Bringing Up the House

Audiences come into focus at the 2006 TCG conference

By Nicole Estvanik

During the opening plenary of TCG’s 2006 National Conference in Atlanta, director Anne Bogart explained why she would not think of giving up the theatre: “I’m in love,” she said, “with what happens in the morning when an actor wakes up, and somewhere else an audience wakes up, and the whole day leads toward their meeting across the footlights.”

But often at the moment of that meeting, a performer looking out into the darkness cannot see the faces beyond the edge of the stage. What do they look like? How are they reacting? Who is here—and who is not—and why?

Essentially these were the questions 733 members of the theatre field—including representatives from 206 TCG member theatres—had gathered from June 8-10 to discuss at the palatial Robert W. Woodruff Arts Center, home of the Alliance Theatre. The conference theme was “Building Future Audience.” But the proceedings addressed the equally strong compulsion to understand current audience, a useful exercise both from an artistic and a marketing point of view.

As the speaker for the opening plenary, Bogart set the tone with the declaration that “the relationship between the artist and audience is everything,” and she mused over the services theatre ought to provide for those who fill the seats. “The first job of the theatre is to slow down time for audiences—to change the time signature of the lives we live,” she said. Another item in the job description, in her view, is “to create new kinds of society on stage that might be communicable—and I mean that like a disease.” She lauded the European tendency to treat audiences “as part of the process rather than receiving a product” and decried the American impulse to ease audiences into a play, and to “do far too much on stage” rather than press viewers’ imaginations into service.

Bogart also had a counterintuitive suggestion for spicing up the relationship between art and audience: playing hard-to-get. “We have to make it harder in ways that make going to the theatre more special. It could be a delicious obstacle. But I would hate us to try to make ourselves too available. That’s never attractive, for anyone,” she quipped.

As the conference progressed and lectures, forums and casual chitchat piled onto Bogart’s remarks, the fable of the blind men going to observe the elephant came to mind. Each man in that tale, with his limited faculties, assumes the animal is comprised of whatever he happens to touch—so that he who grasps a tusk announces elephants must be like a spear, the one holding its tail calls it a rope, the one against its side proclaims it a wall. Likewise, each person at the conference, with his or her unique vantage point and concerns, could contribute one small piece of the puzzle. Only by synthesizing all those views might a composite portrait of “audience,” both present and future, begin to emerge.

For guest speaker Colin Greer, there is another kind of elephant in the room—”the myth of the mainstream”—and, unlike the eponymous beast in George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” this one deserves to be slain for the good of the people.

President of the “radically progressive” New World Foundation, as well as a board member of New York’s Lark Theatre Company and the Culture Project, Greer told Orwell’s colonial parable to highlight the misunderstandings America’s political class has perpetrated in its attempt to characterize and placate the American public. Despite talk of mandates and majorities, Greer insisted, there is no monolith of like-thinking Americans. Social change begins not with widespread consensus but with localized grassroots movements.

According to Greer, those same political pundits who cite the mainstream are addicted to polls. But polls “say nothing about imagination, nothing about what people can dream.” If you want to predict—or better still, change—the future, art is a far more effective tool.

Greer disagrees with linguist George Lakoff (who began the talk of elephants with his speech at last year’s TCG Conference). Rather than reframing messages from the top down, as Lakoff advocates in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant, Greer insisted progressives should focus on “harvesting” the language people use to talk about their own conditions. Who knows how to do this better than theatremakers?

“Mainstream” was not a dirty word for all the speakers. For Guy Garcia, author of The New Mainstream, the term is a way to understand another kind of emerging majority. From Garcia’s perspective it’s consumers, not activists, who cause political change. The growing numbers of America’s so-called cultural “minorities” give them economic clout. “The profit motive is forcing corporations, institutions and culture to pay attention to the values, needs and interests of people of color in a way they never had to before,” said Garcia, whose remarks were delivered in tandem with those of Wendy Puriefoy, president of Public Education Network (PEN), and moderated by Alliance Theatre’s artistic director, Susan Booth.

Garcia further suggested that multiculturalism is no longer the rule just among groups of Americans but within individuals. A typical representative of this new mainstream might consider herself Asian, Latina and black. “The idea of merging and blending is something that not only represents young people genetically,” Garcia continued, “but it’s actually the way they see the world.” In light of this trend, a single cultural filter may be inadequate to satisfy an individual theatregoer, let alone a theatre’s entire constituency.

Puriefoy, for her part, used her podium time to describe the reform campaign being spearheaded by PEN. “It turns out that the way we’ve been talking about public education turns people off. We make it so complicated,” she said, “that they can’t even find the handle to the door that we want them to walk through.” (Scattered applause and “hmms” met this pronouncement.)

