More information visit the festival website or blog.

Due to losses in charitable giving and declining attendance at larger cultural institutions, the health and vitality of the arts in the United States was lower in 2008 than it was in 2003, a new report from Americans for the Arts finds.

According to the National Arts Index (146 pages, PDF), attendance at art museums decreased by 13 percent over that period, while audiences at popular music events were down by 6 percent. At the same time, the report found that between 1998 and 2008 there was a steady increase in the number of artists and arts organizations and in arts-related employment. Indeed, while attendance at arts events is shrinking, advances in technology are changing how Americans experience the arts.

Conducted over four and a half years, the first study of the health and vitality of the arts industry in the United States looked at seventy-six indicators in nine categories to arrive at a decade-long view of trends in arts philanthropy, participation, and creativity as well as the relationship of the arts to other areas of American life, including employment and education. The measures include capacity and infrastructure, participation, contributed support, employment, nonprofit, creativity, demand for arts education, arts business, and competitiveness.

Measured against a base a core of 100 (in 2003), the overall index score fell to 98.4 in 2008 and achieved its ten-year high, 105.5, in 1999. “The current economic crisis offers a unique and important opportunity to begin a national conversation about the value of the arts — to us as individuals, communities, and a nation,” said Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute and one of the project’s advisors. “We need to rethink a nonprofit arts sector that in many ways remains tethered to support models that have remained unchanged for a half century. Arts organizations need to find creative ways to engage their audiences, build on the public’s growing interest in personal creation, and stimulate audience demand.”

Although the national study was funded in part by the Rockefeller and Henry Luce foundations, the Michi-gan-based Kresge Foundation has awarded $1.2 million to Americans for the Arts to create a companion Local Arts Index and provide workshops and materials necessary to assist communities in the effective application of the local data. “Our work in all parts of the country suggests that the National Arts Index will have a valuable impact on local communities of every kind,” said Kresge Foundation president Rip Rapson “The Local Arts Index — the local application of this national tool — will help local leaders in one hundred communities make better-informed decisions about arts and culture investments. It will also contribute to heightened community understanding of the importance that arts and cultural activities play in a community’s economic health and social vitality.”

“First-Ever National Arts Index Measures Health and Vitality of Arts in the United States.” Americans for the Arts Press Release 1/20/10.

Trescott, Jacqueline. “The Nationals Arts Index, a New Survey by Americans for the Arts, Paints a Troubling Picture for Arts Organization.” Washington Post 1/21/10.

Link to the index:

http://www.americansforthearts.org/pdf/information_services/art_index/NAI_full_report_optimized.pdf

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Theater in DC

Last summer, I was part of a panel discussing the topic of theatre and urban revitalization at the annual conference of the organization Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. The paper I prepared for that event is in the blog entry “Art, culture districts, and revitalization.”

And last weekend, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, which has been in operation in the city for 30 years, had a private conference to which I was invited, as part of a “strategic planning” process they have chosen to embark upon to grapple with the issues of what do they want to be now, now that they have a permanent and beautiful facility located just off 7th Street NW and a couple blocks from the National Mall.

I think what Woolly Mammoth is doing is a really gutsy move. It’s not a typical formal strategic planning process involving consultants and lots of Powerpoint presentations, but a messy process involving actors, patrons, board members, staff, and audience. The presentations and discussions convinced me that I was on the right track with the presentation in the summer.

In the summer presentation, I called upon theater professionals to do five things (even if in the entry I said it was four things):

1. Create your own discipline-specific cultural plan/Write a theater plan for your community.

2. Come up with a sustainable facilities plan for your community

3. Create anchoring institutions (to support the discipline, organizations, and artists)

4. Networking/rethinking about how to work together to develop the arts community as a component of the community’s cultural infrastructure and as a force to represent artists and artist organizational interests in land use, capital investment, public finance, cultural, tourism, education, and other local policy matters.

5. Figure out how organizations can share and maximize the value of audiences.

But where the paper didn’t offer any guidance was in discussing the question of local and regional theater vs. what we might call national theater being presented locally, as well as the how to better support local theater specifically, and the differentiation between presenting vs. producing theatre organizations.

