Ben Cameron, Closing Remarks

BEN CAMERON:

Where did the time go? Forty-eight exhilarating, extraordinary hours after we began—72 hours or more for those of you involved in pre-conference sessions—we now sit on the verge of saying farewell to one another. But before I try to bring us to some collective closing, let me say a few thanks. First, to our Seattle community of theatres, the fantastic Seattle volunteers and, especially, our host theatres—ACT Theatre, Intiman Theatre, Seattle Children's Theatre and Seattle Repertory Theatre. Thanks to all of our speakers, panelists and moderators for their exemplary work in exploring a range of issues; to our sign language interpreters for their beautiful and—especially given the speed in which I speak—fleet and indefatigable work; thanks to all of you for taking time in your busy lives to be here together—and perhaps within that a special thanks to our theatre board members whose lives are called in other directions professionally but still have made this journey with us today; and thanks from the bottom of my heart to my TCG Board and staff—a staff who works at a remarkable pace, whose investment in the field is total, sincere and ravenous, who are the real heart and soul of all that TCG does for you and strives to do in the future. This year I'd like them to join me on stage as I call their names so we can applaud them all:

Matt Alford, Laurie Baskin, Shira Beckerman, Emilya Cachapero, Joan Channick, Jen Cleary, Monet Cogbill, Heather Cohn, Chris DeWan, Nicole Estvanik, Peter Fenzel, Michael Francis, Randy Gener, Connie Hall, Jaclyn Harriott, Sarah Hart, Cassandra Johnson, Sheela Kangal, Tom Kingsley, Fran Kumin, Cindy Lee, Young Jean Lee, Liz Maestri, Rebecca Marzalek-Kelly, Phillip Matthews, Sandy Nance, Martha Neighbors, Terry Nemeth, Warren Nichols, David Nugent, Jim O'Quinn, Ilana Rose, Will Schmerge, Chris Shuff, Kathy Sova, Arthur Stanley, Kitty Suen, Carol van Keuren, Kate Walat, Jenni Werner, Kristina Williams, Mollie Wilson, Eve Zapulla and Leigh Zona.

And most especially to our conference coordinator—a woman from our field who has coordinated our National Conferences in San Francisco, Philadelphia and Milwaukee as well, but who has chosen to forego the opportunity to do this annually, yielding the reins to her fantastic successor, Jenni Werner. To Vicky, a special, special valedictory thanks and our hope that you will enjoy this token of our deep appreciation for all you have done for us—a permanent invitation to come back to any National Conference at any time.

All of us hope ardently that this Conference was of value to you—that you are already eager to join us not only in 2006 in Atlanta on June 7-10 and—in our final bit of TCG news for this Conference—in The Twin Cities in 2007, where we will be hosted in the amazing new Guthrie Theater complex. We will continue to seek your counsel—as we did in the affinity group returns today—on how best to serve you in the substance of the Conference and how best to maximize the time in this new annual rhythm into which we have moved.

We gathered together, as our conference theme reminded us, in a polarized world—one thoroughly described through the arc of our sessions. Especially when we are separated from one another, it can be a time when we feel we are being told to stop, not only in our pursuit of what we believe artistically, but what we believe politically, intellectually and socially—a sense of beleaguerment for both sides of the political aisle.

Embedded in this increasingly deafening din, the most worrying shift of all is at play. Amy Gutmann, the President of the University of Pennsylvania, said it best at the Wesleyan graduation ceremony last week,

“The signs of disrespect are all around us—in the ferocious assault on the judiciary, in the shrill debate over Terri Schiavo and worst of all, in the hateful ad hominem attacks that issue daily from radio and TV talk shows. We are living in a smash-mouth culture in which extremists dominate public debate to the point of hijacking it. You cannot have a reasoned discussion about abortion when one side is slandered as "baby killers" and the other side is smeared as "religious wing nuts." It is hard to pursue a reasoned debate about the Iraqi war when opponents of the war are accused of treason and the president of the United States is compared to Hitler. Reach across the aisle, pursue collaborative solutions or explore any shade of gray on any charged issue, and you are likely to be ignored or dismissed as indecisive. That is, if you're lucky. More likely you will endure crude and often malicious attacks on your intelligence, faith and patriotism. You may even face death threats.”

