Engaging Dissent

by David Dower

This post at 99 Seats, which I just stumbled on, resonates in many different ways with the place I find myself these days in the continuing "positive inquiry into the field" that is the basis of this program and blog.

99 starts by expressing concern over the relative lack of engagement in the discussions of the bloglodytes. Vijay and I wrestle with this as well-- wondering whether it matters if people engage the material here in big numbers or if we're doing our job simply by doing our job. Though here at the NPDP blog we see consistent traffic on the site (so we know people are reading along) we don't see much interaction with it.

And this is particularly relevant to us because we are seeing the very real potential of the "Here Comes Everybody" generation of technology to collapse the barriers between the institutions and the free radicals, to bridge the moat of geographic isolation, and gather tribes of like-obsessed people to share and advance their aesthetics, forms and processes. When the Rude Mechs stream their process, or CalShakes live- blogs their workshop, or when Aditi Kapil's Agnes Under the Big Top starts streaming from her circus workshop in Bulgaria this is about much more than spotlighting the seven selected projects of the NPDP's first round.  The program has enlisted the artists to help in trying to break through, and out of, the sense of separation and alienation that keeps us all tethered to yesterday, stuck in our habits, reinventing wheels, in a loop of old complaints, and living with the grey-colored glasses of scarcity and zero-sum competition.  So, yeah, 99, I feel ya.  Where exactly is "everybody"?

While the meat of 99's concern is that, even with the best shit-disturbing efforts of the most regular writers in the blogosphere, there's a resounding shrug from the general population of the theater profession, a specific challenge arises: 99, among others, keeps up a critical line of inquiry on the state and role of our theater institutions and the people who work in them but no one steps in with a dissenting opinion to the dissent.

"I don't really begrudge the people working in the institutions their way of life. I've been there and I know it. What's frustrating is that it's all so one way. Why not defend institutions? Why not defend the system? Why not join the conversation, even anonymously? For all of our fire-breathing and flame-warring, I think we actually want to hear what you believe. And we're willing to incorporate new ideas into our own."

So, in the spirit of that positive inquiry, let me take a stab.  I am happy to defend institutions and the important roles they play in the infrastructure of the American theater. The whole ecosystem is depending on them-- strong and effective and focused on that which they do best. This is part of my quixotic crusade to clarify and evolve the language of our field-- that we should celebrate and elevate the contributions each makes, rather than flaming them for the things they don't do.

Without the institutions, there would be no avenue for artists and other practioners of our form to actually eek out a living. The entire enterprise would be an amateur endeavor. The best feature of the institution is that it acquires and organizes the audience around a specific artistic inquiry. The larger the organization, the larger (hopefully) the audience surrounding them.  And this is the economic engine that makes our theater go. Have we captured the full potential of this machine? No. But that's not the fault of the machine.

Institutions provide gathering spaces for artists, and ideas breed where artists congregate. True, the larger the organization the harder it seems to be to provide an actual artistic home for other than the staff. (I'm not discounting this as a problem, it's simply one I believe we can solve if we decide to. The institution, again, is not the culprit. It's what we do with them that gets in our way, seems to me.) But imagine NY without The Public, NYTW, and Playwrights, for example (since we're the New Play Blog, let's focus on new work). I was at MTC recently to audition folks for a new play at Arena in the Fall and ran into Lear Bissonet and Lucy Thurber in another studio, at work on her massive Monstrosity. Across the hall was Donald Margulies, at work on another new play. New Dramatists and The Lark are also institutions-- they have staff, space, and programs. What if there was no Z Space or Intersection in San Francisco or Playwrights Center or Chicago Dramatists?  Steppenwolf is an institution and it floats the boats of smaller, nascent institutions through its Visiting Companies initiative. It functions in a conscious and conscientious way as a citizen of its community. Even local-to-Chicago writers describe them that way. I visited Los Angeles in the spring of 2006 and found a community in a state of grief and shock over the loss of two important institutions in the new work infrastructure: the ASK program and the new works labs at CTG. The Off Center in Austin is a relatively new institution and has a huge impact on the artists in that community making new work.

While I'm at it, I'll dissent on some other engagement. I've stayed out of the slug-fest that is the Olson-Daisey chain. (I'm not even going to link it, that's how much I'm staying out of it.  You can look it up if you've been buried in grant deadlines, or your day job, or off on an artistic retreat and missed the dust-up.) Why? The whole conversation is stuck in the past and seems to burn up important energy for actually moving forward.  The point, in my view, is missed and as a result, an opportunity lost. The issue is not locked boxes for actor endowments or blowing up the buildings or turning more artists into administrators or whatever zero-sum proposal-du-jour causes a mini-stink in the blog and theater presses, (again, in my view). It is about a collective failure of the field to marshal all our abundant resources around rational models of working together to advance the form. We need artists.  We need institutions.  We need audiences.  We need patrons. We need labs for experimentation and hellofa houses to entertain mass quantities of theatergoers. We have big companies with big buildings, tiny peripatetic* ones, and everything in between. But we have very little idea, as the collective community of American theater practitioners, how best to align these resources to extract their full potential.

And this is where I'm still waiting for the Everybody. It is a new day for so many communities and industries in this country. Perhaps we can make it ours as well.  Can we stop grinding the same old tunes, working the same list of complaints, move beyond the competitive frame, and start moving purposefully toward effectiveness as a field? Can we celebrate and engage successes, even if they aren't our own? Can we look up from our own desktops and beyond our own immediate horizon to find the things that need to be done and set about doing them?  And share what we discover in the doing? Buckminster Fuller described Man as "a local problem solving unit. The more successful we are at solving problems the more we get to solve." That was life lived to its fullest, or Fullerest.  Ronnie Brooks says "purpose lives at the intersection of what you're best at and what most needs to be done."

What do you see when you stand in that intersection?  What problems are you going to solve? Everybody's eager to hear.

*I use that word because for the first years of my career that's how nearly every reviewer described our company, The Z Collective: "the peripatetic Z's". Seems like a $.50 word perhaps, but I wore that badge with pride.