When I was looking around the Memphis Manifesto website the other day, I came across a June 2003 Smart City interview with Ben Cameron who is currently the Executive Director of the Theatre Communications Group. TCG does advocacy and surveys on theatre, promotes some educational initiatives and publishes drama texts, American Theatre magazine and ArtSEARCH. The last publication has been one of my near companions in my job search efforts.

I any case, I stopped subscribing to American Theatre some time ago because it wasn’t delivering anything new of significance to me. However, listening to Ben Cameron, I wonder if I should revisit the publication. If nothing else, I am going to listen to more of these Smart City interviews.

He discusses that in the past the focus of the arts has been on presenting quality. Trying to figure out how to do it all better than in the past. This has been reflected by one of the key evaluations of the work–the newspaper review which has discussed the merits of performances based on the quality.

He says when he was working for Target Stores as Manager of Community Relations the message he often got was that the focus needs to be on presenting the value of attendance. Certainly, the work has to be of the highest quality, but just like Target, if people don’t see any value in walking through the doors, they never get to see the quality offerings within. He comments that this has only been recently that the arts have begun having a discussion on the value of a cultural experience.

There are 4 areas of value he says:

1) Economic-money spent by the organization and those who patronize the institutions contribute to the economic well-being of a community.

2) Education- arts benefits have manifested in studies showing that high risk students are more likely to participate in math and science, disciplinary problems and absences decrease, graduation rates increase.

3) Community Cohesion- Exposure to cultural expression increases tolerance for racial differences.

4) Civic Vitality- Cites Richard Florida studies of how creative classes contribute to municipal health.

I understandably interested in what he said after the interviewer asked him to discuss a talk he made at a Ford Foundation event that referred to how vaudeville theatre owners reacted to the emergence of film. So much of what he said reinforces topics I have read about and written on.

He echoed a fair portion of the pre-Ford Foundation history of the arts noted in the Leverage Lost… article I cited. (When I originally cited that paper I never realized it would end up having a recurring significance on a weekly basis!) He talked about how the number of professional stock theatres plumetted and how arts production shifted to the non-profit system we have today.

Cameron refers to a book titled The Radical Center: The Future of American Politicsby Ted Halstead and Michael Lind. It is difficult to transcribe the gist of his commentary on the book, but in brief, the authors noted that historically when there is war, technological change and a shift in rural-urban demographics (Civil War, Depression-WW II, etc) the tendency for the American people is to alter the social compact.

Cameron agrees with the authors that we are in the middle of a period when we will reinvent the social contract. Thinking that you can “just keep your head down” and weather the stormy economy may not be a viable strategy for continued success. He feels the challenge faced today is determining what social forces to pay attention to so we are prepared for how the situation realigns rather than waiting and trying to play catch up.

Among the examples he uses of theatres making preparations for the shifting expectations is the shifting of performance times on some nights to 6:00 or 7:00 instead of the traditional 8:00 curtain. They are doing this to in response to people’s work and travel schedules and have met with success. This allows people to go to a performance right from work and still be home to kiss the kids good night by 8 or 9pm.

He also notes that some theatres are opening their rehearsals to the public. People are curious to see the process and learn how things come together. (A subject I broached back in February.) Some theatres are apparently taking the Today Show route and rehearsing on street level in a room with a plate glass window. Others are rehearsing outdoors or inviting people in.

The move has required a revamping of rules and expectations. Cameron gives the example of Anne Bogart’s company (I assume SITI. He doesn’t mention the name.) She tried it for a production and the actors apparently screamed at her at the end of the first rehearsal. She asked them to stick with it three weeks. They had to establish some ground rules for this new way of doing things. Among the questions they had were whether they should be playing to the audience or to the director.

He doesn’t mention the answer, but it occurs to me that as simple as the question might be, it does indeed represent a complex situation. Rehearsals are about the director and actors communicating with one another on many levels. Performances are about the actors and audience communicating. Audiences would have to understand they wouldn’t be getting that communication. Actors would have to remember that a choice they made that got a pleasing audience reaction might not be a valid part of the director’s vision for the production.

