Fall Forum 2007
Cultivating Innovation: From the Board Room to the Box Office
November 9 –11, 2007
New York City
Lodging & Transportation | NYC Area Productions
Transcripts
Closing Remarks: Observations
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Susan Booth, Artistic Director, Alliance Theatre
[ Return to the Transcripts index ]
Susan Booth:
Big learning: The willingness to innovate is in direct proportion to one’s proximity to the yawning abyss.
Uh oh. Moral quandary: Am not IN crisis
but
NEED innovation (in order to AVOID crisis)
but
hardly think it suitable to be nostalgic for crisis
much less
manufacture one for expediency.
So. Hmm.
There was an undeniable epiphany-envy Friday night as Peter Gelb smoothly explained his capacity to pull a U-turn with the Queen Mary of cultural institutions by “having painted a convincing picture of devastation in the future” for his colleagues. But the innovation U-turn seen in one’s rear-view mirror often has a kind of beautiful inevitability, yes? Partly because the folks who helmed the really ugly ones seldom get asked to man the Bryant Park Grill podium, but also because itineraries are so often more clearly viewed from the destination point, rather than merely imagined at the onset of the journey.
So there we were, beginning of day two, and I’m wondering where my crisis is. Happily, I’m an artistic director of a not-for-profit theatre with progressive aesthetic aspirations in the heart of the Bible Belt. This shouldn’t be hard, right? But we’re not actively bleeding right now. Numbers are pretty stable, the 9/11 halo effect has faded (or, at the very least, has ceased being a plausible event scapegoat for diminished revenue) and a Republican administration just made an unprecedented funding increase to national endowment levels.
One could almost feel good. Oh, wait—here comes Russell and Jim—time for the NAS smackdown.
And here come the innovation-dwarfing constraints that we are actually putting on ourselves. And I am suddenly mindful of all the poor little orphaned brilliant ideas that have been deprived of implementation by a litany of “but we never…” and “that’s not our way…” and “how will we pay for…” Talk about your asymmetrical relationships. Those little buggers get mowed down in our own gray matter before they even are given words—because doubt and fear and habit have become the real gunslingers in town.
(And this is where I run into Ben Cameron on a break, who makes the mistake of asking how it’s going—and I overshare—as I am CLEARLY wont to do—and I tell him all I can think about is Jeremy Bentham. An 18th century British philosopher best known as the founder of Utilitarianism, Bentham also dabbled in innovations in the penal system. Fun guy. But he came up with the notion of the panoptikon—a sort of donut like jail, which placed the jailor at the center looking out and the prisoners on the periphery looking in. Jailor could see out—prisoners could not see in. Voila—an architectural mandating of SELF POLICING. If you don’t know when you’re going to be watched, you do little to merit surveillance. So not to get all recombinant on you, but I’m thinking this is the theory that justifies (or at least explains in some fashion) a tendency to choke the life out of innovation before it sees the light of day. Is it because of the innovator’s dilemma—the fraught awareness that you will displace someone or something known (and therefore a little temptingly comfy) as you pursue new initiatives? New people? New models? Is it because moving away from core competencies doesn’t just instill discomfort, it can sometimes engender mutiny? Or is it because we haven’t fully embraced the crisis that would make innovation a pure necessity? (Remember the math—“the willingness to innovate is directly proportionate to proximity to disaster.”)
Okay, the day’s not young anymore. Neither am I. Where’s my crisis?
A menu of available crises:
1. Susie Medak of Berkeley Rep: “It seems we just respond to old models by developing new orthodoxies.”
2. Richard Garner of Georgia Shakespeare: “The very relevance of what we’re doing is in question.”
3. Zannie Voss, research guru: “In 5 years, our aggregate attendance has dropped, but we’ve increased the number of performances. We’re adding product but they’re not buying it.”
That last one REALLY gave me a good dose of rearranging the Titanic deck chair vapors. Maybe most of all because the percentage decrease in attendance and increase in performances—both measured over multiple years—aren’t big, fat, DO SOMETHING NOW, GET OFF YOUR ASSES numbers. They’re just small enough that we might just think a new pricing structure will do it—maybe an earlier curtain, an under 25 beer night at the theatre, or Facebook. Yeah! Facebook! That’ll do it. I’m pretty sure we’re not making it over to the “radical” side of Russell’s innovate-o-meter with that one.
The other social theorist that I have a big crush on is Mikhail Bakhtin. A 20th century guy, he spent a lot of time thinking about change. When it happens, how it happens, what are the conditions that allow it to fully flower. And for Bakhtin, it is the tiny window that occurs between the passing away of the old and the concretizing of the new where the good stuff happens. He called that window “the carnival.” I like that. I like the full, sensory rightness of that metaphor. Because the usual rules don’t apply at the carnival—it’s a place of a kind of fast and frantic joy—but if you stay too long, either the cotton candy or the rides will make you hurl. But a lot can happen in that little window. You could imagine something new.
Why has innovation become a word that makes Diane Ragsdale squirm? Why are there thousands of books out there on it, but 150 of us are still willing to come sit in a ballroom for a weekend to figure out how to do it? And pay for the privilege.
