there are, in fact, very few requirements for a piece of theatre: it doesn't need a specific space, it doesn't even really need actors, or a script, or even the realization that you're seeing theatre. And at the same time, there's an overtone of "theatre is, somehow, fundamentally different." It's not TV, it's not film. Finding that balance, especially as we start wandering into cyberspace not just to market but to make and present work, is difficult--and even more so when, as with Joyride, the show referenced in the nytimes.com piece, trappings of a digital world, gaming, music, synchronicity across personal universes, comes back into the physical space and challenges the traditional work being made today.

What do you think? What is theatre, what isn't? Who judges? Does it matter?

10 Lessons the Arts Teach

The National Art Education Association has created a top-10 list for why the arts matter -- and it's interesting to parse the arguments the document makes.

Of the 10 lessons:
- none is an economic argument
- 3 (#4, 6 and 7) are essentially about thinking critically
- 3 (#2, 3 and 9) are essentially about empathy
- 2 (#1 and 10) are essentially about the ability to make judgments
- 2 (#5 and 8) are about learning nonliteral concepts

This document is an incredibly valiant attempt to illustrate the intangible value of the arts, but in a lot of ways I'm afraid it wanders into the same traps that we often do. It traffics in generalities, highlighting words like "ABILITY," "VIVID," and "POETIC CAPACITIES" (yes, they really used all caps) instead of stripping back the language to talk about what's really at the core. The concepts underlying the items are solid--the arts teach children to address situations from multiple perspectives and therefore think critically, empathically and soundly--but relying on nonspecific flow-y language isn't going to get us there.

My English teacher in high school (the best, most ruthless editor I've ever had), always said that behind every frilly phrase is a void where a specific fact should be. Perhaps this is why first-person testimonials are so the rage right now, because they allow the simultaneous demonstration of the power of art on a specific and nonspecific level.

One of the goals of the intrinsic impact study we're working on is to try and standardize and make more concrete some of these giant concepts that get dressed up in adjectives and trotted about--so that we can walk into a room with a legislator who is trying to cut our budgets and say, yes, here, on this graph, is what our art is doing to the minds of young people. Here's proof that they're thinking in a way they've never thought before, here's proof that they're seeing the world from a perspective other than their own. In the meantime, swanky flyers like this one will get us some of the way down the road--I just hope that we're not shooting ourselves in the foot with miles to go.

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."

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?

Is This The Future of Ticketing for Small and Midsize Performing Arts Organizations?

Yesterday, I sat in on an all-day design workshop (in New York!) for a new product called AthenaTix, which is currently in development via the national service organization (formerly mostly know for its services to individuals) Fractured Atlas. The program, like Project Audience, which I wrote about earlier (and which I’ll be writing about again shortly), is funded in large part by the Mellon Foundation. AthenaTix, which is targeting to launch Version 1.0 about a year from now, will be an open-source, free ticketing software specifically designed for small and midsize arts organizations. V1.0 will allow for fairly mundane, but important, things like an easy sales path, robust show information, quick processing, printable tickets, etc. But, in later versions, it also has the potential for a lot more--notably shared attendance data across multiple companies (as more organizations start using the system), customizable logins, advanced customer tracking capability, and perhaps even (though likely not in V1.0) dynamic ticket pricing that would respond to set variables like percentage sold, length of time from performance, ticketing variations from night to night and seating area to seating area, and maybe even aggregate review response (via traditional media and social media) to maximize profits. And Athena (which is actually an extremely hard-working acronym for Advanced Technology Hub and Extensible Nexus for the Arts, but is also conveniently named after the goddess of wisdom) is actually envisioned as a modular system that will eventually cover everything a small organization would need in the way of technology, from constituent management to donor software to content management. The system, which, according to Fractured Atlas executive director Adam Huttler, will take up to 20 years (!) to complete, has the potential to revolutionize the way small companies interact with constituents and dramatically level the playing field between variably sized arts organizations.

To be clear, the product that comes out in a year will not be nearly as robust as that--it will probably function only for general admission houses of under 100 seats, with limited runs and a single price point for any given performance (i.e., no discounting). Given all that, perhaps it’s easy to see why what’s got me excited is what’s coming after V1.0--the high potential in V2.0 and onward for substantially benefiting small and midsize organizations (at little or no cost) is extremely appealing, even though V1.0, in the current formulation that they’re talking about (which may, I should point out, change as the design process continues), essentially replicates services that are already available with almost nothing new on the docket.

It seems, too, that when it rains it pours. PatronTechnology, the for-profit company behind PatronMail, is currently beta testing a similar product called PatronManager in Los Angeles. While I can't speak about specifics because the product is still very much in development, Theatre Bay Area staff and members of the Theatre Services Committee were recently presented with a half-hour demo of the product, and what we saw was very exciting.

In both of these cases, the goal is to create a low-to-no-cost solution for ticketing (and donor) management for small and midsize companies. Fractured Atlas, once AthenaTix is finished, will offer it as open source code to whoever wants it, but will also be launching a national ticket vending site built on the AthenaTix platform and collecting ticket processing fees as income. AthenaTix, and the entire Athena program, will be radically transparent--they're currently sharing everything at athena.fracturedatlas.org. PatronManager is still in beta, and so is somewhat under wraps. If you're interested in learning more, email me and I'll connect you into the process.

