by David Dower
I'm not sure how many posts there are going to be on this topic. Could be the header here will prove to be misleading and I'll never get to Part 2. But let's start here and see what happens.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation sponsored a convening at the Humana Festival this year, with dozens of people from around the new play sector. The first part took place Friday morning. A second, abbreviated (rushed?) session was held this morning.
Providing the focus for this convening were two presentations of large-sample studies conducted over the past few years into the health and challenges in the new play world. The first was the TDF study, conducted by Todd London and Victoria Bailey, into Playwrights Lives. They'll be publishing this data soon and it will no doubt spark a great deal of discussion and debate, judging by the reactions of the room this weekend. It was a huge study with some startling (disturbing, even) results.
The second was the first public presentation of the report I turned in at the end of my eight months on the road, interviewing artists and organizations in communities with vibrant new works ecologies. I've written some about this study here already, so if you're just coming into it, search around. Again, I get the sense that there will be a lot of discussion and debate about the ideas and findings in my report. Ben Pesner and I are working on an extended summary for public consumption-- the actual report was 100 pages and never intended for publication. It was a final report to Mellon following the investigation they supported through a remarkable, and for me life-changing grant in 2006.
Emotions, for me, of having put this work out to my colleagues here in Louisville run the gamut of relief, distress, and apprehension. I mostly feel like I spent years building a soccer ball and carrying it around with me everywhere and only this weekend have I had the chance to roll it out onto the grass for people to kick around with me.
One of the things I spend a lot of time on in my report is the "fungibility of our language". Basically, it boils down to a finding that the field of new plays is a overrun by a blizzard of buzzwords without precise meanings or applications, and the resulting "new play speak" is bewildering to artists and emerging organizations around the country. I'll excerpt this section in a later post so people can dig into it in detail. But if you think about how many different processes are labeled "development", or "workshop", or "residency" you're getting a toe into this water. Bigger concepts have more troubling consequences in their fuzzy meanings, in the view of the hundreds of people I spoke to during my investigaton. So many organizations describe themselves, for example, as "artist-focused" that there's no way to actually ascribe meaning or value to the term, and artists are wondering why it is, then, that they so often feel unseen, alien, or in the way when they are invited in. And the king of the imprecise buzzwords: "emerging". How would you define what constitutes an "emerging "artist or organization? When do they start emerging? When do they stop? Where are they when they've emerged?
Again, I'll post the full section when we're done with the edit, and this will all have more context for you.
But it is ironic to me that, in the course of this presentation, I seem to have inadvertently introduced another one. And one with the potential to have equally powerful unintended consequences in terms of creating confusion.
It comes from a concept that I've been working for some time and only recently started trying to find the language for talking about publicly. You see, I believe, based on my research, my direct experience of the field, and on the view of the field afforded us from the vantage point of this NEA NPDP program, that we are living in an era of abundance in the new play sector. Yet we continue to talk about it as a time of scarcity. I believe that this sense of scarcity comes from an ineffecient alignment of resources in the sector. By resources I mean money, people, programs, and opportunities-- there are significant investments made in this sector by the philanthropic community, there are more playwrights and other generative artists at work in the nation than ever, there are training programs, play labs, producers of every scale taking on new work, and effective approaches to developing audiences and opportunities all over the country.
So, what I am coming to understand is that the problem is not a resource problem, but a failure to align the existing resources effectively on behalf of advancing plays, artists, the field and the form. We feel like we are still in a time of scarcity because we are not in alignment around the abundance, not capturing its full potential. I said this out loud. "Alignment" immediately became a buzzword, with people heating up rapidly around "it's a good thing" and "it's a terrible thing" and overnight turning it into a new entry in the fungible dictionary of 'new play speak'.
Yikes!
So, here's a place for you to weigh in, to help me find the langage or a precise definition of this concept.
I was asked "are you saying there's some model or structure that equals 'alignment'?" No. I think what I mean is something more like a 'core value' of alignment, or an 'intention' (thank you Michael Garces for that word). I was asked "do you mean to say that we should just all align our organizations and take aesthetics out of it?" No. Part of an alignment around abundance is connecting the dots, I think-- and where there are empathies and shared aesthetic sensibilities between artists, play labs, producers, and foundations they could capture abundance by working consciously, collaboratively, around how to get the most effective outcomes (artistic, professional, community, commercial, even...) for everyone committed to this aesthetic terrain most efficiently. I was asked "do you mean 'alignment' like what my car mechanic does?" I don't. I mean alignment like an actor or dancer or yoga instructor or chiropractor seeks-- alignment as something that releases a greater flow of energy and uses the right muscles for the right things, aligned along a spine with integrity and flexibility, creating powerful bodies with minimum strain.
I'll keep working on it. Meanwhile if you have ideas, bring 'em on. If we can find a way to capture the inherent capacity of this moment of abundance, we will have made a significant contribution to our form, to our communities, and to the next generation of artists and audiences. Or that's the theory, at any rate.
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