The upshot of the decision though is a positive one. The actors told Anne Bogart they never wanted to rehearse any other way in the future. They saw exciting possibilities associated with having the people for whom they were making the work in the same room as them.

Other strategies have been to redesign the physical plant adding cafes, etc to make the theatre a social destination and not just a place you go to see a play. “Theatres thinking not about just how do we make a performance, but asking bigger questions like how do we orchestra social interaction in which the performance is a piece, but only a piece of what we are called to do.”

He goes on to talk about the importance of arts organizations to “open our embrace to the fullest spectrum of the inhabitants of our cities and towns.” He speaks not only about non-traditional casting and producing shows that have resonance with different segments of the population, but also in encouraging people of diverse backgrounds to pursue careers in the management end of the arts where they can make active contributions.

As I stated earlier, an interesting interview that I am glad I listened to out of curiousity. Some fodder for thought.

I have been looking around to see what I can find out about the efforts communities are making toward becoming one of Richard Florida’s Creative Communities. Of course, I came across the Memphis Manifesto. The links section provides a wide range of links to interviews and organizations across the nation which are trying to organize to revitalize their communities. The community website I liked best was Tampa’s–CreativeTampaBay.com

While all the other websites have information on long range planning and goals for their cities, Tampa’s front page has a number of ways people from the community can get involved in the efforts. They have salons people can attend to discuss the initiatives they are lobbying for and learn more about the creative community concept.

They also provide people with the forum to suggest their own initiatives to attract creative workers. The forum serves like meetup.com in that it is a central source of information about efforts that are being made in areas like improving transportation, technology, character building and civics, health, greenways and trails as well as arts endeavors.

It is difficult to assess how active each of these initiative groups is. It is good to see that Creative Tampa Bay is trying to harness the efforts of as many constituencies as possible and get them invested in the goal of attracting creative workers. There seems to be an effort to find strategies appropriate to the Tampa Bay area rather than appropriating what was successful for other cities as has been a concern of mine.

Excerpts of my letter to Drew McManus (much of which is covered in the entry prior to this) and his answers appear today on Adaptistration.

This weekend I came across a couple articles that illustrate the effect of national cultural policy upon a nation. The first was an article from the Minnesota Star-Tribune entitled “Music Education Permeates Finnish Society.” Essentially the article attributes all the exposure and value placed on classical music by the Finns as the reason why there is such a high concentration of musical talent there despite having a national population only slightly larger than Minnesota’s. My favorite part of the article is a comment by an American visitor that he watched 3 television channels one evening. Two had concerts and the third was carrying a debate about whether to build another orchestra hall. In a couple of articles I have quoted, the authors have said orchestras should stop blaming the disappearance of music education from schools as a reason for falling attendance. On the other hand, clearly education and exposure can’t hurt attendance.

The second article I came across was discussing the effect of focusing cultural policy on diversity. While the piece refers to British policy, I saw a number of parallels with the US cultural landscape. As much as I believe diversity is going to be a major influence on cultural programming in the US, I take this article as a warning about the negative aspects.

In the article, “Art for Inclusion’s Sake”, the author, Josie Appleton, believes that by rejecting the old methods for approaching art, current policy has also discarded some valuable principles. The author illustrates this by tracing cultural policy from the 19th century. She notes that Parliment was motivated to fund the creation of the National Gallery by the idea that exposure to the finer things would defuse the unrest among the masses. “In 1841, a Commons select committee saw art as a ‘means of moral and intellectual improvement for the people’. The view was that ‘men cease to become mob when they get a taste’. The National Gallery, said Peel, would help by ‘cementing those bonds of union between the richer and poorer orders of the state’.” The National Gallery was therefore placed centrally in London so that both rich and poor would have easy access.

She notes that the elite was acting in its own self-interest to avoid rebellion and were presenting objects that exemplified their ideal of beauty but there was also an egalitarian sentiment. There was a presumption that everyone possessed the intellect to enjoy and understand the art pieces regardless of social standing or ethnic background.

