Love's Labors Lost: Theatre as community organizing and entrepreneurship

July 22, 2011

Theatre as community organizing and entrepreneurship

Over at Parabasis, 99 Seats is discussing dynamic ticketing in theatre. While the discussion about this particular topic is interesting, I'm more intrigued by how it (once again) reveals the tension between for-profit and non-profit models for creating revenue in theatre. Or rather, the tension between the desire to create theatre that is accessible to everyone with the reality that creating theatre is really fucking expensive.

The value of theatre is most often described in its social impact - it's power to awaken, to inspire, to educate, to explore, to connect, to delight, etc. Yet, ironically, butts in seats determines a great deal about how most institutions function.

And now for a detour that's not really a detour.

I'm a member of the Anti-Racist Alliance women of color group, which I came to through the undoing racism workshop by the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond. At our last meeting, I expressed my growing restlessness when it comes to social justice. While dialogue is crucial, and I enjoy talking to people who really want to learn, this is no longer sufficient for my growth as an artist-activist. When the other women of color heard this, one of them said, "You're becoming an organizer," to which several others nodded or said, "Yup."

This shift in focus and effort is beginning to influence every aspect of my life, from how I want to earn a living to the kind of work I want to do to the kinds of conversations I want to have. This is not a dismissal of the discussion, but a desire to transform ideas into action. While it can be stimulating to once again wrestle with these perennial issues, the debating, explaining, and analyzing seems to be a distraction from the real question: How do we get out of this mess?

For a certain cantankerous professor (said with love), the answer is geographic decentralization. For others, it might be thinking outside the black box for performance spaces. Personally, I'm attracted to exploring the link between theatre and social entrepreneurship and/or lifestyle entrepreneurship. How can we change the way we make theatre so that it does what we believe it's best for while giving us a sustainable lifestyle that allows us to follow our passion? How can we organize differently so that we have an abundance of theatre's essentials (people, time, and space)?

For example, WOW Cafe Theatre does not operate as a production company, but as a collective of different artists and individuals who gather and create work in a particular space for the purpose of empowering women through the performing arts. As a result of the way they organize and how they used their resources, WOW is able to make creating theatre a hell of a lot more accessible than any theatre organization I've ever come across. The weird thing is that I've seen no other group like it in NYC. Where are the other places that do things differently? What can we start doing today to change things?

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Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932