Conference Call with Kalpen Modi, Americans for the Arts, and Corporation for National and Community Service

Sat in on a conference call between Kalpen Modi (previously Kal Penn), Americans for the Arts, and the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Some notes/reactions:

1. Although the arts are important to the Obama Administration in and of themselves (which I got from Arne Duncan in a conference call last week), Kalpen Modi underlined the instrumental benefits of the arts to the economy, to education, and to tie together economy (you can tell from how they speak that they've internalized the Obama heritage of community organizers).
2. The Obama Administration is not out to make artists.
3. The crux of Obama's approach to the arts currently is based around the Edward Kennedy Serve America Act. The act added arts to the types of community service supported, increased the amount of support for community service in a number of ways--especially in numbers of volunteers supported--and declared 9/11 a day of national service.
4. The 9/11 Day of Service is the current focus of arts policy, bringing together not only the Corporation of National and Community Service with Americans for the Arts, but also bringing together every branch of government that cares about the arts - Kalpen mentioned the Department of State's cultural ambassadorship program, and arts within HUD and Transportation (the latter two are departments I hadn't heard of any arts coming from, but I'm glad that I'm wrong)
5. Other programs on their way include the Social Innovation Fund (from the White House Office of Social Innovation) and a Volunteer Generation fund (to help nonprofits increase their ranks of volunteers). The appropriates for this have been passed in the House (which decreased the number) and in the Senate (which increased the number). Kalpen said that they were "looking with interest" to see how those two bills would be reconciled.
6. The 9/11 Day of Service comes with two websites: one is the general volunteerism website at Serve.gov, the other is the arts-specific website that Americans for the Arts set up, at Serve.artsusa.org. Arts volunteer organizations are encouraged to list their events on both, so that people can sign up, and post about their experiences.
   
7. Serve.artsusa.org also has two significant other attractions: one is a petition for the addition of Artistscorps to the current Peacecorps/Americorps/etc. within the Corporation for National and Community Service. The other is the United We Serve: Arts Idea Kit which is intended to serve as a springboard for ideas of how to mix art and public service.

That's really what you need to know. My sense, both from this conference call and the one with Arne Duncan, is this: the Obama Administration wants to create a grassroots arts policy, rather than a centralized, NEA-led policy. Given the difficulty in Congress of getting support for the arts, that's pobably wise for the moment, especially as he's neck deep in criminal prosecutions, healthcare, cap-and-trade, getting Ben Bernanke re-authorized, closing Guantanamo Bay and shipping the inmates to Kansas, and his coming legal battles around DoMA.

However, they recognize that we're crucial and they're willing to help us try to get boots on the ground. Where they see something effective happening, they want to duplicate it--the philosophy is the same as his proposal to duplicate the Harlem Children's Zone in 20 cities around America.

In a way, he's trying to use tools in the free-market to try and help promote the arts: increasing the incentives for success (for instance, part of the appropriations is that the education grants to students who participate in Americorps or Seniorcorps will be pegged to the level of Pell Grants, so that the benefit doesn't lag).

I left it reasonably happy: I'd have liked more direct support, but the general feeling was, "We'll provide some big infrastructure for volunteerism, and we'll put all our support behind the good work you do. Now get out there and do it."

To put it another way: "If you build it, we will come."

Inspiration/Dramaturgy II : Play As A Construct III

Back to 99Seats' comments about playwrights needing to think consciously about their work, and my last post analyzing the ending structure of my play Orchestration (published by IndyMill Publishing), and I wanted to loop those two discussions back to each other.

When I first began the play, my initial image was born out of a Beirut concert (and specifically, the song "Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)"), and it basically involved a manic, spiraling waltz. It was also going to be a play specifically about Lebanese colonial history--that was my first conscious set of decisions about the play, and although they informed the end structure, I wound up making a different set of decisions, more abstract ones; dramaturgical decisions.

By the way, I'm using the term "Dramaturgical" to mean something a little bit broader than just decisions made based off of historical fact. For a while, I didn't really understand the purpose of a dramaturgist--I couldn't see the distinction between him and a director. This conversation is making me understand that the dramaturgical role is to think about the play in the conceptual, the theoretical, and the historical--in other words, in terms of the conscious--when the director is thinking inspirationally, making gut calls, etc. I still think that both functions should actually be the same person, or part of the same team equally, but as a concept I think that's the role of the dramaturgist.

