Is your theater building a community? Or is it just putting on shows?

slide with text "a thriving arts sector creates suprising ripple benefits throughout our community"

I asked in a Facebook post in 2011: "Theater is about connections. How do administrators facilitate this connecting? How do theaters (as an entity) ensure this connection continues happening, time and time again?" Strengthening these connections is what makes a theater resilient, what makes the theater ecosystem resilient.

Even before Covid forced theater closures, our local ecosystem lost several long-standing organizations due to life happening (people moved, people aged and retired, etc.). Add the normal ebb and flow of creatives coming together for some number of shows and then going on to reassemble in different configurations. New groups crop up, some grow, some provide fodder for a completely different way of making art.

Nonprofit theater cannot build itself in the same way as for-profit theater. The very heart of the nonprofit mission is community-mindedness. For-profit theater by its very nature will follow a path of least resistance to earning as much profit as it can: mass-audience pleasing work; stunt casting; paying actors, designers, and crew as little as possible. Nonprofit theaters that use the same tactics repeatedly abandon their core reason for being a nonprofit: to strengthen their community.

Much like a forest must withstand a fire every so often in order to clear out decay and make room for new growth, the past few years should be viewed similarly for our local theater ecosystem. Has it been painful? Sure. Has it been drastic? In some ways, yes.

Can we now look around and ask ourselves "how are we resilient, how do we move forward and build organizations that are more focused on the community and supporting the artists within?" Now is exactly the time to do that. Zingerman's president Ari Weinzweig recently wrote "Perhaps most of all, we can create organizational ecosystems where resilience is present and persistent in the best possible ways."

Boards need to be changed to resemble the community the organization serves.
Administrations need to diversify in nonprofit the same way Fortune 500 companies need to have more diverse staffs throughout their "pipeline."
Work presented needs to reflect the conversations the community must have.
Actors need to be advocates and admin needs to get off the wall of "well we've never done that before" and make safe, supportive working spaces for all.
And audiences have to show up for all the work. All.

For our theaters, resilience isn't putting on another show or having an endowment or even a few donors with very deep pockets (although all those things help). Resilience is building a community both inside and outside the doors that wants to ensure the art continues to make a difference.

Comments

High Art vs Low Art

“The masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.” - -The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin, 1936 Is there any more contentious question in the art world than the concept of “high” versus “low” I like venn diagrams. And shouldn't art really be in the middle? art? Who gets to judge? What are the parameters in which to judge? There is no standard definition for either concept and personal explanations range from simple to incredibly complex. One common theory about how to explain the difference is high art is “popular” and low art is “unpopular”, that is, appealing (or not) to many people. This also links to another version of the difference: that high art fosters the widest connection between people while a smaller subsection enjoys low art. This is in direct contradiction, though, to the idea of low art being part of mass culture (raising yet another question of “is art culture” or merely a com

Death & The Theater

I was listening to a recent episode of the Tim Ferris podcast and the guest, happiness scholar Arthur C. Brooks, was discussing death meditations. And the little lightbulb in my brain turned on with the thought, "We need to talk more about death in theaters." I know, I know, that seems like an illogical statement because it feels like we're always talking about the death of theater. This whole summer has been filled with articles and op-eds from across the country about how large regional theaters are dying in major cities. But that's not the kind of death Brooks was talking about, and in reality, it isn't death these articles are complaining about, either: they are trying to stay alive in a “E’s just resting” fashion, to find some kind of life-support for the theaters, to keep them going, receive new money from new audiences or donors, new shows, new gimmicks to draw more or different people in the door. Anything to keep from dying. We don't talk about death

Pass the Collection Plate, Please.

Various sizes of buildings, with some sort of seating arranged in rows, facing a slightly raised platform. may have curtains around the platform. people --primarily men-- take the platform to orate to the audience seated before them. A plea for donations is made at some point, either before or after the show, which may have music and will definitely have directives masked as stories on how to be a human in this day-and-age. children will be seen, maybe, but definitely not heard. the men in charge will believe they have been given a special gift for leading this particular group of people. and the people, for whatever reason, will also believe this. and this group of people will believe that their building and person and each other are completely different and somehow better than all the other exact same groups around their town/city/county/state/nation. If theater wants to be treated as church and church as theater, then both are getting exactly what they have been setting up for the p

Perpetually Curious

Search This Blog