In their new facility, Woolly Mammoth has repositioned and is focusing less on what we might call general community/neighborhood outreach, and more on supporting local theater as a discipline by hiring local actors, working with academic theater programs at the local universities, and developing and/or working with local playwrights.

The idea of a local/regional versus a national theater, as well as building local audiences and local institutions is being discussed in other places such as the blog Theatre Ideas; in the entry, “Welcome, New Readers” the author lists five key points:

1. Decentralization.
2. Localization.
3. Solidification of the Relation to the Audience.
4. The Improvement of Society.
5. Revisioning of the Business Model.

And the discussion in the New Colony blog (“Goals for Chicago Theater Series – the new colony blog!“) about five goals for theater in Chicago:

1) Produce MORE, MORE OFTEN and TOGETHER
2) Theater Companies: Show Some Balls When Programming Your Season!
3) Jeff Awards: Expand to Include Foreign Language Theater.
4) Theaters Should Work Together to Produce More Theater More Often
5) We, As an Industry, Need to Start Educating Our Audiences

To have a thorough “theater plan” as part of a community’s arts and culture master plan, these kinds of issues must be discussed in a direct fashion.

This is demonstrated to be true given the news in today’s Post, “The lights go dark at Catalyst Theater,” about how the Catalyst Theater Company is closing down, having failed to make a go of it in the much bigger quarters of the Atlas Performing Arts Center, and how the Atlas itself is having some difficulties, and is refocusing towards more of a rental facility (this is happening in Bethesda too, see “Bethesda Theatre To Try It as a Rental” from the Post), not to mention the clamoring for a regularized funding stream on the part of arts organizations generally (see “Arts funding source sought in D.C.” from the Washington Business Journal).

Not to mention the other failures discussed previously (see the past entry “Cultural resources planning in DC: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king).

Even though failure is part of the innovation cycle, the reality is that systematic and regular failure is an indicator of deeply rooted problems.

That’s where we are here in DC, in terms of support of the artistic disciplines.

The social/political obligations of cultural organizations to their respective communities will be examined in “Love in a Cemetery,”…

Just finished listening to Diane Rehm show from December 8, 2009.  She interviewed Robert Kennedy, former director of the national parks service, who collaborated on a new book When Art Worked.  The book is about the Public Works of Art Project–the first federal government program to support the arts nationally.

In the introduction, Rehm describes that time as a point when:
- artists were working for us/with the country.
- artists worked with the country to “find ourselves.”

Then, Kennedy shared a quote that I have been cooking on since I heard it:  “The work of art is to help to coax the soul of the nation back to life.”
Gutzson Borglum, the sculpture of Mount Rushmore, wrote this to Harry Hopkins, one of FDR’s advisors and major architect of the New Deal.  Hopkins kept the quote in his wallet for most of his life.

You can find the entire podcast on iTunes or wamu.org.

Wondering after your thoughts on whether our soul needs to be coaxed?  And who’s job is it to lead that charge?

Well, 8 million jobs are gone.  Half of those losses are described by employers as permanently gone.  Half of all children in the U.S. will be on food stamps at some point in their childhood.  Meanwhile, Wall Street companies received swine flu vaccines before public hospitals.

We are at a time where how we live as a society is in great contradiction to our values of democracy as an American people.

How does the current economic climate and sharp wealth divide shape the kind of civic engagement we are even able to have in this country, let alone in D.C?  As more and more of us find ourselves in the same boat, we need to see that we are in fact in the same circle.  In these times, expanding that circle can be extremely difficult.  But because of these times, it is all the more important.

So, in all of this, how does theater matter?

Federico Garcia Lorca once wrote:

“The Poem
the Song
the Picture
is only water
drawn from the well
of the people
and it should be given back
to them in a cup of beauty
so that they may drink
and in drinking
understand
themselves.”

Woolly does a lot well:

• having a resident company of local actors
• bringing new plays on important issues, like Eclipsed, which also featured 5 well developed roles for black actresses.  In the D.C. theater world, that is sadly rare.
• Offering free and reduced rate rehearsal and production space to local artists and community groups.
• Hosting great panel discussions and audience conversation starters.

D.C., a city with a population larger than Wyoming, has no right to vote in Congress and has the widest gap between the rich and poor than nearly every other city nationwide.  D.C. is still a majority working class town, as well as mostly Black and increasingly Latino.