Puriefoy said another of her team’s findings was that parents “want places their children can feel human and whole.” This is a need the arts can fill. However, she cautioned, “we can’t ask them to look at the travails of other people’s lives and not have it relate to their own. What goes on inside your theatres will have to do with who comes in.” She recalled her own childhood: The established theatres had only “vanilla” offerings, she said, in no way resembling her own experiences as a young black girl in a segregated society. So she turned to her home, her church and her school for a personally affirming connection with the arts.

Both Garcia and Puriefoy made clear that institutional change comes slowly. “It may take a generation or two,” Garcia said realistically, “before the right person is running the theatre who can connect to the new audience that just emerged in the last 10 years or so.” Still, as in the corporate world, he warned, the quickest to adapt are the most likely to survive.

Social scientist Kevin McCarthy of RAND Corporation stepped up next. In his theories of audience-building, “Who are they?” is a question less of ethnic or economic background than of varying dispositions toward the arts. (This is a topic of considerable interest to RAND, which has released two recent publications by McCarthy on patterns of arts participation.)

First, said McCarthy, audience development is not just a matter of selling more tickets but of knowing what kind of theatregoer you want to buy them. Are you trying to cement the relationship with your core audience members to make them stronger allies in the future (what McCarthy calls “deepening”)? Are you convincing occasional attendees to come more frequently (broadening)? Or are you attempting the hardest task of all, diversifying—trying to make theatregoers out of people who view the arts as a waste of time or, as one theatre leader lamented during the Q&A session, believe they’re “not smart enough for that”?

These are all valid ways to “build” an audience, but it’s difficult to pursue all three populations at once because each will respond to a different set of tactics. So first, said McCarthy, a theatre must select a primary audience-building goal in keeping with its mission. Next is to figure out exactly what is keeping the target population at a distance.

McCarthy reminded the gathering that a frequently suggested cure-all for increasing ticket sales is to lower ticket prices. This may indeed entice a certain type of person to enter your doors, he agreed—perhaps the arts-loving young person for whom cost is a barrier—just as changing curtain times might make it easier for parents or commuters to attend more frequently. But it’s important to recognize that it’s not cost or inconvenience that keeps everyone away, he said. “For people who are not predisposed, or alienated,” he remarked bluntly, “the arts are worthless at any price.” For reluctant theatregoers, it’s attitudes (grounded in upbringing, social reference points, personal tastes, past arts experiences) that must be addressed. It will be necessary either to change their perception about what theatre has to offer them or—more radically still—to change what is offered.

With so many points of view to be heard over the course of two-and-a-half days, attendees were encouraged to shape their own schedule by attending two of three “mini-plenaries.”

One was a conversation, moderated by Arena Stage’s Molly Smith, with Joan Blades, co-founder of the political activism website MoveOn.org. Blades is a valuable resource for the theatre field primarily because MoveOn—along with a new site she has begun for working mothers—is a primer for getting large numbers of people inspired and involved. Her experience using the Internet to do so is intriguing to a field that is just beginning to figure out the potential of that medium. For starters, Blades advised, “The Internet when used most effectively is not so much a broadcast system as a back-and-forth.” She pointed out that the online MoveOn community has been a powerful catalyst for face-to-face interaction at the local level, for example through thousands of house parties thrown by constituents. “Give your community a challenge,” Blades urged.

Several theatres experimenting with Internet marketing shared their strategies—having artists blog throughout rehearsals, for example, or crafting “trailers” of shows to post online. MySpace.com, a networking and homepage site (and the web addiction du jour of young America) was mentioned with reverence here as it would be throughout the weekend, someone in the know jumping in to explain the phenomenon, followed by ruminations about how the theatre field could catch up with the music industry in turning the trend into a tool.

Another mini-plenary introduced conferencegoers to the philosophy and goals of the World Social Forum (WSF), where, according to panelist Candido Grzybowski of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analyses, consensus is not the aim (“a feeling of change is enough”), although participants are unified by their opposition to global commercial liberalism. So far, the international WSF model has inspired 100-plus social forums around the world, and the United States’s first will be held in Atlanta in summer 2007. TCG board member Melanie Joseph, who is president of the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute and who attended the 2005 WSF in Brazil, read aloud a letter that pleaded with artists to contribute their strengths to the effort, including their facility for collaboration and ability to “live comfortably imagining what isn’t there, until it’s there.” If the goal is a new world order, Joseph added, the only way to ensure a space for the arts is for artists to be part of its shaping.

