From the Executive Director

Behind the Boardroom Door By Ben Cameron

As executive director of TCG, I spend much of my time on the road—more than 20 days of some months—attending meetings with funders and theatre leaders, participating in cultural think tanks, speaking at community meetings and more. None of these activities gives me more pleasure than meeting with individual theatre boards.

I'm always inspired, in fact, when I walk into a boardroom and see the faces of those community leaders who have made room in their lives for us. Because we have chosen to devote our working energies to the theatre, we often lose sight of what the presence of the board participant means. With so many things competing for their time, their commitment and their resources (intellectual as well as financial), they have freely chosen to dedicate all those valuable things to us and our work—a decision that moves me more deeply than I can say.

Many trustees join theatre boards precisely because they love the theatre, but without necessarily understanding the complex set of dynamics that can be involved. As Jaan Whitehead, president of the board of the SITI Company, observed at the annual TCG Fall Forum (a meeting specifically designed to enhance trustee effectiveness), a board's focus inevitably settles on mitigating and minimizing financial risk—in preserving the organization for the community in a fiscally responsible way. But as we well know, theatre by its nature thrives on risk—the artistic moment cannot, in fact, come alive without it. This state of affairs can produce a collision of values between the risk-averse board culture and the risk-hungry artists' culture.

It was as succinct a summation of the very real dilemma of arts board service as I have ever heard. With such a basic, ground-level conflict present, how do we create healthy board cultures—cultures that serve rather than debilitate our organizations and our communities? That very question lies at the center of a new TCG publication, The Art of Governance, an anthology both philosophic and pragmatic, co-curated by Jaan and Nancy Roche, a board member of both TCG and Baltimore's CENTERSTAGE.

So as creative, collaborative entities, perhaps we need to discuss how we can facilitate the formation of creative, collaborative boards. Not loose-cannon, or self-indulgent, or formless—qualities too often associated with the word "creative"—but creative in all the ways we know real artists are—rigorous, specific, clear, intentional, embracing, and living by the consequences springing from making hard choices.

At that same forum in New York, it was Anne Bogart who delved deeper into the true nature of collaboration, describing agreement—especially easy, pleasant, perhaps pro forma or mindless agreement—as a deadening end, precluding inspired action and ideas. It is disagreement (albeit structured in appropriate and respectful ways), Bogart contended, that properly becomes a springboard for inspiration. And she analyzed creativity as a four-step process, an insight she attributed to Bill Moyers:

Step one: Show up. That means really show up—not merely walk into the room, but be present, senses vibrating, attention focused, energy high.

Step two: Pay attention. Maintain a state of receptivity, energy and responsiveness to the larger world around us, even as we pay more specific attention to the theatres where we work.

Step three: Speak the truth. No elaboration needed there.

And step four: Let go of predetermined responses, for nothing precludes true creativity more than determining the outcome before the process itself begins. Isn't this essentially what we want? Collaborative, creative boards?

It's certainly what I want for the board of TCG—and I think more and more as I look around the boardrooms, it's what board members want, too: not to interfere in the work of the artist, not to be seen as a walking ATM (which, let's face it, is the way far too many of us regard trustees), but to be known as collaborators who show up, pay attention, speak the truth and have the courage to relinquish rigid, predetermined results. This means that both organizations and their boards will have to take the risk of being more open, more transparent with one another. Nothing makes my heart sink faster—or incapacitates an organization more quickly—than a culture in which the staff whispers about the things they dare not tell the board, or, conversely, where the board holds back concerns or criticism from the leaders of the organization. Such a lack of honesty festers and ultimately destroys.

In that spirit, I salute those creative, collaborative boards—and specifically those individual board collaborators who give so much of themselves in service to our work and, by extension, to our communities. Serving on an arts board is, especially in this moment, a form of social activism. It is a statement of belief in the power of community, in the power of sharing the most private of feelings in the most public of spaces, in the value of breathing the same air—actor with actor, actor with audience, audience with audience—as we confront pain and difference, conflict and joy, in a safe environment. It represents a passionate belief that we can grow as a society only if we find the strength to confront and consider ideas that may make us uncomfortable or are not our own—and indeed that a community without art has no voice, no memory of its aspirations, perhaps is no community at all.

Let's bring precisely those things we cherish about the theatre more and more consistently into our boardrooms—and watch ourselves flourish as a result.