A woman I know, she is working class, black and from D.C.  She’s a part of Classlines, a storytelling project of which I’m artistic director.  We were going to have a rehearsal here, and she didn’t know where or what Woolly Mammoth was.  This is not just about Woolly, but indicative of how the larger D.C. theater community is known nationally and invisible locally.

What Woolly can do:

• Fill the theater seats as well as conferences like these with D.C. residents.
• Take on fighting racism and classism through showcasing high quality performance as well as in the creation, production and publicity of it.  How?
• Expand the definition of new play development to include D.C.-based, hybrid, multidisciplinary artists who are doing high quality, innovative performance and who represent D.C.’s diverse communities in either who they are or what they address in their artistic process or content.
• Take on a resident company of these artists in a structured mentorship.
• Devote some part of every season to showcasing their work.
• Offer them professional development, any opportunities that local artists can engage with out-of-town artists and learn about the business and craft of theater.
• Have an area-based community advisory board that is racially and class-wise diverse to help bridge this art versus community gap.
• Systematically explore these questions as part of ongoing staff development.
• Bring groups like Appalshop or Roadside Theater to D.C. in a residency program.
• Offer youth internships.

But above all, in our ability as theater makers to tackle these questions of theater and democracy we must consistently reflect upon who is in our circle.  Not only as a company and a community, but as individuals too.

Our work is to transform people through theater.  To touch their lives.  It’s not just a job.  We’ve devoted our lives to this because we understand the power it has to change the world.

My work with Classlines currently is gathering stories of, by, and with everyday people as related to wealth and poverty in their lives.  In doing so, we can blur the boundaries between art and community by having the process of art-making be community engaged.  My theater pieces have often told the stories of my relationships with people.  And over the years, I’ve come to understand that the people I encounter have to be more important to me than the stories I tell, because if not, then the work I do is meaningless.  It’s the realness and longevity of those relationships that fuel, build and deepen the stories I am able to tell.

And the telling of those stories leads to broader awareness, which leads to the potential for social transformation.

By expanding our circle of those we care about, breaking down the long standing segregations of class, age, gender, race, ability, language, ethnicity, occupation — everything you can possibly think of and more – by expanding the circle of those we decide to allow into our lives, beyond the work itself,  that will transform the kind of theater we can make, and the reach it is able to have within the kind of democracy I know that I dream about.

So, the question is, who is in our circle? And who needs to be?

Knowledge and love advance in excess, in spill, breaking past themselves into what they do not yet know, what they have not yet loved. Ignorance and sentiment are stable.

DaSein, in Heidegger’s formulation, is one’s person, one’s presence, one’s position as a living thing, aware of its temporary, exact pulse against the limit of life. Our mortal excitement is: understanding exercised between a memory we may not own – ourselves before we were born – and a will superior to ours – death. We are a “this” made vivid by “not this.”

Understanding is not a settled place, but the territory, the ecology in which meaning is made. Our lives are committed to understanding; we do not remember, we do not will, in ultimate ways, but we make meaning within the space of an ultimate mind. So we are not constructed (personally, in our humanity) to hold. We are constructed to live in pure action without a master memory or will. We are clearly built to be, and disappear.

To assess the moral character of our institutions, look at what we are not, and make strangeness richer.  To be more alive, improve relationship with death. As Beckett says in Rockabye and Salinger in Franny and Zooey – our audience is death.

We are alive if we are out of control; if we are given away. In concrete terms: How do our audiences control us? Inventory what doors are locked, and who has the keys. Each key marks a crisis of position; personal rights and private property are a withholding from human nature and our public world. Are we looking to make a living off a world we are resisting? How may our esthetic be used up and misunderstood? To live, we avoid plays and processes that we and our audiences get; we move towards that which makes us mutually helpless. Paraphrasing John of the Cross, to arrive at the play you have not, go by the way of the play you have not. To be the space you are not yet, dispossess yourself of the space you are.

The Ishyo performance space in Rwanda is vital; on any given day there are weddings held there, aikido class, the company is off on their library bus playing scenes from the books to lure kids to reading; there is a pool table, a bar and a basketball court.

Our business, our sustainability depends on play. How are we unstructured, and improvisational? Our institutions are the least important aspects of our institutions. How can we ask for loyalty if we are not loyal? And what more supreme test of loyalty is our willingness to give up our lives for our other?