When it came to the ending, though, I had a clear desire to have the play fall apart (in old Greek Tragedy, the character falls apart; it seems to me that the modernist tragedy involves the play itself falling apart). But I didn't know exactly how. I stumbled (inspirationally) on the image of him lashing out at the audience, kicking them out. My intuition was lead along by how people who lose control lash out: first by yelling (which is why I broke the silence of the piece with him yelling), then by cursing, then by violence (I put violence before yelling in the play later, as a decision), and then finally by withdrawal and rejection.

My dad (an executive in the software industry with a background in development) challenged me on this point, for good reason. He felt that the audience would feel rejected and insulted by me, the playwright, and that the play would therefore end on a strong negative feeling for the audience. I wanted that image to stay with them, but I didn't want them to feel assaulted; it was a balance.

This is when I used the Pragmatist model of decisionmaking, and one which I think artists should use when making decisions about their art. It's a strict way of looking at decisions on the stage, and it's based on William James' Pragmatism.

James was discussing whether or not there was a God, and he asked the question this way: Assume that there is a God. How would the world reflect that? Assume that there is no God. How would the world reflect that? The answers to the question are not as important as the question (his version of the answers to those questions is that in the present, everything would look and feel exactly the same, but in the far future it was the difference between a perfect ending and a slow decay into chaos).

I looked at my play and asked, "If I do _____, what effect does that have on the audience? How would ______ support my central ideas?" And then I selected the ending with the desired effects, and the best support of my central ideas.

The ending I selected (having the orchestrator kick out all of the audience, but having the ensemble and, crucially, myself as the writer-director greet them as they exited) answered the questions thus:

1. The ending would first give the audience the sympathy and fear of the collapse of the character, would blur the lines between the internal world of the play and the external--both conceptually, because the play is still going on as they exit, and physically because the characters are outside and they travel out of the theater while still experiencing the play. It would also create a sudden, important separation between the world as the orchestrator has created it and the world as I am running it, because I step in to say "hey guess what? The world isn't as negative as this pathetic wreck would force you to believe."
2. The ending strongly supports the conceptual frame I was operating under, Vaclav Havel's "Power of the Powerless", which states that power only exists as long as the powerful control the truth and the powerless operate under that truth. Once the ensemble rebels against the "Realism" of the orchestrator, the audience is invited out of that realism and into another realism of the real world. Simply by greeting them at the door, I retain the right to completely disassemble his world, without having to directly oppose him in any way. That fits in with the conceptual narrative, and therefore it's the right ending.

Of the thousand of endings I can imagine now, none of them fit the test any better -- although I'd love to hear some better-fit endings! (When I adapted Orchestration for film I had to adjust the ending because in film, it had different impact on the audience).

Pragmatic Theater: Realism and The Play As A Construct II

So, I originally got interested in the idea of the play as a construct reading Brecht, but that's what it was to me--an idea. Stephen Colbert made me understand what it meant for comedy (which I analyzed academically here, if you don't mind mixing academia and comedy), and I came across it extremely effectively in an admittedly really lousy student production of The Crooked Cross, a play which I extremely dislike, but had one choice that worked really well: namely, the girl who is murdered at the end of the play stays dead, lying there face down as the curtain call happens. And everyone files out, leaving the poor actress lying there face down.

Suddenly, it becomes about more than the play. The audience is literally laughing about the actress being left behind. It also feels like a hokey choice--it doesn't strike me as being inspired, or anything. But there's an awkwardness as people consider, "Do we leave yet? If we stay, will she stay face down?"

At any rate, I walked out feeling as though it was a silly choice rather like the rest of the really bad, really silly choices in that piece. But it stayed with me. There was something emotionally jarring about her staying dead--even though I knew it was a hokey choice. It had blurred the end of the play for me, and in some strange subconscious part of my mind I wasn't allowed to end the play.

For me, there became two tools used in opposition: one is the use of the play as a construct, and the other as being blurring the lines between reality and the play.

On the one hand (as my teacher Laura Levine would tell me to start this essay), you cannot ignore the fact that you are putting on a show, because people are sitting in a theater facing actors, having just paid money for the privilege. In a way, any lack of acknowledgment of that is an insult and a failure.

On the other hand, the audience's ability to compartmentalize theater as something separate from real life allows them to dull its impact--to dull its realism (see previous post). If I had to point to the one chief advantage that theater has over film is that in film, there is very little way for the film (using current technology, I should probably qualify) to avoid that compartmentalization. The film is a physical artifact, and no matter how well constructed it is, it ends rather abruptly--it is playing, and then it is not. The end.

