In Search of (a Definition of) Excellence

The NEA regularly asserts that its primary criterion for awarding grants is "excellence," and the citizens of the arts world nod in agreement. The peer review panels are instructed to search for excellence in each and every grant proposal, and they do so with confidence that they will recognize that particular quality in each and every variety and permutation, and award pots of money accordingly.


But what does "excellence" mean, really -- what does it look like, what are its characteristics, and as importantly, how is it recognized in advance, since grants are awarded in anticipation of the creation of the piece to be created and delivered. Surely if there is money and support involved, we should be able to agree on a definition without resorting to the old "I know it when I see it" that worked so poorly for identifying pornography.


In practice, it is pretty clear that "excellence" means two things, at least when it comes to giving money to theatres: previous accomplishments and money. And maybe that's as good a definition as any, but I suspect you can see the inherent problem: if you follow that definition, the tendency is to reward the past rather than the future, the old rather than the young, the rich rather than the poor, thems that have rather than thems that hasn't. From my perspective, in an era that is seeing the collapse of interest in the theatre and an increasingly homogeneous audience, perhaps this might be a formula for disaster. This might be a point of agreement between me and the 20UNDER40 folks -- at least, if their ideas are sufficiently disconnected from those of their predecessors (and I confess I haven't seen much evidence of that, but I remain open to surprise).


We also tend to think that "excellence" resides in the work of art -- the production, the painting, the novel, the dance, the performance. It is the work of art itself that is excellent. 


I would propose an alternative definition that changes this. It may not be any better than the current definition, but would lead to the rewarding and funding of a different set of works and people, and perhaps in different places, and that alone might be valuable given the current dilemma. The new definition would be particularly relevant for the performing arts, because of their temporary and transitory nature.

 Excellence exists not in the work of art itself, but rather in the interaction between the work of art and its audience. 

To be regarded as excellent, then, the interaction must be lively and vigorous -- either an energetic enthusiasm or an equally energetic rejection. This definition would not reward the interaction most prevalent in our current theatrical scene: bland, passive acceptance. An institution wouldn't seek to simply grow its audience willy-nilly, but actively seek to build an audience with the kind of people who would respond to its work actively and energetically; artists would be expected to create works of art not that simply demonstrated virtuosity, but rather created the circumstances necessary for combustion to occur. 


To do this, artists would have to come to know their audiences well -- you would no longer simply program whatever was successfully energetic somewhere else, since your audience might be completely different from that audience. In addition, since institutions would be rewarded for the connection between their work and the audience, small theatres could be rewarded as often (or more often) as large, experimental theatres as often (or more often) as mainstream, rural as often (or more often) than urban, young as often (or more often) as established. Suddenly the playing field is level, because interaction is about immediacy.


But, you may ask, how can we measure the interaction, and how could we do so in advance (since grant funding comes in advance of a project). Well, we could do it the same way we do now: guess -- does it sound like it would lead to a vigorous interaction? Would that really be any more difficult, or any less accurate, than guessing in advance whether the work of art will have excellence in it? Probably not, but I don't think it is an effective way of approaching the issue.


Instead, perhaps we need to change the focus of grantmaking from the future to the past. Maybe we need to reward grants retroactively for successful projects that provoked a vigorous interaction that could be measured in many ways -- how many spectators stayed afterwards to discuss the play, for instance? How many were able and willing to write a short paragraph about the ideas in the play, or fill out a survey? How many letters to the editors were written? How many people came more than once to the production, and brought friends? How loud were the laughs? How quiet was the house? How much did the audience interact with the stage? 


As a result of awarding grants retroactively, the leaders of arts organizations would be forced to take risks, and choose productions not that would keep their audience happy, but rather keep them stimulated. It would require a delicate balance between creating work that will attract an audience and making sure that it is the right audience. 


I believe that the result of this new definition would be an increase in audience size, because the likelihood that theatre would be boring would decrease. It wouldn't be enough to put, say, a decent production of Hamlet onstage -- you'd have to figure out a way to make Hamlet stimulate an active audience response. And if you couldn't figure out how to do that, then you wouldn't be rewarded with funding, simple as that. 


I'm sure there are dozens of reasons why this "won't work," but maybe giving it a shot would shake the theatre out of its somnolent state. Might be worth a try.