And increasingly, I would add, not from those on the periphery but often from those who are seated as elected and appointed officials in the halls of power.

This is the world we struggled to understand more deeply throughout our time together—a world of unraveling civic discourse or, perhaps more accurately, of growing uncivil discourse, a world characterized by a division between perceived authenticity and perceived elitism—a division that serves us poorly and exacerbates the disaffection of many in the public from our field, setting the prelude for a "culture wars" scenario, designed to incite and engage wrath rather than truly vanquish, as Thomas Frank warned us; a polarized world where we must engage our public in new and focused ways, as Congressman McDermott encouraged us to do; a world which is divided by faith that increasingly not only unite us but also divides us, as we saw at times with Cornerstone.

And over our time these two days, we began to perceive more subtle fault lines at work beneath these more obvious signs of polarization. The opposition between the social, intermediary accepting individual and the increasingly hermetic, technology linked but intermediary averse, a-synchronistic one, a division by technology that will increasingly insulate us from discomfort and reinforce our existing prejudices rather than dismantle them as Ellen Ullman explained; oppositions between the strict father figure and nurturing parent, as George Lakoff so brilliantly articulated—and of how these confounding forces collide, confuse, conspire and ultimately inspire in the creation and work of the artist, as powerfully exemplified by Sekou Sundiata.

These polarized times, we know, demand our most focused energies and the very best work we can offer, even while we strive to retain those very emotional qualities that make us human through the arts—a charge offered by Charles Bukowski in "The Miracle," when he writes:

	To work with an art form

	does not mean to screw off like a tape worm

	with his belly full,

	nor does it justify grandeur,

	or greed, nor at all times

	seriousness, but I would guess

	that it calls upon the best men

	at their best times,

	and when they die

	and something else does not,

	we have seen the miracle of immortality:

	men arrived as men,

	departed as gods—

	gods we knew were here,

	gods that now let us go on

	when all else says stop.

For my own part, I arrived in Seattle on Tuesday with a litany of concerns that seem to grow longer with every passing month. But my own conference was unexpectedly shaped by a set of conversations I had here in Seattle on Wednesday, hours before many of you began to arrive. Thanks to the generosity of Brad Fowler, one of ACT Theatre's wonderful trustees, I was asked to speak at the Rotary Club luncheon for several hundred Rotarians. I spoke precisely about these concerns, I even quoted Amy Gutmann to them just as I have to you, and I was received with overwhelming generosity and kindness.

As I was making my way to the elevators, however, I was stopped in two separate encounters by those who had taken exception to my remarks. The political substance of our disagreements aside—I tried to deflect a debate about politics and redirect it to the focal issue of how debate is currently conducted—I was struck by the virulence of their distaste for the arts. These men, clearly archly conservative, extremely intelligent and highly successful, were clear in conveying much of what they dislike about our community as difference of values—a sense that we promulgate only a liberal point of view. "Where and who are the great fundamentalist Christian playwrights?" one asked, while another challenged me to think of any play that reminded us of the evils of gay marriage (a question that will lead me straight to the doctor for stitches in my tongue) or that portrayed George Bush in a positive light—questions that reflected a keen sense of being excluded by the arts community, that their concerns do not concern us, that indeed we find them derisible, contemptible and worse.

My mental rejoinders to them were perhaps those many of you would have made—that while I can't cite you a pro-Bush play, I can't cite a pro-Kerry or pro-Clinton one for you either, that I don't know the politics of the vast majority of writers, even though I might suspect that the great majority of television and film writers on certain networks, at least, are far more likely to be conservative than not in their viewpoints, that they have a far greater reach, and that while part of our role as theatres indeed is to question and criticize the prevailing social order—witness the Fool in Lear as a metaphor—the vast majority of plays uphold the sanctity and value of heterosexual marriage and the joys of having children. Indeed, as I shared this story with many of you, the predominantly apolitical stance of the bulk of our work was the dominant theme.

But why wouldn't these men know that? What have we done to convince them otherwise? How could I begin to understand the conversation, not from the point of what I know to be true, but from the point of their truth, as difficult as I found it to be?

