Marching Orders

Over the Fourth of July, my wife and I had our extended family over for a meal. After the chicken and potato salad had been eaten, I got into a conversation with my father-in-law that was quite interesting. Bud is a retired Lutheran minister who gave up his career as an engineer at General Electric at the age of 40 to go to seminary and become a minister. So I asked him how it was that pretty much every small town you go through has at least one church of some sort, and many have several. It doesn't matter how small the community, there seems to be a church somewhere.

He was able to answer only as a Lutheran, although I have since heard that the Episcopalians follow a similar process.

When members of a community decide they would like to start a congregation, they contact the synod and the national church organization (e.g., the Evangleical Church in America, or ELCA) to express their interest. The central administration then sends a Mission Director to visit with the community and to determine the level of interest. Prior to becoming a minister himself, Bud had been a member of such a group interested in forming a church, and he remembered being in a car with church representatives and the Mission Director writing on an envelope the expectations. According to a representative of the North Carolina Synod that I contacted (and this is how Bud remembered it as well): "The funding for new starts generally comes from three sources: The national church, the synod and the local community (area churches). Roughly a third is shared by each for the first few years and then as the mission grows more is picked up by the new church itself. Most of the funding in the first few years goes toward the pastor’s compensation. In fact the pastor is usually on the payroll of the national church for the first few years and the synod and local partners send resources to Chicago to help offset the costs." Once the church is independent, it is expected to make annual contributions back to the synod and national church. What about when, I asked, the new congregation gets on its feet, and decides it wants to build a church? "Most of the costs for a building is covered by the congregation, but our Lutheran Men’s organization provides loans at 2% interest which is a great help." I was also referred to the ELCA website, where I found PowerPoint presentations for some of the training sessions that the new congregation representatives are asked to attend as part of the startup process. The ELCA provides resources and training, as well as an experienced advisor assigned to the new congregation.

So to sum up, the process goes like this:

1. Costs for the first few years are evenly split between the new congregation, the regional organization (synod), and the national organization (ELCA).
2. Money is provided primarily to cover salaries.
3. After the first couple years, the new congregation takes on a greater share of the financial burden until it is financially independent.
4. At that point, the congregation begins to make annual contributions back to the regional and national church, which continues as long as the church continues in existence.
5. The congregation is responsible for raising enough money to build a church, if it so desires, but a service organization provides a source of low-interest loans to help with that process.

Now, let's compare this to the way we do things in theatre.

To apply for grants at most foundations, especially the governmental programs, the theatre usually has to have been in existence for a while -- to the best of my knowledge, three years seems to be the minimum. To qualify to receive such a grant, the theatre must have a history of quality work, and of community support. Once the theatre has become stable, foundations are more likely to give it money, and often the percentage of the theatre's annual budget made up of unearned income increases as the theatre becomes stronger and bigger. New buildings are paid for through capital campaigns.

In other words, except for the church and theatre both being largely responsible for raising the money for a new building, the two systems are opposite!

However, the more I thought about it, the more sense the church model began to make. It is during the first years that a theatre would benefit most from its founders being able to focus their attention on developing programming and building its relationship with the community. In our current system, this is precisely when the members of the theatre are most likely to be working a day job and using their evening hours to rehearse. Thus there is literally no time for the theatre's staff to forge relationships in the community, get the word out about what they are doing, design programming that will increase their profile, or do many of the myriad things that would put the theatre on its own two feet. Furthermore, this is when a young theatre could most use the assistance of an experienced consultant, who could provide advice on how to build their audience and publicize their work, design programming and outreach. They wouldn't be reinventing the wheel, or trying to figure out which of the many books has useful information. Once the theatre is on its feet, it would be more able to contribute to a centralized fund that would help other theatres get on their feet, and the more theatres there were contributing, the more money would be available to start new theatres. So the movement could build. Meanwhile, the central organization could field proposals for the creation of new theatres, and proactively encourage the geographical distribution of theatres throughout different parts of America, and different sized towns.