Grant Wood (Part 2)

"This [utilization of of materials of our own American scene] is no mere chauvinism. If it is patriotic, it is so because a feeling for one's own milieu and for th validity of one's own life and its surroundings is patriotic. Certainly I prefer to think of it, not in terms of sentiment at all, but rather as a commonsense utilization for art of native materials -- an honest reliance by artist upoon subject matter which he can best interpret because he knows it best.
Because of this new emphasis on native materials, the artist no longer finds it necessary to migrate even to New york, or to seek any great metropolis. No longer is it necessary for him to suffer the confusing cosmopolitanism, the noise, the too intimate gregariousness of the large city. True, he may travel, he may observe, he may study in various environments, in order to develop his personality and achieve backgrounds and a perspective; but this need be little more than incidental to an educative process that centers in his home region.
The great central areas of America are coming to be evaluated more and more justly as the years pass. They are not Hinterland for New York; they are not barbaric."

Grant Wood

"For years our stage has been controlled by grasping New York producers. The young playwright or actor could not succeed unless he went to New York. For commercial reasons, it was impossible to give the drama any regional feeling; it had little that was basic to go on and was consequently dominated by translations or reworkings of French plays and by productions of English drawing-room comedies, often played by imported actors. The advent of movies changed this condition only by creating another highly urbanized center at Hollywood. But we have now a revolt against this whole system -- a revolt in which we have enlisted the community theatres, local playwrights, and certain important university theatres."

With a few minor tweaks, this paragraph could have been written today about both our commercial and nonprofit theatre scenes. However, it was written by painter Grant Wood in his book Revolt Against the City in 1935. Seventy-five years later, little has changed, despite the advent of the regional theatre that was supposed to alter the face of American theatre. So much for artists as innovators.

To those who are impatient with the discussion of supply and demand, and who are wanting to get back to talking about artistic matters, I would argue that you've had the floor for at least 75 years -- it isn't too much to ask for a couple more weeks.

Supply, Demand, and Geography

Howard Sherman, in a post on the American Theatre Wing blog entitled "This Is Not a Political Blog," discusses the recent legislative threats of deep cuts to the NEA (not to mention NPR and CPB), and asks whether we are being distracted from this more important issue by Rocco Landesman's "supply and demand" conversation. Instead of talking to each other, he insists, we should launch some sophisticated public advocacy along the lines of the "Got Milk?" or cotton campaigns that draw America's attention the the reason these things are important to them. "We fail to make the argument for the value of our field, because we’re too busy getting butts in seats or bodies through turnstiles."

In the midst of his post, as almost a throwaway, he writes, "The reason the arts and humanities are targeted is that for a major portion of the country, we are either a complete blank or the spawn of the upper-class elites." Let's pause there for a second, and examine this before we go blowing a bunch of money on an ad campaign.Because if that is, in fact, the reason arts and humanities are targeted...well, it's hard to argue with it. And maybe we ought to be thinking about that a little bit before buying TV time.

According to a recent NEA study, 88% of the arts organizations in America are located in places with populations of over 50,000 people. Frankly, I think this statistic actually masks a starker picture: the majority of arts organizations are in large metropolitan areas. This is certainly the case when it comes to the non-profit theatre. About two years ago, I did an analysis of TCG-member theatres, and what I found is that

• 58% of TCG-member theatres are in counties with over 500,000 people. To put this into relief, the less than 4% of the counties in the US have populations over 500,000. 
• Of the 63 places that have LORT theatres, none have a county population under 50,000. 

So yes, for a huge portion of America, the non-profit theatre is a "complete blank." Is it too much of a stretch to connect this fact to the NEA budget travails that happen each and every year? Isn't it true that the elected representatives from those places who are not being served can score budgetary points with their constituents at home without having a negative effect on the communities they represent? Can we realistically expect those people who, for almost half a century since the creation of the NEA, have been virtually ignored by artists and nonprofit arts organizations to rally behind arts funding because we came up with a clever slogan like "Got Milk?" The fact is that milk is available in every town in America -- what about the arts?

When I analyzed the NEA grant data for one round of grants in 2006, I found that almost 40% of the money went to New York City, Chicago, and the state of California. They represent less than 17% of the US population. On the other end of the spectrum, 17 entire states didn't see a single dime.