Could it be the cumulative visual impression that our arts pages give as they review our work (especially if you don't read the accompanying reviews)—impressions that suggest that the theatre cares only about the young, the hip and the beautifully coiffed, that the bulk of actors are physically remarkable but clearly not working class, and that we care only for the white people in our country? Could it be that the typical use of religious iconography is often ironic—as in this week's New York Times picture of Christopher Durang as the Infant of Prague—a writer most of us love and adore and frequently produce but whose conservative Republican counterpart I could not name even now? Might it be our industry's collective critical disdain for the popular—the snubbing of Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ, at this year's Oscar Awards, or more close to home, the total neglect of Good Vibrations, All Shook Up and Steel Magnolias at this year's Tony Awards? Is it the portrayal of our actors' lives as sexually squalid, seamy, flagrant and extra-marital? Whatever the cause, their distaste was clear.

I found myself imagining those two men this week in every session when we came together during the conference. There were moments in which I wonder whether they would not have wholeheartedly agreed—most strongly perhaps in Sekou Sundiata's evocation of the common spirit that simplistic polarizations overlook and his denial of the hungers for meaning and spirituality as being the exclusive purview of either political party, or in the concern of Ellen Ullman for the impact of the internet in dismantling the social fabric, for example, although they may well have found the solution in church, rather than theatre. I want to think they would have responded to Bill Rauch and Cornerstone's unforgettably honest, raw and open account of what it can mean to try to breach the walls of faith, to discover through deep listening and pain precisely what unites and divides us, that they too would have been, if not inspired by, perhaps, at least compelled to remember the wrenching accounts of the power of faith to destroy bonds and to inflict pain, as well as to affirm and nourish.

But I had a very different reaction when I tried to imagine them during Thomas Frank—a man of staggering intellectual accomplishment whose arguments are powerful, germane and must stay with us. But even while, as a man raised in the church, I never recognized the Christianity I know firsthand as that described by the railings of the evangelical right, neither did I recognize myself in the evocations of Christianity offered by Thomas Frank.

Indeed, the most clarifying and provocative moment for me in many ways was the back to back contrast of Thomas Frank with Cornerstone—a juxtaposition of scintillating intellectual brilliance against emotional, heartfelt exposure, of hurling the gauntlet against extending the olive branch, possibly even more of exchanging blow for blow against the almost Gandhi-like approach of nonviolent response and of strict father against the nurturing parent, both of whom saying things with which I deeply and passionately agree. Regardless of the overt text, their presentations revealed the subtext—the opportunity in this conference to examine our deepest motives, our commitments, our ability to embrace and foster difference.

For all of our talk about conversation, do we really want to be forums for public exchange of ideas? Do we really want to explore the differences that unite and divide us, as Cornerstone says? Or are we really only asking, "How do we get them to listen to us?"

If we care truly about the former, we must listen to those questions and ask, as a field, "Where are the conservative Christian playwrights we commission? In our talk backs, where are those we invite not to reinforce our points of view, but to challenge and refute the work we have seen? If the latter, do we have the strength, the patience, the resilience to commit to the decades of work that lie before us?"

I don't wish to suggest that theatres necessarily should walk one or the other of these paths. Many of us do exist as interstice of community factions and as conveners of dialogue like Cornerstone, while others thrive as sanctuaries of shared secular beliefs led by a different kind of evangelist like Thomas Frank, celebrating a consistent set of political and social viewpoints. Our field and our world have room and need of both. But what I began to realize during our two days, is that the ability of any theatre to maximize its role in any community begins with its ability to acknowledge clearly, frankly and powerfully which role it truly plays.

We feel buffeted, overpowered and confounded by these polarizing forces. But for the bulk of those of us assembled, we are adapting, responding and triumphing in ways that do us proud:

And yet, as always, I am conscious not only of how we fare. I am conscious of those who are not with us. With only 200 or so of our member theatres represented, we are only at half strength, and while a significant number cited summer performance schedules or personal circumstances that prevented attendance this year, many more told of the dire fiscal circumstances, the looming deficits, the staff cuts and more that made attendance impossible. These fiscal storm clouds make the implications of these numbers significantly darker. Even as we try to share the proceedings and pass along much of what we have learned together, I urge each of you to extend yourselves, to be the generous emissaries in your communities, convening your colleagues and sharing what you have heard here in Seattle.

