The Point of Collectivity

Joanna Harmon has an interesting post up at TCG on an idea for small theatre companies to pool resources in order to achieve more administrative efficiency and better distribute the collected talents of many individuals in a given theatrical community. It's full of very interesting ideas (and certainly demonstrates the way most of us should be thinking about sustainability in our communities), and is worth reading in full, but I have to say I disagree with what seems to be the basic premise: outsourcing the unseemly business of business.

Look: I get that as artists, we're not fans of the mechanics of reaching our viewing public. It can be tedious, bloody, frustrating work (I say this as someone who founded and ran a theatre company for several years and then fled for the comfort of graduate school), but while there may be good ideas to be mined from Ms. Harmon's post, if the intent is to relieve the "burden of business" from artists, I don't think we do ourselves any favor in distancing ourselves from constructing a healthier infrastructure for one another. We live in a society that prices all goods and services according to a volatile, unpredictable market (there are valid, debatable questions to be discussed as to whether or not that's the best way for a society to relate to art & artists, but that's a separate conversation...), as such, by being an artist, we enter into an understanding with society that we are, in fact, commodities. Our work (if you're an actor...you) is priced and bought and sold. Why artificially separate ourselves from that reality? Why not learn it and master it and build a genuine, lasting relationship with our business associates? Why not embrace the diversity of administrative models that could be invented to support various different companies?

I think part of the problem is one that Ms. Harmon hints at here:

Considered on an individual basis, they [small theatre companies] are not reaching the critical mass—in terms of audience size, staff or annual budget—necessary to be deemed eligible for a level of support that would lead to longevity. Many also remain dependent on grants as their primary source of funding. As they look ahead, a gap emerges between where they are and where they want to be– between “small” and “large” (also dubbed “emerging” and “established”). Where is the middle ground?

It's a valid question - but one that reveals a key problem with much of the thinking that goes into the creation of our art - namely that many of us fail to clearly articulate our rationale for existing in the first place. Why form a theatre company? What are you trying to achieve? Who are you trying to reach? I tend to think many companies are absent a middle ground because they fail to articulate an objective that can be scaffolded to reach. Too often, young artists jump into the act of creating art in order to make work for themselves. Could you imagine a business in which people decided to form companies to make cups for their own cabinets? You'd have a lot of cups, that's for sure, but I'm not really clear on what your social value would be. In a scenario like that, it seems the worst thing you could do would be to generate more distance between the doers and the builders. Everyone should be taking part in learning the good, bad and ugly of our violent economic existence.

I'm a firm believer in more theatre companies. I advocate for the group of 20-somethings who start making plays in a relative's garage and invite neighbors and build sets with found materials. We need more theatre. Period. We need to reach more people. We need more plays and more actors and more directors and more writers, but we also need to be accountable and intelligent. If you want to have a theatre company - you have to own the part of it that is, in fact, a company. You have to give people their money's worth. You have to realize that it's not really about you, but about a mission; one that's attainable and makes sense in the context of your community (actually, Ezra Klein's article about doctors is really, really applicable here. Trust me). If you live in rural Kansas and want to start a Wooster Group-like theatre and then get upset when no one comes to your performances, you have to answer the question of why and what people actually want to see. Apple didn't become Apple because they made something nobody wanted, they became Apple because they smartly identified a need people had and fulfilled it.

People do have an innate need to be in rooms with one another and hear stories (arguably now more than ever), so let's own the fact that it's a business and get cracking on what exactly they want to see & hear.

And yes, let's run our own box offices and learn how to count money. Because that's just as important as the rest of it.