The corporate institution is the new person. The corporation – abstract, bodied – is the current gambit against mortality; we have made a golem without a soul and it walks off with our civics. The human person finds meaning socially; we are stripped of society by corporations, who would like us wholly dependent on what they sell us; they would like to control meaning. Human attempts at congregating: running barter economies; trading, making and improvising in personal ways – and our right to be helpless too – are criminalized. Instead of meaning we have only words. A corporation is aspirational zombie: an unstoppable, unkillable person, unkillable because it is made in imitation of death, with all the properties of death but standing independent of memory and understanding, no responsibility to understand – it is a theoretical semblance of death. The criminalization of poverty signals of this shift from the human to the abstract; this denial of mortality, this over-exercise of an as-if-superior will replaces: the beautiful mystery of understanding, always fluid and restless, with: certainty. We drive from morality to moralism. The criminalization of poverty goes hand in hand with the criminalization of theater; and the best theater in ages of certainty is criminal. The weakness, the interior threat inherent in democracy is a tendency to average; to be secure in the mean. A retreat from the edges of experiment is a retreat from death and ultimately audience; it is a retreat from authenticity. Euripides ended in exile; Zeami was exiled for a period; it is no accident that the Globe was paved over. If, in an age of reductive, inhumane, and frightened control, we are not out of control, then we are uniforming ourselves as the arresting officers of human potential.

Luke 17:

Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.”

“It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all.

“It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. On that day no one who is on the roof of his house, with his goods inside, should go down to get them. Likewise, no one in the field should go back for anything. Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it. I tell you, on that night two people will be in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding grain together; one will be taken and the other left.”

Let’s set aside the criminal misreading of the sin of Sodom as sodomy for another conversation; the sin of Sodom is clearly pride and has nothing to do with sexual deregulation. Here the rabboni is not advertising disaster as a model of heaven – he is saying that if you look for eternity in signs; if like Lot’s wife, you look back at what you know to go by the way you know not – you will read change as horror. Death is not loss, in theological terms. To put it in capital terms, Death is the only market that stages infinite growth.

The only different between the ignorant and the wise is that the ignorant need to know and the wise need to learn. In possessing, we obstruct loving, we’re idolatrous; after the thing and not the thinging. Dearer than the beloved or the lover is loving itself. Are we in search of the beloved thing or are we making room for more loving? We become, by curating a personal emptiness.

We will pay our bills better if we are more over-run. Practically speaking we are moving more and more to free content, with local specificity (“meaning” is the new oil) and universal distribution. Shows have to move, staff has to travel, but one way to be everywhere is to site everywhere – let everywhere blow through us. Fill our homes with cooking, and naming, and snot-nosed crying over romantic break ups. Do not compare box offices, show to show and theater to theater. How hot is the kitchen and is it rich in stink? What is the house like at 3 a.m.? Are there enough beds? If we put our hands between into an empty bed at any point, are the sheets still warm?

If Woolly Mammoth is not Woolly Mammoth, but is the curator of its emptiness, then it can be a stranger here too, and just as entitled to the hospitality.

Plays are not our content, they are consequence of the scenes we are making.

Theaters are not built for community, they are the accident of community. The community needs a theater not for what it is, but for what it makes spare. This space  made by stepping back is particular. Death in a personal shape is mercy or hospitality.

The colonial era has passed. The corporate era will. The structure with the finest prospect of survival is the home.

We cannot think without memory. We cannot live and make choices without thinking. Memory is structured by meaning. We must re-socialize to make these meanings, on personal terms.

Theater is not shows, or a mass of years. Theater is a movement. It is project, not an institution, not a corporation. Celebrate the transitory; quit, be quitting every day. And, since you’re a movement, and not a seller of things, give it away for free. This again is a successful capital model – establish a free service, that allows for democratic control – be very scared for a couple of years; eventually we make money by running turbines with the flow of our popularity – if we the water, the wheel will find us. No matter how well we build a wheel and a millhouse, the charm of our construction will not attract a river.

Home is a demonstration of the principles guiding sharing. Are we subject to the deepest dangers of hospitality, or are we only sentimental? What are we sharing? What are we giving away? How is our “nothing”?

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