If we want to talk about supply and demand, we need to start there. If there is over-supply, it is highly centralized and and localized. If Landesman wants to make an impact with NEA grants, he needs to spread that money to places that haven't seen it before.

Where Is Your Theatre's Work Imported From?

I rarely just do a post that is just a link, but this is a must read: "The Super Bowl Ad You Should Be Talking About."

The Need for Theatre R & D

Kudos to Rocco Landesman for coming back to engage the field about the "supply and demand" issue he raised (to great gnashing of teeth) at the New Play Development Program convening at Arena Stage. I have responded below a couple times to the issue, and no doubt will continue to do so -- after all, it is the raison d'etre for the Center for Rural Arts Development and Leadership Education (CRADLE). On Twitter, the hashtag being followed (suggested by Landesman himself, which again indicates to me that he wants a conversation -- again kudos) is #supplydemand. And while Howard Sherman may resist that hashtag ("Is it just me, or does everyone using NEA’s suggestion of #supplydemand seem accepting that this is equation to debate?"), I think that it does encapsulate the issues of audience development and geographical centralization that are important for artists to address.

What I want to discuss today, however, is an issue that I discussed briefly at the convening in a breakout session about devised work, and that Trisha Mead alluded to in a response she made to Landesman's blog post, where she said "non-profit theater should exist for the good of the culture- that the arts in general are the 'R & D arm' of our society." While Trisha was speaking about the relationship between the arts and society (and I'm not certain I agree with her analogy, but I'll have to think about it more), I'd like to talk about The Field of Theatre.

On the plane on the way to DC, I finally got around to reading an essay published last year in March by Hasan Bakshi, Radhika Desai and Alan Freeman on the Australian Arc Center for Excellence Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) entitled "Not Rocket Science: A Roadmap for Arts and Cultural R & D." I'd like to explore some of the ideas in the essay, but I'd first like to draw your attention for a moment toan analogy about another discipline: the sciences.

In the sciences, a researcher applies for a grant to run an experiment on a certain subject. He has a hypothesis to test, and a way to test it. If the grantor sees value in the experiment, it is funded. The researcher then fully designs the methodology of the experiment, runs the experiment, and then publishes the findings, with a complete review of literature and a clear description of the methodology and the findings, in a journal. The journal is peer reviewed, so at both ends of the process, the researcher's work is evaluated by qualified members of the field.

If we could look at a theatre production as an experiment for a few minutes, we see certain parallels. We often will seek funding for a particular project, and once the money is received we create the production. But the last part, the part I underlined above, is usually totally ignored. We don't feel the necessity of communicating to The Field.

The result of this truncated process is that The Field doesn't develop. Techniques and approaches remain local knowledge, known only by those who worked on the production. Vocabulary isn't shared and integrated. It is as if a scientist discovered a cure for cancer and didn't tell anybody about it, but instead just moved on to the next research project. OK, that's not a great analogy, but the point is that, across the country, theatre artists are reinventing wheels that already have the treads worn off them elsewhere.

When I first arrived at the convening, I ran into Ben Pesner, co-author with Todd London of Outrageous Fortune, and he told me he was reading the TCG publication The Artistic Home: Discussions with Artistic Directors of America's institutional Theatre that Todd London, Lloyd Richards, and Peter Ziesler published in 1993, and Pesner said that nothing has changed in 20 years -- the same conversations could be occurring today about the same problems. During one of the convening sessions, in a Tweet heard 'round the world, Polly Carl, the Literary Manager for Steppenwolf, said when she was head of the Playwright's Center in Minneapolis she and a research assistant had done a review of literature about the new play development processes and she said that looking over old notebooks, she realized "we regurgitate the same new play conversations every 5 years." Why? Because we don't engage The Field.

Admittedly, this ought to be a role for academia, but academia is filled with profs so obsessed with training the next generation of creative cannon fodder that we're not doing it either. Gotta get the fourth show of the semester on its feet! No time to think about The Field!

And I suppose it is a little intimidating to think that the things we discover in the chaos of rehearsal might be applicable to someone else somewhere else doing some other production. But scientists make that leap all the time -- the feel a responsibility to publish their research results, because others build on those results. At the convening, we spent a bunch of time, for instance, trying to define "devised." Heck, the first convening I went to was called "Defining Diversity." How can we ever make progress if we never get past definitions? To bring together that many high-powered, thoughtful people and to have them spend their time on definitions is a pity. But it had to be done, because nobody is communicating with The Field.