All of this is very much still in process, but we’re really excited here at Theatre Bay Area to see not one but two fantastic products coming down the pipeline designed to directly address a major field-wide need.

Developing Audiences the Gay Way

I have a new theatre audience development crush, thanks to my cousin who lives in Chicago. She works as the development director for a music organization there, and was at some sort of organization fair sitting next to a theatre company called About Face.

About Face, which is currently running a production of local fave (and hometown boy) Adam Bock's The Flowers, is devoted, at least in part, to "disproving the old model that says the arts are a frivolous extra, the LGBTQ community is 'other,' and that neither are relevant to the real business world."

So what does this have to do with audience development? My cousin sent me the swag that About Face was distributing at this event -- a postcard for a show called Queertopia, and a fabulous magnet that says in big bold letters "Theatre is so gay." What really got me, though, was when I flipped the Queertopia postcard and discovered that it is part of About Face's "Activist Youth Workshop" series -- essentially, it's a class in which young people "study acting, movement, circus arts, drag performance, anti-racism and anti-violence models, self-defense, story collection and playwriting."

This is a fantastic step in audience development -- both for theatre and, I'd argue, for gay rights. About Face is creating an environment in which youth are deeply immersed in the creation of art in a variety of ways, and which is uniquely intertwined with LGBTQ issues.

About Face's card goes on to discuss the goals of the class, saying:

"Join the cast to help create and perform in a new play about the true stories of violence against LGBTQA people in our city and our schools. In addition, we will be documenting true stories of peace, progress and acceptance in our communities."

Teasing out the LGBTQ stuff, which I think is great, I'm still left with a great respect for the larger scheme behind Queertopia -- About Face, through clever marketing and an open mind in terms of what constitutes theatrical performance, is giving every kid in their class myriad ways to connect with the artform -- multiple doors to walk through in order to become theatre consumers and makers as they grow. That's fantastic, and it's something I'm afraid I don't see nearly often enough in our community.

Do you have other examples of great, innovative audience development via youth programs in the Bay Area?

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.

Thinking Outside the Jewel Box

On my bus ride this morning, I came across a talk by Natasha Tsakos, a performer from Miami who has created a one-woman multimedia show called Upwake. Upwake is an hour-long story of Zero, a modern day businessman going to work with his life in a briefcase, stuck between reality and fantasy. It’s told using one performer, four projectors and a constant array of video, audio, lights and images created by 19 collaborators, all working together to address that one theme, amplified all over the place: connection between reality (stage, performer, audience) and fantasy (in the form of multimedia). Decidedly not a new theme, especially here, where we have some of the most exciting multi-arts work being done of anywhere in the country. What was interesting, though (and the piece looks interesting, too) was that this talk allowed Tsakos to engage in the theory and goal of the work in a deep way, putting into words some of the more abstract concepts that I think float around our heads as theatre practitioners a lot, but which are sometimes less than coherent. The talk became a discussion of the intersection between what she terms “science” (I’d more accurately term it “technology”) and “art,” and the ability of this intersection, in the proper hands, to bridge the gap between theatre and new audiences.

In Natasha’s words, “It is as much about bringing new disciplines inside this box as it is about taking theatre out of its box.”

More below the video.




I think this resonates in multiple ways and directions as we continue as a field to grapple with an ever-shrinking traditional audience base. We must start looking outside the jewel box of theatre for not only new technologies (although those, too), but also new experiences, new stories and new ways to tell those stories. The truth is, the demographics of humanity are changing, more quickly here than almost anywhere else in the country. As a field (and understanding it is a field-wide issue and cannot be the single duty of a few nontraditional theatregoer-focused organizations), we must look outside the box and draw in (and on) new parts of the world. In a way, theatre has always been about reflection – reflecting our society, or our hope, or perhaps simply the experiences of the people who come through the doors. As Tsakos says, the reflection is changing, and it is happening whether we as organizations, individuals or the field are on board or not:

“There is a revolution. It’s a human and technological revolution. It’s motion and emotion. It’s information. It’s visual, it’s musical, it’s sensorial. It’s conceptual, it’s universal and it’s beyond words and numbers. It’s happening…There is a revolution in the way that we think, the way that we share, and in the way that we express our stories. Our evolution. This is a time of communication, connection and creative collaboration.”

As companies and individuals, much of your days (probably) are spent looking at today, tomorrow, next month, one year out. You rightly strategize about sustaining your current base, reviving flagging donations from various sources, keeping steady audiences, a stable reputation, etc. It seems to me that part of our role at Theatre Bay Area is to ask you as individual artists and companies to take a moment to look more broadly and more long-term, at the long-term viability of the field as a whole. Field-wide trends are just that, field-wide, and field-wide changes happen over five-, ten-, twenty-year spans, across as many companies as are there to be part of the trend. If the core of Theatre Bay Area’s mission is to unite, strengthen and promote the theatre community, then we must continuously ask ourselves how the world is changing over the mid- to long-term, while also of course providing services to help companies and individuals sustain and thrive today. Tsakos’ larger message, that remaining static as a field (in our form, our content, our way of presenting ourselves) is not really an option, must set in motion all sorts of conversation.