The third mini-plenary was moderated by director Robert Leonard of Virginia Tech, and brought together Meena Natarajan, John O’Neal, Marty Pottenger, Michael Rohd and Michael Sommers to discuss “Making Theatre, Building Community” through the lens of their own theatres’ work, including Natarajan’s Pangea World Theater, which has given voice to Minneapolis’s Native American and Hmong populations, among others, and Pottenger’s work in Portland, Maine, dramatizing the testimony of those affected by a 2001 Homeland Security raid on the border. Rohd described Sojourn Theatre’s Witness Our Schools project on the history of public education in Oregon. The show was based on 500 interviews gathered over two-and-a-half years, but what Rohd considers exceptional about the project was whom it reached: Every Sunday for nine months the company performed for free in a different Oregon community, followed by a town-hall dialogue. Rohd reported proudly, “The audiences at the performances, after a lot of partner-building and collaboration, included legislative leaders and also those who are not traditionally part of policy conversations.”

For the zealous conferencegoer, even lunchtime was programmed with an optional “Salon Series” spotlighting legends of the regional theatre such as Deaf West Theatre’s founding artistic director Ed Waterstreet and retired CENTERSTAGE managing director Peter Culman. In one such session Woodie King Jr. recalled that he recognized in Ntozake Shange’s eventual hit for colored girls... a long-awaited opportunity to produce black poetry for the theatre, minus the usual backlash; the “stunning legs” of the performers, King said half-jokingly, distracted would-be critics. In another lecture hall, Tisa Chang recounted traveling with her Pan Asian Rep company to South Africa in 1992, just after Mandela came into power; quietly, she recalled that after a performance of Cambodia Agonistes, about the Pol Pot era, the mixed Johannesburg audience “was in tears, and I was in tears.”

Between plenary sessions, conferencegoers browsed a vendor fair and TCG Books table and visited the “Spotlight On” exhibit for New Generations and NEA/TCG Career Development Program grantees—a sort of “Building Future Artists” parallel to the conference theme. Within the Woodruff’s gallery space, the featured artists walked visitors through their displays of photo albums, videos and models. Director Kristin Horton, for example, had set up a 13-foot-long scroll “mapping” Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire. When she directed it in 2001 the many tangents of the play “reminded me of a subway map,” explained Horton, “so I wanted to see what it actually looked like if I cut out the lines and pasted them together.”

During one Q&A the Inge Center of Kansas’s Peter Ellenstein voiced a common anxiety about the nonprofit theatre field: “We have tried to merge the two challenges of creating art and marketing it. And it’s hurt us deeply.” For those overwhelmed by talk of demographics, the Spotlight On gallery was a refreshing, art-focused refuge. Another antidote to the cloud of statistics were the doses of performance on the schedule. At the opening ceremonies, the high-school students of Free Street Programs enacted their sober, self-written eternal return; Pick Up Performance Company’s Ain Gordon and his mother, Valda Setterfield, performed an excerpt from Art, Life & Show-Biz, in which Setterfield strutted out her veteran memories of working in the theatre; and Alternate ROOTS presented a slice of Uprooted: The Katrina Project, a mix of dance, music and personal testimony. That night, after a buzzing cocktail reception, shuttle buses carried partiers to local theatre Dad’s Garage, where the celebrations continued downtown-style with beer kegs and a lively improv show. Other Atlanta theatre companies, including 7 Stages, PushPush Theater and Horizon Theatre Company, also extended invitations to conferencegoers for various performances and social events.

Later in the conference, versatile solo performer Daniel Beaty delivered a transformational excerpt from Emergence-SEE!, which he premiered at Philadelphia’s Freedom Repertory Theatre and will perform at New York’s Public Theater this fall. And throughout the weekend there were several opportunities to take in Open Eye Figure Theatre of Minneapolis’s The Adventures of Katie Tomatie. Its final performance was moved outdoors onto a sunny patch of grass in the arts complex’s main piazza, in front of a colorful Roy Lichtenstein sculpture of a house. The venue was fitting for a puppet show its creators normally perform in neighborhood yards and driveways—their own particularly grassroots (pun intended) method of reaching new audiences.

The conference’s usual structure was tweaked right from the beginning: Participants whisked directly from registration into “affinity groups.” These smaller meetings allowed arrivals to form immediate personal connections and got the participants focused on audience issues. After providing a snapshot of their theatres’ current financial perspective, groups—split by budget sizes—went around the table with responses to questions such as: How did you engage your community this year? What does your audience look like versus what you’d like it to look like?

Breakout sessions throughout the weekend zeroed in on specific issues, such as a panel geared toward theatres flirting with the idea of forming a university partnership, or a conversation on integrating education programs into the artistic life of theatres. At the latter, Denver Center Theatre Company education director Daniel Renner recalled a residency about suicide his department did in high schools, after which students were invited to attend a production of Waiting for Godot. “They came on bikes, on skateboards, which they left in the coat check next to the old ladies’ furs,” Renner remembered with a smile, observing that the kids’ energy changed the nature of the experience for the adults present, too.