Theater, on the other hand, could be constructed in such a way that people are not quite sure where it starts or end. If you try to create theater that is absolutely invisible, that's one thing--much like "theater" in which nobody knows theater is happening. This is the sort of performance art that groups do outside of a theater, in "the real world" (i.e. in a place where naturalistic conventions are the norm), where nobody knows they're participating at all. That, perhaps, doesn't interest me so much.

But if you are in the place where non-naturalistic conventions are the norm; i.e. in a theater, where no matter how much "naturalism" we try to put in place, we still have plenty of things that get in the way of absolute 100% naturalism?

My approach to this has been to try and create a production wherein the play starts naturalistically in real life--the actors are themselves, they enter into the space along with the audience in some way. The audience knows that they are there for a production, but don't know how exactly it will begin or take place (this is why this method demands a black-box theater, rather than a proscenium). They sit, the actors appear to be preparing, and then something happens that starts to tell the story--transitioning in a way which is not so seamless as to be hidden to view, but in such a way that it seems to progress naturally and consciously from real life. Then the story continues, with the performer remaining the same performer who is present out of the performance, until the performance comes to some sort of an end--but not a clean end, an end that dribbles out into the real world.

In the tradition of Brecht, I'll do the self-serving thing and give an example from my own work (although not in the tradition of Brecht, I'll plug that it's available here for $10 / $2 download). The production Orchestration took place in a black-box theater, but it sort-of began a little beforehand, where the man orchestrating the production (It's important to me that the central protagonist of these pieces appear to orchestrate the entire evening, so that he is in control of all of the elements of the story he is trying to tell; this is the orchestrator) is mingling with the audience, greeting them as they enter.

As the audience files in, the orchestrator ushers the ensemble into the space, including a technical person (who was played by me, the writer-director) who would appear to run the entire show's technical aspects from on-stage, at the direction of the orchestrator.

At the direction of the orchestrator, the story begins--by this point, the audience is absolutely clear that the production has begun. The production tells its tale--at this point, it's mostly a classical production, with a few moments of self-awareness. As the story progresses, the ensemble characters become slowly more and more self-aware of the story, and finally the narrative collapses on the orchestrator, who has no more control over the narrative. Everything is in silence until this point; he breaks his own convention to try and bully through shouting the other characters into obeying him. He kills characters, they resurrect themselves. And now (spoiler alert! actually, I don't care about that sort of thing), he reaches the end of his rope--he can't make them obey his conception of the story: he kicks them out, he kicks out the technical person (me, the writer-director), and sulks.

Then he starts yelling at the audience to get out--they're just as much a part of his failure as anything else. And the doors open, and the characters (who are humming a funeral song from earlier in the production) stand in rows to guide them out. Framed in the doorway is myself, the writer-director, only now I really am actually just myself, and as the audience comes out, still (hopefully) reeling from the abrupt collapse of the play, I thank them for coming with a smile.

My hope is that the beginning and end are blurred in such a way that the performance becomes more real to them, more difficult to compartmentalize as just something that happened in a theater space--even though obviously this is all still just a planned artifact. This is the aesthetic you get in The Office--note the big deal people make about the fact that when they're not filming, the actors are pretending to do the office thing, and yet at the same time they film The Office in such a way that they both are aware and not aware that this is being filmed for someone else's benefit--as though they are aware of producing a construct, but not being aware that the construct they think they're making is the construct they are making. That's the appeal of reality shows: the participants think they're playing a certain role in the drama, but really they're probably playing a completely different role. They may think the competition is about their talent, and they may think that they are the hero in the story, but they are not.

That's what I feel about realism today, and how it relates to the play (or TV series or film) as a construct, and how you go about treating it as a construct. For Brecht, it was as simple as occasionally stepping outside of the construct once or twice (like Jim's sidelong looks at the camera in The Office), but if we leverage the fact of real, three-dimensional, unquestionable human beings in the space of theater, we can do more: we can force the construct we make into the real world.

(By the way, this aesthetic is the result of returning to a single hunch over and over again: I've always hated curtain calls more than anything, except when I'm participating in them, and I haven't known why... it's possible to read this as an analysis of why they ring so false for me).

Pragmatic Theater: Realism and The Play As A Construct I

Unlike many of my classmates, I spent the spring of my freshman year reading the entire book of translated Brecht essays, rather than the ones that were assigned ("The Modern Theater Is The Epic Theater" and "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting"). Now, I know why those two essays are assigned--in terms of the larger history of theater, those are the two that mark the clearest antithesis to Aristotle's Poetics, but in terms of understanding Brecht (and Brecht is a personal hero for me, the man who forms the very core of my artistic sensibility), I think that those essays are poor representatives.

