From the Executive Director
3 New Year Wishes
By Teresa Eyring
Happy New Year! From the sound of it, 2010 will continue to carry the descriptor "unusual times," and we will need to summon our most profound creativity and agility. To that end, I wish everyone a year of happy experiments, gleeful boundary-stretching and joyous personal activism.
Happy experiments: Last year as the economy continued to sour, more and more questions arose about the viability of the predominant business model for theatre. It turns out we were not the only ones asking these questions. Surfing the Internet one day, I typed in the words, "The model is broken," and pages of entries came up: "the venture capital model is broken," "the free TV model is broken," "the open source model is broken," "the newspaper model is broken," "the supermodel model is broken," and so on.
In one blog, Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky wrote about the newspaper industry's problematic future. He speculated: "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place? The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as Craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did." Shirky sounds right on target to me.
Theatre, when it has survived and thrived, has often done so through its ability to undertake experiments. This was certainly the case in 2009, as theatre organizations tried new approaches to engaging stakeholders, mobilizing social media and partnering with other organizations.
I hope members of our community will continue to hone their identities as willing mad scientists. Additionally, as we wrestle with the model question, I hope we create a how-to-survive-and-thrive definition that is expandable enough to serve as a practical tool, and that provides a common language for talking about our diverse enterprises and aspirations.
Boundary-busting: As I talk with various arts practitioners about the rigors of the previous 12 months, another theme comes bustling forward. It has to do with silos and the desire to eliminate them—inside organizations, among artistic disciplines, in public life. There is a yearning to dissolve the containers that separate civic discourse from art, institutions from community life and artists from nature—as if these were all simply artificial constructs.
That theme persisted this past October, as Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu of Louisiana organized what he called the Louisiana Cultural Economy Summit and World Cultural Economy Forum in New Orleans. About 50 countries were represented, and Landrieu was joined in a provocative opening panel by a political strategist, a Nobel Peace Prize–winning Brazilian environmentalist and Grenada's minister of social development. Their discussion covered the subjects of climate, the economy, environmental change and the arts, treating these usually-walled-off topics as interchangeable and inextricably related—and the potential silos among the subjects at hand melted away.
A month later, Washington, D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company staged a full-day think tank called "Who's in Your Circle?" to solicit ideas about how a company such as Woolly, now 30 years old, can continue to have meaning for its community and be a place for discourse and the expression of citizenship. The object, at least in part, seemed to be ensuring that the walls of the company's relatively new building would be porous to the melding of ideas and people and creative expression.
The best city parks (which can claim the advantage of not having walls) demonstrate these silo-free traits—permeability, interactivity, a sense of limitlessness. One summer evening in Madison Square Park, I happened upon a massive LCD screen hanging above a transfixed gathering of New Yorkers on blankets. They were watching the U.S. Open under the stars and the twinkling skyscrapers of Manhattan. A few weeks later, a series of festive tree huts appeared in the park, built by Japanese-born artist-in-residence Tadashi Kawamata. Some months later, I encountered in the same place an installation called Pulse Park, created by the interactive public artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Through it, a visitor could hook up to a pair of heart-rate sensors that activated 200 pulsing theatrical spotlights. A few steps away, diners queued up for gourmet burgers at Danny Meyer's Shake Shack. What could have been a largely uninhabited public square had become a place where world-renowned artists, technology, trees, burgers, webcams, kids in tiger PJs and super-sized television could happily coexist.
Imagine what can happen when you discard all assumptions about what persons, ideas or activities go in which box.
Personal Activism: The articles in this special training issue of the magazine are primarily about the voice, literally. We also, each of us individually, possess a voice that communicates our beliefs and aspirations—and when we join in community, it becomes a collective voice. This aspect of the voice enables us to debate and lay plans for our theatre community and its future, to advocate in the political sphere, to meaningfully participate as citizens of our towns, the nation and the globe. This is a year for us to be strong of voice and unencumbered by unnecessary boundaries—and to make crucial new connections in the process.
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