Facing the Unknown

From the Executive Director

By Ben Cameron

This past spring, I had the pleasure of teaching a graduate seminar in arts-management issues at Columbia University. The students, drawn from the graduate programs in administration, directing, dramaturgy and playwriting, were a fantastic group. Our reading list emphasized Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Richard Conniff’s The Natural History of the Rich, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information and Douglas Rushkoff’s MediaVirus!, among other works; our guests included the ever-inspiring Sharon Jensen from the Non-Traditional Casting Project, audience-development expert Donna Walker Kuhn and artist advocate Holly Sidford. We made journeys through the history of the theatre movement; encountered the thoughts of leaders present and past (the students loved the ideas of W. McNeil Lowry and Garland Wright, to name two examples); and explored the issues that consume us all—diversity, changing perceptual modes of thought, philanthropic developments and more.

In preparing for the class, I often found myself wondering how much use I could possibly be to these students. Especially in a time of such seismic upheaval—when the very existence of the not-for-profit sector seems imperiled—what did I have to offer them? I was armed with far more questions than answers: I could share some of the achievements of the past, but was woefully unarmed with concrete, specific tactics for confronting the challenges of the future.

Indeed, that very sense that we are facing the unknown—a sense that certainly seems more powerful to me now than at any time since I began working in this field—became the animating principle for the class’s work. I was especially delighted to witness the students’ passionate, enthusiastic, galvanized response to Zelda Fichandler’s “Whither (or Wither) Art?”, published in the May/June issue of this magazine. On some level, they recognized in Zelda’s account of founding Arena Stage their own situation: the experience of looking ahead; the need to forge a new path where none has existed; the awareness of the challenges involved in creating entirely new structures.

My appreciation of the rewards that lie in revisiting our founding days—as my students did when reading Zelda’s piece—was reinforced recently by a conversation with Perseverance Theatre’s artistic director Peter DuBois. He described the deep joy of speaking with theatre founders—conversations he likened to those possible, not with one’s parents, but with one’s grandparents, marked by a kind of candor and generosity that parents and children find more difficult to achieve. This appreciation has complemented encounters I’ve had at Penn State, American Conservatory Theater and other schools where I had the honor of addressing graduating classes. The students’ palpable hunger—their eagerness, their avidity and love for theatre—were all deeply inspiring to me, reminding me of the hopes I harbored at a similar moment in my life.

From all of these encounters, I have taken away two things. Firstly, I have realized that, in asking my students to challenge every assumption, every tenet and practice, I have gone through the same process on behalf of TCG. My students’ questions and probings—and my own preparations for class—forced me to a different kind of contemplation and self-scrutiny. The experience has given me a new sense of what might be accomplished in the next chapter at TCG—a chapter with new emphases and new directions, despite these constraining times. You’ll be hearing more about these changes in this column in the coming months.

The second lesson springs from the fact that (it being so easy to feel defeated or disconnected, given the challenges we face today) we tried in the class to be more articulate about our individual core values. Having already defined the what of our lives and the how (the combination defined by a choice of major and a subsequent path of study), we acknowledged that we might now profitably spend time exploring the why—why we must do the work we are individually called to do.

Years ago, I recognized that, whatever my artistic skills might have been, my directing work neither afforded me sufficient nourishment of spirit nor contributed to the field a sufficiently distinctive voice to warrant my pursuit of a directing career. If I could make a contribution to the field, I realized, it would lie in the work I could do galvanizing, energizing, focusing and inspiring the energies of others—work that has sustained me, whether I was teaching, serving as a grantmaker at the NEA and Target Stores, or leading TCG.

For all of these reminders, I thank the students I encountered this semester. Individually and collectively, you inspire me and give me hope for this field. Many of you are entering our field at a moment rife with questions and uncertainties. We look to you to be leaders, finding new pathways for us all. And to you I pledge I will do everything possible to build a TCG that is worthy of you and your work—work that I, for one, anticipate with eagerness and curiosity and hope.

© - 2006 by Theatre Communications Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.