Maybe the trick is in acknowledging that stasis really is one heckuva plausible crisis, and that it doesn’t just take money to lubricate change, it takes a sincere, full tilt willingness to throw all the rules on the table for question. Including the one that says we are the makers of the art and the community is the receiver. YIKES! There’s a carnival ride for you. But maybe we need to consider that the audience is not merely a commodity to be obtained in greater quantity, but a full collaborator with a right to our ear as well as our seats. Because just as we don’t know who came down from the mountain with the “Thou shalt have 60/40 ratio” tablet, I’m pretty sure the Greeks didn’t have a “we make it, you take it” transaction in mind when they created theatre (which they did as a means of civic discourse, which last I looked, requires both parties’ involvement.)
There was, yesterday morning, some chat about the fact that the art is not always on the table for the internal discussion the way that the more prosaic topics of infrastructure are. That we somehow feel more able—equipped, I suppose—to poke about in our structures and systems than we are in our Stoppards and our Shaws. And I’m using the trustee and management “we” here, because apparently the sheer fact of my designation as an artistic director allows me to poke with impunity. And I’m struck by the distinction of the pokeable and the non-pokeable. And further struck by the designation of who gets to poke and who doesn’t. (I’m going to stop using the word poke, now.) What is it we’re afraid of? That we’ll somehow taint the sanctity of the art form if we allow it to be held up to the perhaps unflattering light of “why this, why here, why now” scrutiny? I’m arguing with myself a bit here, because there is an absence in our particular medium of those clearly discernable tools that can only be wielded with real artistry by professionals—instead of cellos and charcoals, we wield emotions and psychologies. And yes, you COULD try this at home. And maybe the sheer democratic accessibility of our art form’s tools to just about anyone makes us all feel a little vulnerable? A little at risk of not being sacred?
But here’s the deal. Implicit in what we do is a partnership. Act one is what we put on a stage, and act two is what our audience makes of it. And we can no more control that second act of creation than we can manufacture a deep need for deconstructed Ibsen in springtime in Atlanta. And maybe that’s the point. The great and wonderful Chuck Mee has said that none of his plays are truly written until the people sitting side by side at a performance leave at play’s end and FUNDAMENTALLY disagree about what they just saw.
If we truly believe that change is required—and thousands of books and 150 people seem a good couple of indicators—then do we not need to offer all of what we do up for scrutiny? Including the community’s role in informing the very heart of our activity? The art can take it. It’s kind of in its DNA to take scrutiny, and frankly, any artistic leader who thinks it’s inappropriate, or scary, or dangerous for his or her trustees and management colleagues to question his or her choices is deluding themselves about what the audience is doing as they walk to their cars after the show. Ours is a culture of creators and curators these days, and that’s not a distinction governed by a youthful age and the ability to download YouTube content. (Although anyone who really knows how to do that needs to see me after and use easy words and speak slowly.) We are fiercely autonomous and individuated people living awash in technologies of choice. The bus has left the station, and as we say down South, if you can’t fix it, feature it.
But how? From the local to the global—and here’s another menu:
- Put your artistic report first on your board’s meeting agenda and make sure it’s a dialogue, not a monologue. Take to heart yesterday’s lessons in the expansive potential of dis-confirming information. Consensus is nice; it isn’t generative.
- Call your colleagues at Arena Stage and learn about the trustee internship program, where trustees actively track a production from first read to opening night.
- Go to our website and learn about the Alliance reviewers. A community cohort selected annually through a “Why Theatre Matters” essay contest, our reviewers are given opening tickets in exchange for posting a review on our website within 24 hours.
- When your audience books on the internet, send a confirmation and a question—would they like to join a virtual play club? If the answer is yes, plug them into an email list of like minded playgoers, give them the time, the MySpace link and 20 generative questions—and let them create their own post show discussion.
- Whether pre show, post show or dark night, invite your community to come make art in your space. Offer Saturday morning drop-in improv classes. Friday night salsa lessons in the lobby before the show. Late night spoken word open-mic in the rehearsal hall. A porous theatre is far more likely to matter to its community come county arts budget allocation time. If you missed the Space discussion earlier, track down Charles Frasier of Portland Center Stage for more ideas of community space usage than your head can hold.
In closing, I am thinking back to a debate that winded through the funding and arts community a few years back around access and excellence. And for reasons still being debated, those became understood as mutually exclusive. Either an organization focuses on providing true, engaged access OR it focuses on creating world class art. But if this weekend has given us anything, it has given us permission to MAKE A BIGGER BOX. Rather than artistic production vs. community programming—embrace the cultural equivalent of mixed-use real estate development. Substitute AND for VS.—again, the art can take it.
Innovation begins with “what if” and doesn’t so much end, as it transforms into altered behaviors, actions and maybe even altered definitions. So what if we spent more time asking questions than pontificating answers? What if we didn’t immediately follow up community engagement events with the tracking of attendance at our shows, but instead spent some head space on how we might redefine our programming to reflect the way our community wants to engage? What if we committed to excellence in providing true access to our venues and our art, and committed to innovative access to the true excellence that is our theatrical legacy?
The crisis is not mattering. We’re plenty close enough to hear the mandate.