More on Participation

So apparently WolfBrown is doing a study on participatory arts -- Ian at Createquity has the details, but WolfBrown defines what they mean: "In this case, “active” means that the participant is involved to some extent in creative expression (i.e., creating or performing)." Ian thought it might be a good thing to crowdsource. So let's see what people consider "active participation":

• Unsilent Night, where "composer Phil Kline's free outdoor participatory sound sculpture of many individual parts, recorded on cassettes, CD's and mp3's, and played through a roving swarm of boomboxes carried through city streets every December.  People bring their own boomboxes and drift peacefully through a cloud of sound which is different from every listener's perspective.
• All Raise This Barn, All Raise This Barn (East) is a "group-designed and assembled public structure created in response to a public vote by the Rensselaer campus and local community. Using a commercially available barn-making kit as the starting point, online voting determines architectural, aesthetic, and labor choices, as well as whether the assembly is collaborative or competitive."
• Takes by the Nicole Canuso Dance Company. "Within a large cube wrapped in semi-transparent screens two dancers perform fragments from their lives. Captured by multiple video cameras, their actions are woven into an elaborate reel of "takes," and projected back onto the screens as large black-and-white films. At turns hypnotic, visceral, and intimate, TAKES creates multiple layers of visual movement between the performers and their projected selves, weaving into the present what they thought they had left behind. TAKES captures the full intensity of how past moments live within us and how they intercede with the present. Viewable from 360 degrees, the audience is invited to move around and shift perspective during the show.
• Random Acts of Culture,"brings fine art to the population and breaks down barriers that prevent consistent engagement in the arts."
• Artistic Rebuttal Book, "in artistic fashion, I want to make a book full of rebuttals to the “art is worthless” debate. That is to say, a book full of “Oh yeah! Art is worthless? Take this!” But with a bit more research and validity, of course :)"
• "Song of Houston: East +West will explore the stories of first- and second-generation immigrants to Houston from all over the East, starting with the Chinese community," said Anthony Freud, general director and CEO of Houston Grand Opera. The project will continue through 2014 and is expected to commission a series of nine chamber operas. “As its name implies, Song of Houston is deeply rooted in the cultures of all those for whom Houston is home, and will generate fresh, relevant, exciting new operas by important composers and librettists. We are passionate about collaborating meaningfully with communities throughout our city," said Freud.

I have a feeling that WolfBrown's main research result may be discovering that people in the arts have no idea what "participatory" means, even if you define it clearly. Participation in creative expression isn't letting spectators carry a boom box around, or move around during the production, or vote on what color your barn is going to be, or be present when you deliver "fine art" to them in a non-traditional venue, or serve as the subject of your commissioned work. It means actively participating in creative expression. It means sharing the ownership of the artistic process. It means it isn't about you, the artist. It means using your own skills as an artist to facilitate the expression of others.

A Thought About TEDxMichigan Avenue

I was only able to stay for the morning sessions of TEDxMichiganAvenue, because my son was graduating from Illinois State that evening. But I've followed the Twitter hashtag, and read some of the blog posts about the speakers that came after me. And from what I can tell, many of the speakers seemed to touch on a similar topic: participation.

All of us seem to have soaked in the whole crowdsourcing, Clay Shirky here-comes-everyone-cognitive-surplus theme that currently dominates many discussions of how the web is changing our expectations about, well, just about everything. I have to admit, I'm sold -- I think there is a major change happening, and I think that Shirky is the one who tells the story in a way that is most relevant to the arts.

But I'm curious as to whether people in the arts are really getting it. We keep talking about using the web for marketing, using Twitter and Facebook and various apps to "strengthen the relationship with the audience," or using Twitter for a back channel conversation during a show. And all of those things are important, and could lead to some interesting experiments, but I don't think they get to the center of this revolution -- or "reformation," as Ben Cameron said in his TEDx talk about a year ago. He said that the central questions being asked were "who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?" There's the real crux of the matter.

There will always be spectators and performers. The question is whether the performers (and the playwrights as well) are going to continue to be separate groups. Will most artistic experiences continue to consist of an art-commodity created by artist-specialists and sold to consumers? That certainly is not the model being discussed by Shirky. Whether "lol cats" or YouTube videos or independent films created with equipment purchased with a credit card, people want to not only consume, but create as well. And the question is: will artists learn to share the stage with them, will they sit down and let amateurs stand up, will they work alongside them to create and tell stories?