Sometimes the theatrosphere gets close, when a discussion goes on long enough to get beyond the initial position statements. But rarely, and rarely is it based on research.

Let's look at what Bakhshi et al has to say about this. Noting that R & D has tended to be defined in terms of Science and Technology (S & T), the authors notes that arts and cultural organizations need to recognize:

that the development of new products or processes, no matter how creative, inventive, or socially useful, does not constitute R & D if it remains tacit. The Frascati Manual [considered the Bible of R & D] requires R & D to clearly articulate research questions, apply dedicated rigorous methods, and produce replicable findings which can be made explicit for dissemination. The methods and outcomes of arts and cultural R & D must be explicit and capable of generalisation across the sector. This requires arts and cultural organizations to shelve the notion that the sources of art, culture and creativity are necessarily mysterious.

You're having flashbacks to college stats classes, aren't you? But I ask that you withhold your judgment a bit longer. The authors go on, in a section entitled Creative experimentation per se is not R & D, "experimentation and innovation in content and form are inherent to the arts. There is a sense in which every work is new." That's what we all claim, right? However, they go on, "if, as is usual in the arts and cultural sector, the knowledge created and the methods used are neither made explicit, nor codified, nor replicable for extension and use by others, sunch innovative activity falls short of the requirements of R & D -- even if it leads to innovation in the wider creative economy." In other words, it ain't enough to experiment, we need to generalize from the experiment and then share that knowledge widely. We miss both of these in the arts. We just do shows.

But what if the various people who do devised work, for instance, didn't only create a product, but tested out devising techniques, generalized the technique as a pattern (ala Christopher Alexander's idea of a Pattern Language for architecture), and shared the pattern to The Field for others to use? This is what Anne Bogart did with Viewpoints, and why Viewpoints has taken off as an approach to rehearsal -- she gave us a vocabulary, exercises, techniques and approaches that we could apply to our own work. Stanislavski did the same thing. "Proper, informed, structured R & D," Bakhshi et all goes on, "is needed for arts and cultural organizations to ride such great waves of change. It goes beyond mere individual artistic creativity, just as the knowledge needed to run a railway so vastly exceed the knowledge needed to build a locomotive, or the knowledge needed to electrify whole nations goes so far beyond the knowledge that produced the dynamo and the light bulb."

Applying this to our current Landesman-prompted discussion of #supplydemand, how can we complain about the fact that he is using traditional economic concepts developed for capitalist markets when we, as A Field, haven't developed our own terminology concerning business models or done our own studies about the effects of saturation on an arts market? The best we can manage is a few furtive gestures toward Lewis Hyde's The Gift, which we likely haven;t actually read all the way through, and some huffing and puffing about the importance of diverse expression.  But, as Bakhshi et al writes, "trialling new business models is urgent, as social and technological change makes old, often implicit, business models irrelevant." Surely every theatre company in America (or the world, for that matter) isn't operating on the same business model! How are they structured? How are decisions made? How is income generated and distributed? As Bakhshi writes, "The key point is that the knowledge be shared. This means it must be made explicit and have clear mechanisms for dissemination."

I know, I know -- that involves a lot of writing and thinking, and we want to be in the rehearsal room or at the computer creating our next work of art. But don't you think that scientists would much rather be in the lab than writing up their research? But they feel a responsibility to The Field. And consequently, the sciences advance, whereas we in the arts simply go in circles.

"The possibilities are immense," Bakhshi enthuses. "Arts and cultural organizations working with, rather than against, its grain, can lead social change towards a society more suffused with culture. They can embed themselves more purposefully and fully in ongoing social processes, and can create specific new ones. By learning from R & D-intensive industries, by allocating funds and specific intellectual resources to experiment and understand emerging ways -- aesthetic, social, and technical -- of satisfying evolving needs and demands and creating new ones, they can create their own knowledge about the changing sources of value in new forms of artistic experiences and apply it to yield innovations -- new processes, products, and systems -- for delivery."

By the way, I also think that the NEA needs to get on board with this idea. At the moment, most of their grants go to the creation of specific products, but I think that part of the expectations for anyone who receives a grant is to publish their findings. I know some of the documents I had to write when I finished my grant might be applicable in other situations, but my report disappeared into the files never to be seen again. This is also where a journal like HowlRound can contribute.