However, in the 1960s and 70s, the idea that there was a universally shared ideal of beauty began to erode. The concept instead was:

All claims to cultural value were merely the personal opinions of a white middle-class male elite, foisted on to the population in order to maintain power structures. A cultural democracy, by these terms, was a society in which everybody was able to express their opinion and create according to their taste. Only by getting rid of value judgements could culture serve everybody’s needs.

As the 80s arrived, the onus was on cultural institutions to justify their existence in economic terms. This is still very much a factor in the US where organizations justify the value in regard to how much money they bring to the community by their operations and via what patrons spend on food, lodging and gas when they visit. Even the current mania to become one of Richard Florida’s Creative Communities is more about bringing economic prosperity rather than an excitement about how much beauty and truth will enter one’s life as cultural activities become available.

During this time, Appleton says, there was such a push to have art mean as many things to as many people as possible, art lost its meaning altogether.

If you value a painting only because it can tackle unemployment or improve self-esteem, then you have no idea what it is really worth. It’s all about context, about the way in which you are using the painting, rather than the painting itself. ‘Cultural diversity’ policy blossomed as an expression of this situation. Uncertain about how to evaluate artefacts, cultural institutions celebrate difference as an end in itself. ‘Diversity’ here is really a metaphor for cultural disorientation.

She notes that museums have begun putting pieces by the Old Master’s into storage and have started asking people to bring in objects from their own lives and are putting them on display. The aim is to provide a sense of worth to a person by acknowledging that their belongings have some value. “Because cultural institutions no longer believe in cultural value, their collections of Rembrandt and Constable look shamefully narrow and exclusive. By collecting the most everyday things from the most marginalised in society, museums are engaging in self-admonishment, castigating themselves for once being so high and mighty.”

She notes that by using piece of art and artifacts define personal meaning, museums are actually working counter to diversity. If an object is used to learn more about ourselves, we aren’t learning anything about the others who made it, what their lives were like and how they contributed to our current existence. It is self-centered rather than contributing to empathy with people different from ourselves.

This result almost sounds like Orwellian newspeak–“Self-Centeredness is Diversity.” It is this along with an unintentional disempowerment of the participant I see as most worrisome and something to be wary of as arts organizations move into the future. Appleton says:

“This policy also has a low view of its visitors. The assumption is that visitors are uninterested in or unable to learn about the world. Each person is seen as trapped within his or her own private bubble, in constant need of affirmation and recognition. The idea seems to be that if people fail to see their reflection in exhibitions they will feel worthless and excluded…The image is of people wandering around aimlessly, unsure of their right to exist until their family photographs are valued by the museum. With this view of their visitors, it’s no surprise that museums have put the Great Masters in the backroom.”

Another criticism she has for diversity focused policy is that it shifts the criteria for success away from attracting large crowds to attracting large crowds with a certain color skin. For example, “Islamic art is not valued for its intricate, proportioned design, or because it provides us with an insight into one of the great historic civilisations; it is valued because it gets the right kind of punters through the doors.” She asserts that this engenders a segregationist mentality that demeans the intellect and curiousity of different racial groups by assuming they are only interested in collections that reflect their background and experience and wouldn’t understand or care for pieces connected to other traditions.

The situation in England provides some lessons for arts organizations in the US. In a pursuit of diversifying and expanding our audiences, we certainly need to provide a product that is accessible and appealing to our communities on more than a token basis. The most enthusiastic audiences are those who have a relative performing. The problem isn’t just that we can’t possibly present something that has some personal relevance to everyone in the audience. The problem is also that when people come to see their relatives, they aren’t paying attention to how well the show is done or thinking about the themes it is communicating. You aren’t engaged in audience building activities when you program with an eye to pleasing niches. The niche disappears from the seats when the element significant to them disappears from the stage.

This is why education programs like Drew McManus’ docent proposal are so important. Audiences need to be provided with insights into the value contributed by all the nieces and nephews involved with a piece. As the public is able to make choices on television, radio, and the internet that reinforce an increasingly narrow worldview, the arts may end up being the last forum in which a dialogue about wider issues can be presented.