Another packed session explored the significance of theatres’ buildings within their communities. “Permanence means not just an idea,” said TCG board president Abel López, whose GALA Hispanic Theatre moved into its own District of Columbia home in January 2005. “What people can relate to, ultimately, is a physical space, especially in the Latino community. We wanted to tell our audience they deserve a nice place.”

Some sessions featured artists discussing their current projects—those excerpted at the conference, as well as ongoing initiatives, such as the Pan-American theatre collective NoPassport, and upcoming endeavors, such as Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays. Others were pragmatic: “Maximizing the Public Phase of Your Capital Campaign,” “The Board’s Role in Ensuring the Success of a New Leader.” And some were just plain therapeutic: “On Why We Lie,” “Our Biggest Failure.”

For those who like to mix their pragmatism and therapy, a time slot was reserved for open sounding boards organized loosely into issues of management, artistic leadership and governance. At one such forum for independent artists (of whom there were more than 100 at the conference), individuals dished about finding mentors (“I need it more for the networking than for help developing my voice”) and debated whether it might be better just to move to Europe. Inevitably, familiar grievances seethed out—”If you pay someone $150, why do you get to call yourself a professional theatre? That’s not a living wage!”—but the bitterness was leavened by the comfort of preaching to a choir that knows the rewards as well as the frustrations.

The 2006 conference was possible thRoughfunding by the National Endowment for the Arts, the AEC Trust, the John H. and Wilhelmina D. Harland Charitable Foundation, the Charles Loridans Foundation, the James Starr Moore Memorial Fund and Wachovia. Fisher Dachs Associates and Schweickert & Company served as national sponsors. The Nathan Cummings Foundation underwrote programming related to the arts and social justice and participation by theatres and artists of color. Theatre Development Fund ensured access for deaf participants. Regionally based participants received support from the Georgia Council for the Arts, Fulton County Arts Council, City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs and Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund. The Atlanta Performing Arts Coalition provided valuable assistance to conference organizers.

TCG’s annual Peter Zeisler Memorial and Theatre Practitioner awards were presented at the conference to Will Power and Woodie King Jr.; funder awards also went to the Wallace Foundation and the Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund. TCG executive director Ben Cameron took a moment to pay tribute to managing director Joan Channick, who, like Cameron himself, was preparing to depart from her role at TCG. “Whatever successes we’ve had as an organization would not have been possible without her,” he said.

At TCG’s annual meeting, open to all, one of those successes in particular was highlighted by board member Molly Smith: the first stage of the Free Night of Theater initiative. The three-city event this past October drew roughly 8,000 people to attend a show at one of 150 theatres they’d never before visited. The program will expand this year to 15 regions, with the goal of going truly national in 2007. Other topics at the meeting included future leadership plans: the search for new board members and a successor for Cameron.

Back during the first plenary, Anne Bogart had proposed an interesting take on the concept of audience: “There’s not a crowd of persons that is your audience. Everybody is your audience,” she suggested. “But when you are speaking to them as an artist you are speaking to a particular part of them, and you choose that particular part.” In other words, the key to building a nation of theatregoers might not be the question, “Who is out there?” but rather, “What reasons do we give them to want to come in?”

At the close of the weekend it fell to Cameron to assemble the puzzle and see if any answers had emerged. He prefaced his remarks by saying that the field has become adept at quantifying its economic and social impact for legislators and funders. Still, declining ticket sales “suggest we have failed to make a compelling case for our emotional value,” and that’s what prospective audiences need to hear.

Of course theatres want to increase attendance, he said, but doing so will trigger unforeseen changes within an institution. “The addition of any new group, if seriously engaged, not only has the potential to displace and redefine the old, but will almost certainly do so.”

So if we want these new groups for the long haul, what are we willing to change for them? A less vanilla season? The opening of our rehearsal halls and our minds to feedback from increasingly savvy audiences? More opportunities for socializing within our buildings?

Even as such changes bring in new faces, they can be an alienating move to those who have sat with us for many seasons, Cameron warned. There are those who loved our theatres just as they were. “How do we evolve,” he asked, “in a way that embraces our supporters and takes them on our journey, if indeed we wish to do so?”

Whether existing theatres do evolve or new ones rotate in to take their place, Cameron wrapped up with this assured prediction: “Just as the not-for-profit theatre field of 50 years ago bears scant resemblance to the field we know today, the field of 50 years from now will look different, will act different, will be different than the one we know today.” As, no doubt, will the people who walk through theatres’ doors.