I second Michael John Garcés's passionate cry of belief. We have more power, more talent and more wonder than ever. Already, more Americans work in art, entertainment and design than in law, accounting and auditing. As a nation, we graduate 400,000 MFAs from training programs in music, dance, the visual arts, theatre and more every single year. This is a mixed blessing, to be sure, leading to a glut of trained personnel that we can never begin to absorb—and what potential there is to divide the field there—but it is a positive sign that we are reaching kids, that we are touching lives, that we are communicating the power and rewards of a life given to the arts. And if these arts-trained citizens begin to ply these skills, these lessons of empathic listening and community connection, in other fields, how much healthier as a society might we be?

This forward trajectory reflects our increasing resilience and our increasing ability to act differently, responding to these larger forces around us, to think strategically and differently. But the next chapter may well call on us to think transformatively, a term raised moments ago by Sekou Sundiata.

Many of you know I am a voracious reader, often reading multiple books at the same time. This month the concurrent reading list included The Great Influenza, by John Barry, the story of the great flu epidemic that killed more than 50 million people in 1918, and Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

The story of the great flu begins by tracking the key assumptions of medicine, a field remarkably static for more than 2,000 years. The key approach to medicine had been defined by Hippocrates—he of the oath—in 460 BC. Interestingly, the period makes him a contemporary of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. This father of medicine based his work on observation and logic. If a patient was flushed with fever, for example, bleeding him would produce paleness, an observable result with logical conclusion of improvement. While subsequent generations would engage in practices that Hippocrates would never have considered, most significantly, autopsy, physiologically intrusive surgery and even later vaccination, the very bases of medicine did not really change. And, indeed, the very notion of health continued unchanged for centuries, with disease seen as internal misalignment rather than the product of interaction with external forces, such as viruses and bacteria. It took the dedication of a relative handful of men to break free of the existing assumptions of medicine and health—men educated and trained abroad—to challenge these assumptions in America and to transform American medical practice by instilling notions of research and patient contact—things we take for granted that were not considered essential before 1900—and that led to the triumphs over influenza, polio and more in the years to come.

Blue Ocean Strategy similarly opens with the story of an accordion player, stilt-walker and fire-eater, frustrated with the decline of the industry in which he worked. Alternate forms of entertainment had left circuses reeling. Children, seduced by the technological illusions of PlayStations and other video games, found circus feats less impressive. Animal rights protestors lined up outside the convention centers where the three ring behemoths played and true star acts—witness Siegfried and Roy—were defecting to Las Vegas or packaging their own special brand of spectacle on television. The response of this accordion player was simply to break free of the existing competition, to rethink and reinvent, to discard the three ring format that had become the industry standard, to circumvent the convention centers that had been increasingly housed circuses in their search for higher audience and ticket volume and to return to the one ring tent, to discard the animal acts, to discard the stars—an unthinkable combination—and, most interestingly to me, at least, to rethink the audience itself, re-conceiving circus as a medium not for children, but for the sophisticated adult. The stilt walker was, of course, Guy Laliberté, and his reinvented circus the one we know today as Cirque du Soleil.

The threads that bind the two are obvious. There is a willingness to break, shatter and reshape the form and to defy conventions, even while seizing what is most fundamental and most distinctive—the one ring circus, for example—and reconciling it to the times in which we live. In these two stories, the subjects have gone beyond understanding their own value. They have transformed themselves and the value they offer. Instinctively, I feel that we are groping towards transformation. I feel it; instinctively, I know it. I hear the quest especially when I encounter work by our younger artists as they break and shatter and reshape the form, defy the conventions, break the rules and increasingly come closer to a form less defined by what they reject and more defined by what they believe. Older organizations are also transforming, moving more deliberately and methodically, aware of the imperatives of sustaining current proponents even as they make the change. But they are transforming nevertheless, shifting, expanding, testing, teasing, and reinventing. It is not a seamless trajectory forward, it is one marked by as many failures as by successes, but it is a movement forward, one theatre at a time, one group of artists at a time, to a better future.

As this conference reminds us, we can and must celebrate and support our colleagues as we seek these new paths. Our collective success will increasingly rely on our ability to transcend the competitive and move to the realm of co-opetition, as Yale School of Management professor Barry Nalebuff said at our last Fall Forum, working collaboratively to grow the pie for all, even as we inevitably compete for our piece of it. Even a landscape of hundreds of individually strong theatre organizations does not comprise a strong sector.