In all of this discussion about "strengthening the arts" in America, I don't hear anyone asking the question "for whom?" And the reason I don't hear it, I have a feeling, is that we are all holding on real hard to strengthening the arts for the artists -- it doesn't even occur to us that the category artist-specialist may end up shrinking to make room for an enlarged artist-amateur category, as the people-formerly-known-as-the-audience demand to participate, not just observe.

Are we ready to share? Not only to share, but to facilitate and encourage?

Who? You!

Over at ArtsJournal.com, the discussion of "Expressive Life" continues, and Alan Brown (of WolfBrown, who released the report on the intrinsic value of the arts) writes:

This conversation reminds me of the time six years ago when Wallace Foundation and RAND released Gifts of the Muse - Reframing the Debate about the Benefits of the Arts. After providing us with a terrifically erudite accounting of arts benefits, the authors' lead recommendation in the last chapter was to "develop language for discussing intrinsic benefits." And I wondered, whose job is it to create this new language? (Frankly, I'd hoped RAND might make some suggestions...) I imagined a room somewhere in the sub-basement of the NEA where wordsmiths were earnestly hammering away at new framing language that will, once and for all, tickle the funnybone of policymakers and convince them that the arts really matter.

The answer to Brown's "who" question, of course, is us. Bloggers, artists, educators, citizens, anybody who recognizes that the creative life of this country has been stolen by corporations (including non-profit corporations) and sold back to us as high-dollar products produced by underpaid and overpaid specialists. As Obama said back when he was a candidate, "We are the people we've been waiting for." But it requires that we become educated in our field.

Back in June 2008, I wrote a post about what I had learned attending the National Performing Arts Convention, where a discussion (on ArtsJournal.com) of the WolfBrown report was centerstage. Among artists, at least artists who blog (and by the way, when you're done pointing us to female bloggers, Isaac, would you find out where the blogs by actors are?), the report was virtually ignored, or dismissed. Here is what I wrote:

But what I have learned here at NPAC is that those who wield power in the theatre -- the administrators, the board members, the foundation staff -- do read these studies, do recognize the value of the data and the ideas, and do put them into action -- and that is how they maintain their power. They think more broadly about the art form. The result of lack of knowledge is a diminished power for artists, who give over control of their art to those who will take the time to study, to learn, to think. Mike Daisey, who brilliantly performed How Theatre Failed America here in front of the assembled administrators, rightly condemns the low status of actors on the regional theatre scene, but there is also truth to the idea that their status is low because they have given away their power by not being knowledgeable about broader issues than the latest theatre gossip, and not being willing to educate themselves on the issues and speak their mind together to demand change. They fear repercussions, yes, but they also avoid engaging anything but the most insular issues.

We in higher education must do something to change this know-nothing orientation. Instead of giving semester-long classes in auditioning, we need to empower our actors to take control of their art form, develop entrepreneurial skills, understand the context of their art form within the larger culture and economy, and become powerful, engaged artists who will not allow themselves to be manipulated and exploited.

The only way that things change is if artist become empowered, and they only become empowered if their are educated. Paulo Friere's classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed should become required reading for all theatre people so that they can understand what is at stake in developing their critical consciousness.

We're all busy, yes, and these reports often aren't page-turners. But like Outrageous Fortune, or better yet like Gates of Opportunity, the more we know the better understanding we have of the actual situation (and not just our own little corner of the world), and the more we know the better decisions we can make. Do we have time? Clay Shirky says we do, and he's right:




We are at a turning point in our culture. As Shirky says, in the 19th century it was gin, and the 20th century is was the sit-com, but we are starting to rouse from our binge and want to participate. We can wait for others to change things for us, or we can dig in and do so ourselves.

Bill Ivey, again as part of the Expressive Life discussion, provides a good reason why we need to take control of this discussion:

Now I'm not a conspiracy theorist (really; I'm not) but if I were it would be easy to frame the entire nonprofit arts scene as a plot to keep smart arts people from ever thinking about things like copyright, union agreements, media ownership, or mergers in the recording, film, and television, or live performance industries. They give the NEA an extra ten million some years, and it's all "high-fives;" the next year they take it away, and we spend thousands on seminars to help us cope with the funding crisis. All the while, bigger forces are quietly tying up the Internet, expanding the footprint of IP, while allowing heritage assets to be locked up in the vaults of a few merged media giants. The nonprofit scene can be viewed as a medium-sized sandbox in which arts people are asked to play for a pittance while mainstream policy actors use legislation, legal interpretation, and regulation to expand controlled revenue streams. But I'm not, just not, a conspiracy theorist...

