Envisioning Alternatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And later:

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Writing for the Head Is "All Wrong"

Frank Dickerson, a fundraiser and researcher, recently published an article whose title gives away his thesis: "The Way We Write is All Wrong." His piece, which is specifically about fundraising language for American nonprofits, linguistically analyzed 1.5 million words from 2,412 online and direct-mail fundraising documents using a series of computer programs developed by a linguist named Douglas Biber.

The article is interesting and is written, deliberately, in the easily accessible, anecdote-filled tone that Dickerson recommends fundraisers use--which has the side benefit of being quick and easy to read. Essentially, Dickerson's analysis reveals that the vast majority of the fundraising pieces he looked at have a tone and format linguistically consistent with dry, scholarly writing; fundraising discourse "failed to connect with and involve readers on a personal and emotional level" and "failed to tell stories about real people whom readers might actually care about."

The most interesting part of the paper, for me, was his hypothesis on why nonprofit fundraisers fall back on overly written, overly edited, dry asks that rely on statistics, measurable outcomes, etc. Dickerson argues that development professionals in the nonprofit world are super educated, with advanced degrees, etc., and that being brought up in that style of scholarly writing affects their ability to write. In his words:

"They write as if they were still graduate students. They continue to produce a style of discourse appropriate to a past-bound setting, dedicated to a past-bound task, created for a past-bound audience…In contrast, [fundraisers should] follow writing rules or laws of composition that enable discourse to achieve pre-determined rhetorical aims…[like] interpersonal involvement and narrative discourse."
(Italics his…all of them.)

After taking a short side trip into the neurological underpinnings of his argument, which is interesting but sort of out of left field, Dickerson does provide some examples from the 2,412 pieces he analyzed that scored really well on his Biber scales. One is a letter from the Catholic charity Covenant House that tells a story about giving a meal to a young hooker on the street. The other is a rather gripping tale from a Jewish charity that helps forgotten Holocaust heroes. In both cases, what really got me is that Dickerson is advocating the type of storytelling that I often reel from--I find it manipulative and frustrating. At the same time, it's not terribly surprising that direct-mail pieces that appeal to the emotional, empathic part of a person's brain do better in asking them to support a cause.

We in the arts may have a shorter way to go to get to that type of fundraising writing, since we traffic first and foremost in an ethereal product that itself appeals to the emotional, emphatic part of the brain.

The Facts Are These

I've never paid attention to Theatre Facts, the 35-page audit of American theatre as a whole published each year by TCG. Before I started here at Theatre Bay Area, I worked at Z Space, which wasn't a TCG member theatre, and as such the national service organization barely touched my radar. And last year I was swallowed whole by Free Night and the run-up to the intrinsic impact study. So I'm a Theatre Facts virgin, and I've got to say, it's quite the piece of work.

For those of you who don't want to take a wander through all 35 pages, I'd at least recommend reading the first page, which includes a very helpful "Inside this Article" summary. But if you want to delve deeper, there are a lot of numbers and some potentially disturbing trends.

One thing to point out first--while Theatre Facts was just published, it actually only looks at the period between October 1, 2007 and September 30, 2008. This is because it takes almost a year for TCG to do what it does in terms of verifying numbers, pouring over audits and 990s, and crafting the article. As such, it cuts off just before things got interesting with the economy. As you can imagine, I can't wait to see what it shows happened in the year they're auditing now--but alas, we'll have to wait until next August, by which time (one can dream) this whole financial downturn might have flipped back to an upswing. (An aside: this long timeline has inspired the currently-running Pulse survey, which we encourage all arts organizations, TCG and non-TCG alike, to take. The Pulse takes a much more cursory, but also much quicker-to-process, look at the state of the field.)

First, some of the quick takeaways from the study, and then some futher thoughts on meaning:

• Theatres presented the creative work of 83,000 artists to 32 million audience members.


• More than half of theatres ended 2008 in the red.


• Subscription income rose 2.6%, but 8% fewer subscription tickets were purchased and the number of subscribers fell by 10%.


• Overall attendance was up 1.9% and the number of performances offered was up 5.2%.


• Earned income dropped over 7% from 2007 to 2008, and supported fewer expenses per dollar than in any previous year.


• Of all earned income, ticket sales represented 76% of money earned in 2008, but covered 3% fewer expenses.

The main thing that caught my eye is this ever-rising discrepancy between income and expense--even with earned income on the rise, which it surely won't be in the next edition of this report, growth in expenses (19.1%) outstripped growth in earned income (6%) by a large margin over five years. Essentially, even as we continue to raise our prices, the cost of producing theatre continues to be a losing game financially.

I don't know where this leaves us, especially since of those five years referenced above, five were in a positive economy. And I'll be honest, I'm not really a numbers guy, so my eyes kind of glazed over around page 15, so I've got a lot more to process. But this is a start--and it leads me to ask, how can we as a community generate new models that allow our income to balance, if not exceed, our expenses? Admittedly, my numbers don't cover the development income/expense lines, which are a bit more positive, but still don't really even out.

I find this especially interesting in light of the discussion occuring in the comments on Rebecca's post "Growing versus Thriving" and an earlier post by Sabrina about the NEA funding coming under attack. TCG's survey looks almost exclusively at budgets over a million dollars (in many cases, far over a million dollars) because that's who TCG primarily serves. What would happen, I wonder, if we were to look at this same level of detail for companies like Crowded Fire or Shotgun Players? Is theatre morphing into a situation in which smaller is better, more sustainable? Additionally, some of the comments in those earlier entries have been discussing the assertion by certain Republican Congress members that the government shouldn't have the onus for supporting work that hasn't succeeded in the public sphere (i.e., hasn't made money on ticket sales). With this new data--that almost no one succeeds to that level, at least in the aggregate--where does that leave us as a field, especially as government and foundational funding wane with the descending good fortunes of the people whose money they redistribute?