This organization could also provide education in the form of workshops, but also devise college curricula to educate young theatre founders in the skills needed for such theatre tribe work, and be a funnel of theatre proposals. A good senior thesis or MFA project might be to form a company and write a proposal to the national organization, who would then fund as many good proposals as possible. Thus instead of heading for New York or Chicago or LA, young people might graduate from college directly into a salaried job founding a regional theatre, and thus be more inclined to resist flooding the major markets with new artistic cannon fodder. The central organization, through its grant making process, could focus funds in different ways: one year, there might be special funds available for anyone proposing a theatre in a town of 50,000 or less, another year the funds might go to theatres to be founded in Montana and Wyoming, another year to theatres being founded in Hispanic communities.

When I finished speaking with my father-in-law, and finished emailing with the North Carolina synod rep, I came away with the clear feeling that this was the direction my efforts needed to be headed: to the founding and funding of a central organization devoted to the achieving of geographical diversity within the American theatre. And for all those donors who would like to have a theatre named after them, this organization could create a fund to build Del-Tec-based theatres that would bear their name at a fraction of the cost of traditional theatre edifices. This would be like the Carnegie Library system that brought libraries to small communities around the country.

If such an organization could get off the ground -- and as with any such undertakings, it is a big if -- we might see theatre tribes springing up all around this country.

Thanks to my father-in-law, I think I have my marching orders.

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Revisiting the Principles

Over at Don's place, in the comments to his latest post, Don is expressing amazement that my definition of community sounds like "niche marketing" to him, and that what I am advocating with theatre tribes is what everybody has been doing already. Perhaps so -- maybe I don't get out much.

For clarity's sake, and taking advantage of an opportunity to try to express my "vision" succinctly (which takes practice, believe it or not), let's return to the list of "Principles" that are listed on the right side of this blog, and try to describe what each principle means.

1. Decentralization. This is the idea that there should be professional theatres and theatre artists spread across more of this nation, that no few cities should be seen as the ultimate arbiter of quality or legitimacy, and that there should be a concerted effort to spread information concerning the work of theatre artists wherever they are.

2. Localization. This is a belief that artists should be long-term, active members of their community, and that their theatre should reflect a relationship with that community. Community it defined as those people who share proximity with your theatre that you consider the desired audience. Theatres are not expected to appeal equally to every member of the community, although the larger the circle of supporters the more likely a theatre will be sustainable.

3. Sustainability. This is an umbrella term that covers several different concepts. First, that a theatre should follow environmentally friendly principles. Second, that the business model should not require such a degree of commitment from its members that they are unable to lead full, rich, and secure lives over the long term. Third, that to whatever degree is possible, theatres should rely on generated income rather than contributed income. Associated with this is a business model that is collective, egalitarian, entrepreneurial, self-supporting, and self-supportive.

4. Mutuality. This is an outgrowth of localization: that the relationship between artists and audiences should be dialogic, supportive, challenging, open, and personal. Part of this means facilitating opportunities for all participants in a theatre event to interact with each other. Part of this means re-visioning the role of the artist as being less an elite outsider and more an integrated member. Part of it means creating opportunities for the community to actively support the theatre artists.

5. Education. This is the belief that the way theatre artists are educated must be changed in order to develop the skills, the values, and the goals that will support a more entrepreneurial, interactive, goegraphically-diverse, sustainable, and community-oriented theatre.

Each of these values separately have little that is new. In fact, there are historical precedents for every principle, and likely there are contemporary theatres that embrace several of them. I believe that the entire set of principles bundled together in one theatre is more rare, although I suspect that there are examples.

Note that there is nothing in those principles involving content. It is irrelevant whether a theatre is mainstream or avant garde, classic or contemporary, comic or serious or musical. Indeed, I would suspect that a successful theatre may mix and match, and include other art forms as well. What is important is that a way be found to intentionally engage the community through your work.

As it stands, that is the general description of the overall model. There are details that change and evolve, but the fundamental choices are those described. Whether it is new and original is less important to me than whether it works, and whether it can accomplish the goal of creating a decentralized, localized, sustainable, community-oriented theatre system across this beautiful nation.

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