I don't think you have to be a conspiracy theorist to see a lot of truth in what Ivey is saying. We have allowed ourselves to be distracted from the real conversations, and while we've slept, others have made decisions that have a great impact on us. Now we look at the figures and see that arts participation is at the lowest level in years. Are we going to change course, or are we going to ask the band to play just a little bit louder?

David Byrne and Mr. Tanner

The Ancients and the Moderns

Judging from the comments on my post below concerning David Byrne's December 12 blogpost "Art Funding or Arts Funding," there is a lot of people who find the idea of funding arts education and new work over classics objectionable. As seems to be our tendency in today's society, where critical thinking skills seem to have gone the way of the appendix, some people feel as if they are actually saying something important if they "uncover" the motivation someone has for writing an idea, rather than dealing with the idea itself. Hey, conjecture is always easier than actual thought. And so we get this unlikely syllogism:

1. David Byrne is a pop singer.
2. David Byrne is suggesting that public money be used to support arts education and living artists.
3. Therefore, David Byrne wants public money to be used to support only pop music.

First of all, let's just say that $32M for a Wagnerian opera cycle is absurd by itself. But hey, if there are rich people out there who think it is cool, more power to them. But to ask LA county to foot $14M of that cost is really obscene. Nobody deserves that amount of money for a single production. Period.

But Byrne is using that production to illustrate a larger point, one that is getting lost in this rehashing of the 300+ -year Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Here are the critical paragraphs from Byrne's post, as far as I'm concerned:

I think maybe it’s time to stop, or more reasonably, curtail somewhat, state investment in the past — in a bunch of dead guys (and they are mostly guys, and mostly dead, when we look at opera halls) — and invest in our future. Take that money, that $14 million from the city, for example, let some of those palaces, ring cycles and temples close — forgo some of those $32M operas — and fund music and art in our schools. Support ongoing creativity in the arts, and not the ongoing glorification and rehashing of the work of those dead guys. Not that works of the past aren’t inspirational, important and relevant to future creativity — plenty of dead people’s work is endlessly inspiring — but funding for arts in schools has been cut to zero in many places. Maybe the balance and perspective has to be redressed and restored just a little. (underlining and italics mine)

What a radical concept: restore balance and perspective between the past and the present just a little. This isn't Artaud's 1938 "No More Masterpieces" (although I think Artaud had a point), but just a call for balance.

New Plays and Diversity

This goes to the center of our discussion of diversity and new plays. People are convening and blogging about how to get more diversity on our stages, but we are ignoring the single thing that would make the biggest impact: committing to the production of new plays. If every theatre in the country (save those devoted to the work of a single playwright, like Shakespeare festivals) committed to producing more new plays than revivals, the demand for new work would increase exponentially, and I believe so would diversity.

Margo Jones, one of the pioneers of the regional theatre, knew this. In 1951, she wrote in her classic Theatre-in-the-Round:

I believe it is imperative in creating new resident professional companies to take a violent stand about the choice of plays. Personally I believe in the production of classics and new scripts, with emphasis on new scripts. Our theatre can never be stronger than the quality of its plays. We must, therefore, have a great number of good plays. The classics have proved their value through­out the history of the theatre, and I believe we should draw on them as great literature and great theatre. But if we produce only classics, we are in no way reflecting our own age. Our theatres must not only be professional, they must be contemporary as well. The most excellent seasons in New York are those which bring forth exciting new play-writing talent.

Too many people are saying, "I'll do a new play if I can find a good one." Certainly you must find a good one, but this attitude is not good enough. The plays can be found if you look hard enough. And if you take the vio­lent stand I have spoken about, you will feel obligated to search and search and search until the scripts are dis­covered. I have a belief that there is great writing in America today and that much of it has not yet been un­earthed.

Great theatres have always had their playwrights. Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Moliere, Ibsen—all these were men around whom theatrical companies were functioning. The Moscow Art Theatre had Chekhov; the Abbey Theatre had Yeats, Synge and O'Casey; the Provincetown had O'Neill; the Group had Odets. We must have our new play­wrights, and we will not have them unless we give them many outlets to see their plays produced. This is the best way in which they can learn to write better plays.