Brecht was a person who loved to contradict himself. He gets the impression of being a radical, especially because the first of the two essays is quite a radical tract. Actually, he turns out to be quite the moderate, pragmatic thinker. He's not interested in things that don't work. That's why when you read Mother Courage and All Her Children, he's not actually driving out all the emotion--he understands that Mother Courage has to be a pathetic character on some level to be compelling. He pushes the form as far as will work (and, admittedly, sometimes too far).

Late in his life, he began outlining a shift in thinking, creating a theory called the Dialectical Theater that would encapsulate both his Epic Theater and the Aristotilian theater he sought to get away from. That dialectical theater is what I really fell in love with, despite the fact that he never got to really articulate it. But I think it was always present in the contradictions within his work.

At any rate, the one thing that gets said most about Brecht is that he's an anti-realist. Brecht himself noticed that, and he wrote one of my favorite essays by him called "The Popular And The Realistic." In it, he puts forward that his theater isn't anti-realistic. Now, he admits freely that it isn't naturalistic, but in terms of realism, he says:

We must not abstract the one and only realism from certain given works, but shall make a lively use of all means, old and new, tried and untried, deriving from art and deriving from other sources, in order to put living reality in the hands of living people in such a way that it can be mastered.

Later on, he says more succinctly:

Our conception of realism needs to be broad and political, free from aesthetic restrictions and independent and convention. Realist means laying bare society's causal network...

He goes on, listing other benchmarks for the term "realist" all of which come from his own socialist interpretation, and which isn't so applicable to day. But you could reword that last sentence to be "Realist means revealing something about the world today."

That's the Pragmatist, moderate Brecht (I have already dubbed my theater aesthetic the Pragmatic Theater, after the pragmatist philosopher William James). What he's saying is that "realism" isn't a certain style of theater (and he's talking about living-room, fly-on-a-wall Ibsen naturalism), it's the accuracy of the play to reality, and in that pursuit we are allowed to use any aesthetic tools necessary.

The reason I use the capital P Pragmatist to describe this Brecht is because this dovetails beautifully into James' model of how we learn knowledge (I've lent someone that book, so I can't quote directly from it, which is tragic). James describes our system of worldview as being the accumulation of rules-of-thumb that we've tested against reality, and we don't change our worldview until something we test it against makes it fail, and then we make the shortest change possible to keep our worldview. That's why when something minor unexpected happens you don't tear your entire worldview down, and you don't often just suddenly change your worldview unprompted.

That's how our audience views our play: they have their worldview, and they test what we put on the stage against it, and if what we're representing matches the world as they understand it, it feels True to them. That's "Realism."

Should we challenge their worldview? Yes. But that doesn't mean negating it (as much of the combatitive, negativistic art of the 1970s and 1980s did), it means finding a way to make their worldview incompatable with itself. If you can make your audience aware of a sudden, deep contradiction, they'll do the questioning of their own worldview. That's what "subversive" really means; it means that the audience follows the logic every step of the way, until they suddenly find that things don't add up. Stephen Colbert does this very well (I could talk for hours about how Colbert is the third big Pragmatist after Brecht and James).

Now, the one thing that Brecht gave to this "realism," and which he is rightfully remembered for, is the idea that acknowledging the play as a construct can be part of realism. We didn't think it was realism, of course, so we put it in its own category, but that doesn't make it untrue. He tried to lay guidelines for how you can incorporate the play into realism, and not have to pretend (which is the true opposite of realism; pretending and lying).

I was going to get to my own view on the Play as a Construct, but I think that's going to be my next post. Too many words makes the baby go blind.

Problem II: Inspiration/Dramaturgy

I was just thinking about something 99Seats said the other day:

Where is the sense of our work as art, as something to discuss, to consider, something that's created with forethought and precision and consciousness?

The discussion was in the context of playwrights' writing from their "subconscious", and the dangerous view that

we, the artist, are just the vessel it passes through, the "voices speak to us and we just write down what they say."

I agree strongly with his criticism, although with the caveat that some people should write that way in the first draft. The first time I sit down to a play, it starts as a gut-instinct conversation between ideas in my mind, or an image that I imagine that sweeps me up in the moment and I try to transcribe it. If I don't have that, and try to simply write down an idea I had, I very rarely will get beyond the first page, because, well, even I won't give a shit.

