From the Executive Director

Interconnectedness Is the Word

By Teresa Eyring

In January 2010, I attended (and tweeted from) the opening plenary of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference in New York City. This session stuck with me for many reasons, most notably because it pulsed with a sense of invention and optimism about art's increasing potential to impact the world and transcend borders of every kind. It was a mini-world-expo of ideas, with themes that came back to inspire me as we constructed this special international issue of American Theatre—and simultaneously planned TCG's upcoming annual National Conference in Los Angeles, themed to address the guiding question "What if...?"

For that APAP meeting, we were situated in a ballroom at the Hilton Hotel. Rocco Landesman, sporting cowboy boots, was there to present the National Endowment for the Arts's new triple-entendre-ish slogan "Art Works." Radical choreographer Elizabeth Streb waxed poetic about becoming a "live-action hero" (which is also the subject matter of a book she has gone on to publish). Rafael Lozano-Hemmer described his lighting installations, through which participants grasp heart-rate sensors and watch entire parks lined with stage lights that operate in concert with the rhythms of their heartbeats. Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky) mused on projects that mesh conventional approaches to art-making with the vast opportunities presented by modern technology.

I recently came across my Tweets from that session and was again inspired—particularly by DJ Spooky:

DJ Spooky: is quoting William Gibson: "the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed."

DJ Spooky: says interconnectedness (also calls it collage) is what makes this century worth investigating

DJ Spooky: disagrees with Rocco on statement that arts are overbuilt+audience declining.

The first of these comments was Tweeted and re-Tweeted and eventually became attributed to someone other than William Gibson. The third—DJ Spooky's response to a statement Landesman had made in an earlier Q&A—generated little public discussion until a year later at another convening, where Landesman again talked about an oversupply of art. This time his comments inspired a flurry of Tweets and blog posts that catapulted the topic into a heated national debate. It also illustrated the rapid development of the impact of social-media conversation in just one year.

All told, it's DJ Spooky's second point that continues to resonate for me. We are in the second decade of a century in which our "interconnectedness" is materializing as a new pathway, forged by technology, social networking and global awareness. These developments make it possible for the arts community to refer to itself more comfortably as an ecosystem—on a local, national and even global scale. And it has also inspired artists to combine their creative consciousness with personal activism and community engagement in new ways.

An experimental hip-hop artist by trade, DJ Spooky illustrates the point beautifully on all fronts. He is among the artists and musicians creating new renditions of existing musical works for the nonprofit Voice Project. In addition to being aesthetically engaging, the project is designed to help bring awareness to the plight of child soldiers in Central Africa. DJ Spooky worked with the classical cellist Joshua Roman to compose and perform an electronic cover of Radiohead's "Everything in Its Right Place." He is also working in the South Pacific to build the Tanna Center for the Arts, an undertaking that is global in scale but for which he is drawing on the local community and local materials.

A new kind of openness and interconnectivity was also emphasized by actor Jeffrey Wright in his World Theatre Day message, composed for TCG and the U.S. Center of ITI. As Wright put it, "If we listen well and observe, the theatre's gift to us is the sly suggestion that what occurs within its walls can occur without them, too—that the world is changeable." Wright, a heavily booked stage and film actor, has nevertheless devoted himself to economic development projects in Sierra Leone. In his message, he shares an epiphany: One evening during an initiation ceremony that made him an honorary chief, he observed a ritual that turned out to be "the most pure form of theatre I've ever witnessed."

What if...the events that occur within the walls of theatre can also occur without them? Wright talks about the power of theatre artists to imagine new worlds, to take their practices beyond conventional theatrical settings. But his words also summon a broader definition for our art form: Theatre, he suggests, can happen in the context of pure social exchange, in the service of social causes or on the wings of social media.

DJ Spooky and Wright present us with exquisite displays of global citizenship. And we in the theatre know that another pathway to "interconnectedness" is through the stories themselves. This April, Macbeth had three simultaneous outings in New York City. Interested parties could experience three wildly differing visions of the Scottish play: a critically acclaimed staging by Theatre for a New Audience; Cheek by Jowl's stripped-down version at BAM; and Sleep No More, the nonlinear collage offered by the British company Punchdrunk, performed in a cluster of converted warehouses.

Together these Macbeths round out the message: Whether it comes through extreme acts of artistry and global citizenship, or through the retelling of a classic work of theatre, interconnectedness (or collage) is indeed what makes this century worth investigating.

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