The production of classics is healthy, but it is not step in the flowering we want to see in the American theatre. We need progress, and the seed of progress in theatre lies in the new plays.

But what happened to this attitude? It got destroyed by Tyrone Guthrie. In the 1964 book about the founding of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis entitled A New Theatre (the irony of that title still rankles), Guthrie wrote:

It seemed to us that the only way of knowing a good play from a bad was to apply the test of time. Our programme would be classical; only those plays would be chosen which had seemed, to discriminating people for several generations, to have serious merit, which had, in fact, withstood the test of time. This would still offer a very wide choice.....If it be granted that fifty years is the absolute minimum of time required before a new work of art can wisely be regarded as a classic, then it follows that the American theatre cannot as yet claim to have developed a classical dramatist.

Think about that for a moment: the only way to know a good play from a bad play is to apply the test of time. Let's just let our grandparents decide what plays are good, because we sure can't. And because the Guthrie theatre made such a splash, attracting nationwide media attention for bringing in Hollywood stars like George Grizzard, Jessica Tandy, and Hume Cronyn to do Shakespeare and Moliere, everyone decided this must be The Way Things Should Be Done. And so we have our current regional theatre season, dominated by classics, with perhaps a single slot devoted to a newish play, preferably one that's been blessed by the NYC critics or won a major award. But an actual new play on the mainstage? Gasp! We'd have to close our doors! And so our contemporary playwrights scramble for crumbs, and eventually decamp for Hollywood where everything they do is new. Imagine if the Shakespeare's company had taken Guthrie's attitude, or Moliere's. There wouldn't BE any classics beyond the Greeks and Romans.

But note that Byrne isn't suggesting that classics aren't valuable. He writes: "Not that works of the past aren’t inspirational, important and relevant to future creativity — plenty of dead people’s work is endlessly inspiring." But let's restore some balance. Jones was saying the same thing, so was Clurman when he co-founded the Group Theatre, and so were those who founded the Provincetown Players (although the latter two had less patience with the classics than Jones). But then, a few years later, we let a Brit play on our sense of American cultural inferiority, and we abandoned the development of our own unique artistic identity to become Europe-lite. Shame on us.

The Real Revolution: Empowerment

Byrne follows this with what is a far more revolutionary and far-reaching idea:

I sense that in the long run there is a greater value for humanity in empowering folks to make and create than there is in teaching them the canon, the great works and the masterpieces. In my opinion, it’s more important that someone learn to make music, to draw, photograph, write or create in any form than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol or Bill Shakespeare — to say nothing of opry. In the long term it doesn’t matter if students become writers, artists or musicians — though a few might. It's more important that they are able to understand the process of creation, experimentation and discovery — which can then be applied to anything they do, as those processes, deep down, are all similar. It’s an investment in fluorescence.

He's not suggesting we make everybody so-called "professional artists," much less pop music icons. What he is saying is that people should be empowered to take creative expression back into their own hands -- to make music, draw, photograph, write or create in any form, and to do it themselves, instead of buying it from some specialist with an MFA. Yes, learning about the classics can be inspirational, but all-too-often the underlying message that is communicated is, as Byrne puts it, "about valuing the classics more than anything you and your pathetic friends can make." This is also, by the way, the underlying message of TV shows like American Idol. For every singer plucked from "obscurity" and hurled into the music stratosphere, the TV audience spends weeks laughing at the ineptitude of just regular folks who think they might just like to sing.

O Fall On Your Knees

The tragedy of this attitude, which is deeply ingrained in contemporary America, is beautifully illustrated by the late Harry Chapin in his heartbreaking song, "Mr. Tanner":



"Music was his life, it was not his livelihood, and it made him feel so happy, and it made him feel so good. He sang from his heart and he sang from his soul. He did not know how well he sang, it just made him whole."

We've forgotten the true value of the arts, which is not solely about virtuosity (although virtuosity can be inspiring and has its place), but about making us whole, about allowing us to express the feelings within us, about allowing us to connect to what is beautiful and heartfelt, to what makes us human. When we sing, when we tell a story or write a poem or paint a picture, we allow others to find points of contact with us and with each other. We're reminded of our common humanity, and our sense of being alone is lessened. We share ourselves with each other.

That is what arts education ought to release. That is what deserves more attention.