It is this growing sense of cooperation that excites me so about the audience development initiative, that holds potential promise in a new partnership with AFTA in advocacy and that is at the reason and source of my dedication to TCG and my urgent belief in its necessity, now more than ever.

At a recent board meeting, Susan Booth of the Alliance Theatre spoke of the heart of TCG as being "the dream of a common language." Indeed, as a board, we openly dream. We dream of a time when every American has a theatrical experience every year. We dream of a time when the field itself controls ample resources it can direct to its own ends, regardless of reigning funder fashion, when artists, managers and technicians are afforded lives of economic dignity and when the field is a magnet for the best creative minds. We dream of a time when we take our place as a partner in a true global community of theatres. We dream three concentric dreams, of audience, of field and of art form. We know these are aggressive, we know they are long-term, but we know that it is essential that we work to make these dreams become reality.

If we are serious about our dreams, we will need to hold on to this collective, sector orientation even as we engage next in serious conversations on how we develop talent, not within individual theatres, but holistically, with a range of theatres. If we are serious about how we can take our place in a global community, we must be willing to think differently about our role in protesting and overturning the increasingly restrictive policies around visas and immigration. If we are serious about the pool of resources, we must talk about our own role in funding our future, refusing to rely on the largesse of donors and taking responsibility for our collective financial destiny. We have the power to shift our attention from what I have as an individual theatre to what we have as a community and to think in new ways about seizing our own destiny rather than letting it be dictated by others.

As every speaker suggested, these polarizing forces are not stable; they will shift, move and evanesce. We will never arrive. We will never really find the golden answer that secures the future, never the permanent state of bliss that allows us to relax. We will always be challenged, and tested, but in meetings like these, we will come together, share together, challenge one another and provoke one another, but renew together. If we only have the courage to be willing to entertain the notions of our own reinvention, if we can only move towards this rapidly changing, morphing and confusing future together, it might just provide the most thrilling moments of our lives.

In Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a young boy named Oskar searches the city for his father, who has been lost in the World Trade Towers on 9/11. At one point, he enlists the help of an elderly, retired journalist named Mr. Black, a man who alternately cheers and chastises him as they make their way through the city. At one particularly despondent point, Mr. Black turns to the boy and says:

"I once went to report on a village in Russia, a community of artists who were forced to flee the cities! I'd heard that paintings hung everywhere! I heard you couldn't see the walls through all of the paintings! They'd painted the ceilings, the plates, the windows, the lampshades! Was it an act of rebellion? An act of expression? Were the paintings good, or was that beside the point? I needed to see it for myself, and I needed to tell the world about it! I used to live for reporting like that!

But Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn't feed themselves, because they couldn't get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did, Oskar?" Mr. Black asks.

"They starved?" he replies.

"They fed each other! That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!"

"Do you believe in God?" Oskar asks.

"No, I don't, but I believe in the story."

As do I. I believe in the story.

We know these are dark times; increasingly we can feel that we are huddling in mounting exile, that there are attempts to silence dissent, to demonize difference and to metaphorically break the arms of many who have given themselves to the arts, but I believe the story.

Every time we come together, I believe the story. In every grants panel meeting I witness, in every board whose meeting I attend, I believe the story. And especially in convenings like these, I believe the story. We feed one another and our communities by our passion, our perseverance and our dedication to your communities. We feed one another and our communities by our resilience, creativity and insight in how to endure these most challenging times. We feed one another and our communities by our presence—by our breathing together as we learn, reflect and refine.

And, speaking personally, you feed my heart and the hearts of all of us at TCG by the work you do, the astounding variety of work that at its best breathes and provokes, soothes and assuages. If heaven is the place we feed one another, you allow me to wander every day in a heaven of sorts through my time with you—a heaven where, at our best, we feed one another, celebrate and treasure one another, where "Men arrive as men, depart as gods—gods that we knew were here, gods that now let us go on when all else says stop."

We must, can and will refuse to heed those voices that tell us to stop.

My name is Ben Cameron, and I am honored, humbled and deeply grateful to stand before you as the executive director of Theatre Communications Group. God speed you in your travels; God speed you in your work. I declare the 2005 TCG National Conference adjourned.

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