From the Executive Director
New Year, New Model
By Teresa Eyring
Happy New Year and greetings from everyone at TCG! In the coming months, I’m hopeful that we can stay strong and focused as a theatre community, that we are nimble in navigating challenges and responsive in the face of opportunity. I hope we can collaborate in understanding and articulating more clearly the public value of our work, and that we stay balanced as the world shuffles about on its economic tectonic plates.
I also hope that we can tackle some of the pressing questions that lurk about unanswered. First up: all of those questions surrounding our theatre field’s operating model. I hear often from theatre leaders, playwrights, trustees, actors, funders and various bloggers about new approaches to artistic and business models. The inquiry has been fueled by shifts in the cultural environment—including rapid developments in technology and new media—and more recently by the global economic crisis. One theatre trustee, Jim Steinberg, described our position in Dickensian terms befitting the season: “There’s the ghost of theatre past, the ghost of theatre present, and then…there’s the ghost of theatre yet to come. What will it look like?”
In any reimagining, we’re not just talking about shaving budgets, cutting a few staff positions, putting the office lights on timers and jettisoning the opening-night snack—although for some theatres seeking to “hunker down” and make it through the current recession, such strategies will undoubtedly need to be adopted. Building new models amounts to fundamental shifts in how theatres organize for the creation of work, the audience’s relationship to it, and the people structures and financial underpinnings that support it. It requires organizational structures (ensemble, hierarchy, collective or something else); community partnerships; resource ratios (what-percent earned to what-percent unearned); audience-engagement strategies (subscription—dead, alive or in between?); space utilization assumptions (are buildings always necessary?); ways artists make a life in this industry (besides learning to type, as choreographer Paul Taylor allegedly once quipped); distribution possibilities (will we ever be able to fully share our work in new-media formats?); and more.
A fundamental underpinning of the existing model is our place within the social sector, as not-for-profit enterprises existing for the public’s cultural and educational benefit. The late Ben Mordecai used to say that our resident theatres could not survive on ticket sales alone, because their artistic and educational purposes exceeded the potential of the box office. Put another way, most new work, significant known and unknown classic work, radical new aesthetics, innovative community education programs—none of these would see the light of day if we were operating solely within a commercial system. And that would be a tremendous loss to our communities and nation.
There are interesting parallels in other cultural industries. The website called Three Percent—a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester—explains why nonprofit independent publishers are largely responsible for the few translations of contemporary international literature that appear in the U.S. every year. (Just 3 percent of books published are international translations. When scientific, technical and professional titles are eliminated, the number drops to 1 percent—including retranslations of Dante, Dostoevsky and the like. For comparison’s sake, in France, Germany and Italy, these percentages range from 30 to nearly 50 percent.) Most contemporary international book titles would not pass muster when put up against the sales quotas required by larger commercial publishers and sellers. However, efficiencies within the not-for-profit publishing system make it possible for success to be achieved with smaller sales volume, and nonprofit status allows those publishers to operate with diversified resources—including funders who are passionate about giving Americans access to a wide range of literary viewpoints and the resulting democratic exchange of ideas.
Not to harp on this, but the not-for-profit model has been essential in the development of a rich cultural life in the U.S. In fact, it has been suggested that we cease referring to ourselves as nonprofits and start calling ourselves “for social profit.” And if we take this status for granted, we do so at our own peril. Ongoing congressional hearings continue to raise questions about what types of organizations should be considered beneficial enough to operate as nonprofits. Many cultural and educational institutions have come under scrutiny in the past year, and we will be focusing on this issue more.
We also hope to develop a shared, field-wide language about our models—what they are and how we might collectively examine their currency and effectiveness. For its part, TCG has been encouraging discussions about new strategies and approaches at its convenings (see “The Innovation Imperative,” July/Aug. ’08, about the 2007 Fall Forum), through the New Generations “Future Audiences” program, and through the Metlife/TCG Aha! Program, which provides funding for the exploration of innovative new strategies. At our National Conference in Baltimore in June, we will provide a forum for emerging practitioners to evaluate existing models and talk about how they would do things differently (as in “If I ran the zoo”).
We also want to know what you are thinking—let’s explore these topics together as we sail into 2009!