Future Shock

From the Executive Director

By Ben Cameron

This This month's American Theatre brings coverage from our June biennial National Conference, a gathering that reminded us of the thrilling, perplexing, dynamic, confounding, frightening, exhilarating issues we face in this business—all in a moment when we are seeing a new generation of leaders ascend to positions of responsibility, bringing new-found animation and curiosity and passion.

The conference theme, "The Role of Live Theatre in a Digital Culture," provoked a significant level of discomfort—a discomfort that stemmed not from our ignorance of technology itself but, at least in part, from the repeated suggestion from all of our speakers that, for the over-40 generation, raised to fight over who should be the authorities, we have arrived at a moment when the notion of authority itself is under siege.

Social scientists have described the march of human history from the agrarian to the industrial and now to the information/technological/digital age. With each shift has come profound changes in human relationships, in conceptions of the individual, even in the understanding of history and memory. Today we stand at the threshold of other seismic changes in our perceptual frameworks. It is not that computers and the digital age are good or bad; it is simply that they are. Their increasing dominance will have reverberations far beyond what we can anticipate. How will we greet these changes: with openness and flexibility, or with resistance and protest?

In such a time, how do we create organizations that can remain true to the spirit of the not-for-profit—a sector dedicated to making an educational, social or cultural contribution to a community—even as we are forced to compete in an increasingly commercial marketplace? How do we create organizations nimble enough not only to embrace and attract leaders from new generations and new communities, but to respond, adapt and change to meet the insights these new leaders bring? How do we, in essence, find the clarity to retain what is most vital to organizational strength while mustering the courage to undertake broad-scale change?

Already the social contract is changing around us—has changed, as bestsellers like Bowling Alone remind us. And perhaps we have no further to look than our own "Theatre Facts" report to see the rubber meeting the road. As you will see on page 49, fiscal year 2000 marked the first time that single-ticket sales produced more revenue than subscriptions—a shift that occurred in aggregate but also in five of the six budget categories into which we divide the field. While one year does not a trend make, and while this may be an uncharacteristic blip, it may also be the early manifestation of trends we have been eyeing warily: the reluctance of people to make commitments in a longer time frame, the increased competition for leisure time, the increased likelihood that consumers will make decisions based on market product rather than form relationships with organizations. And while economically this shift has profound resonance—far more money is expended to attract a single-ticket buyer than to renew a subscriber—it has profound programming implications as well: Our ability to produce unknown, new plays has often been feasible precisely because subscriptions provide the economic cushion and ensure the minimum audience to make such work possible. If subscriptions are diminishing, what will this mean about what we choose to produce? Such questions are especially pressing as we witness the annual erosion of the percentage of the contributed dollar going to the arts.

Indeed, what does it mean to be a theatre in this digitally altered world? What role does theatre play? In the light of current developments, I would suggest that a theatre’s purposes are threefold:
— In a time of multi-tasking, of prioritizing bombardment of sensation rather than digestion of experience, we promote not merely hearing but listening—intentional, deep, contracted social listening—the ability to truly hear.
— In our constant exploration of what it means to be human, in our insistence that we find value in seeing the world, touching the world, tasting the world through perspectives other than our own, we cultivate and replenish an all-too-rapidly vanishing sense of social empathy—a habit that lies at the heart of our ability to converse and understand across political, racial and religious lines.
— In our pursuit of works of collective imagination, we remind ourselves and others that there can be alternatives to life as it is being led; that there are possibilities beyond the scope of our present reality; that everyday commonplace reality—from the wheel to the Internet—began as a dream outside the frame of life as it was then being lived.

Many of us have been fascinated by research that suggests that the more time people spend on the Internet, the more depressed and lonely they become. I too find hope in a faint choir of voices, hungering for sustained human interaction. I worry only about our insistence (often ill-defined and perhaps excessively romantic) that people driven by the web will need live theatre as an antidote. If this belief causes us to be complacent, to mindlessly behave as we always have in the past, we will indeed be casualties in this changing world.

Conference speaker Thomas L. Friedman evoked a vision of the future as "cultural Darwinism on steroids." It behooves us to approach that future with a strategy—and woe to any of us who plunge ahead without one.

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