So the choice is clear -- we can continue "regurgitating the same conversations every five years," and spend lots of time never getting beyond defining terms, and allow people in politics and economics slice and dice us, or we can become intentional about our Field, and develop it as if we care whether it lives or dies. We're all smart people. Let's focus that intelligence on the broader issues.

More Thoughts on Rocco Landesman at the Arena

A few days ago, I wrote in response to Rocco Landesman's address to the New Play Development Program convening that began on Wednesday. In it, as has been widely reported, even by the New York Times, Rocco suggested that perhaps the nonprofit theatre system was "overbuilt," that demand is falling at the same time as supply is rising, and that we may want to consider "thinning the herd," as I put it on my blog post Wednesday night.

People didn't take too kindly to Rocco's statements. You could hear a collective bristle in the auditorium, one that increased in volume once the blogging world got involved. Trisha Mead called them "fighting words," which was then followed by posts saying that Rocco was calling for, in essence, Death Panels. J Holtam over at Parabasis, who like me was actually there, gets it about right when he writes, "But, I think, when you add up what Rocco was saying, it seems less like he's aiming at taking the little guys out of the equation and more like he's re-evaluating his funding priorities on the basis of what kind of work a theatre is doing." (italics mine)

Some people felt betrayed, writing "With friends like this..." There was a certain nervousness to hear the head of the NEA saying such things when the Republicans are once again suggesting that the NEA be zeroed out. Shouldn't he be the Number One  Cheerleader for the Arts? But the Chair of the NEA is more than that -- or at least, he ought to be. He ought to using the money that he has to make an impact in the field and to influence its development. To put it bluntly, I don't want the NEA to just spread money around, but to do so in a way that leads us beyond the status quo.

That said, while Rocco didn't say anything directly about funding only the Major Theatres, it doesn't take a genius to recognize that that's where his interest lies. While many have noted his background as a Broadway impresario, I think it is more relevant to note that he is a former student and protege of Robert Brustein, the former head of the American Repertory Theatre at Yale and Harvard and critic for the New Republic, who has long believed that the NEA ought to stop funding all these rinky-dink arts organizations and give the dough to somebody who knows how to use it (i.e., to Brustein). He's published these articles in many of his books. I remember when I was writing my dissertation about Brustein that he got particularly exercised about giving money to Folk Arts, which were just to darned lower-class for words.

The NEA is a grantmaker, and people like Landesman who lead such organizations are responsible for setting priorities. If we don't like the priorities, we need to argue about that issue, not throw a hissy fit about "how dare he." At least Landesman is out front with his opinions, so we can actually engage the issues directly, rather than having to tease out his opinions.

The slogan of Landesman's NEA is "Art Works," so if we want to engage this debate, we need to doing so on that basis. It's about economics and jobs and communities. Arguinf aesthetics is a waste of time; objecting to the use of the terms "supply and demand" is a waste of time. That's the vocabulary.

My argument is that, in fact, the nonprofit theatre isn't overbuilt in general, but it is overbuilt in certain places. We don't need more theatres in NYC, or Chicago, or Minneapolis, for instance -- that audience is largely tapped out, at least if you accept the idea that only a small percentage of people are interested in attending the theatre (I don't accept that, either, but I do think that developing a new audience means developing a new approach). One way to increase demand is to open new, untapped markets. If there are too many restaurants competing for diners in your city, then look elsewhere. My particular interest is the arts in small and rural communities, but it isn't only those places that are underserved. There are many medium-sized cities, suburbs, and other such places that are also being ignored by the lemming-like flow of artists to NYC in search of fame. There is a large swath of entire states in the midwest that have no TCG theatres at all.

This approach does a couple of things to make Landesman's job easier. First, it connects to his theme of Art Works. Second, it brings arts funding into a larger variety of districts, so that it is harder for politicians to score points against the NEA because their constituents in their district are benefiting. I know these ideas aren't sexy -- we want to talk about the wonderful things the arts does for the richness of humanity and so forth -- but we're talking about funding, politics, and economics and we need to talk that language.

So What Rocco did was send a warning shot over our bow. How are we going to respond? With hysteria, or focused resistance?