On the other hand, at a certain point, that inspiration will only get you so far. That's when you tap your cerebrum on the shoulder and go "Hey dude, what needs to happen next?" And then the cerebrum builds a structure for more inspiration to fit into, so that the next time you get inspired you can fit those inspirations together into something that means something.

Anyways, so with that discussion in mind, the sentence also caught me off guard because I remembered that the thing I love most is the art of it, and in-and-among my own art policy, I need to actually think more about the art--the aesthetic of it. Maybe that's why I haven't written much creative over the last few months, I've been thinking in blocks of rational prose.

On the other hand, my output of rational prose has dropped off lately, and my creative work is picking back up. So I'm going to ride that wave and get back to thinking about aesthetics, structure, and everything I love.

Thanks, 99Seats!

Problems I: Festival Glut?

Since I've been thinking of "Solutions" lately, I'd like to respond to a short post from Isaac Butler at Parabasis on the subject of Problems. A commenter responded to one of his posts to say that FringeNYC was not in the top 25 problems for independent theater in NY, so he decided to sit down and make a list of 25, which became a list of 6.

Here's two of them I have a response to:

(1) Since it's mentioned above: Festival Glut

(5) The current showcase code makes remounting and/or extending shows very difficult

It's my firm opinion that Festival Glut is not actually our problem--it's the combination of the showcase code and the large amount of work produced (regardless of "Festival" or non-festival) that creates the problem. As in, the work in-and-of-itself wouldn't be a problem, so long as the time wasn't artificially squeezed.

See, in the absence of a showcase code, suppose 200 shows go up at a Festival. Most of them will be crap. Reviewers will spot a few good ones, and they'll say "HEY EVERYBODY GO SEE _______" And then people will flock to ______ and _____ will extend, move into higher-visibility places, and maybe go on to bigger and brighter things.

From my perspective, however, multiple times I've just gotten word of THIS GREAT SHOW AT FRINGE... the Sunday it closes. I've seen a lot of posts that go, "Man, I wish everyone had seen ______ but its closing now."

That's why we feel overwhelmed by festivals: if we don't see the good shows in that narrow window of hundreds of shows, they're gone... and they're gone for good. If we could extend shows easily, then the good shows would live on past festivals, and we'd get the chance to see the good ones. The bad-to-mediocre ones would come, the committed festival-enthusiasts would see it, and then it'd be gone.

So yeah, festival glut isn't the problem.

Add to the Solutions List:

• Showcase Code - Create an easier and fairer showcase code to let independent theaters reap the successes of popular showcase codes without having a gigantic step up in costs.
  

Two Things

I'm striking myself in the forehead right now while I realize that my blog had two very stupid settings set:

1) It wasn't notifying me of comments

2) It wasn't allowing unregistered users to comment.

So, uh, that explains why I feel like I'm shouting into a void! From now on I promise prompt responses to comments, and that the general public can comment.

Solutions IV

Thanks, This American Life!

• Soup-To-Nuts - Rather than approaching the cultural environment in a one-off fashion, approach cultural environment as a whole. This is difficult, and is one of the reasons people are working on developing a quantitative approach to arts cultures... Richard Florida's early work suggests a direction, but doesn't provide the answers yet.
• Baby Conservatory - The Harlem's Children Zone is probably the current Overachieving Nonprofit du jour, but they're exploiting a very important principle in their Baby College approach to education: children are most influenced between the years 0-3. That may go for economic success, but I bet it works for the arts too. And that means we need a conveyor belt that tracks a child's artistic development, so that by the time they graduate, they have an artistic literacy. In some way, trying to "expand your audience" of 20 year olds is probably far, far too late.
  

Solutions III

Two more solutions I remembered but haven't posted:

• Arts Sponsorship - This is a solution aimed at individual, free-lance artists. I discovered, quite by accident, that Olympic team-members are given a form of sponsorship by certain large companies by which they are paid full-time for part-time work. This allows them time to hone their craft and also work for a living, and involves a financial sacrifice on the part of corporate firms. Granted, this economic crisis is not the time to go instituting this strategy (after all, Home Depot who had previously been doing this just said they would dump the Olympic Team), but let's save it in the piggy bank. After all, the arts will always be hard.
• Publicly Traded Patronage - I introduced this method on my blog earlier this year, and it's still esoteric and sketchy (mostly just a thought experiment), I do contend that it might be possible to structure a stock-market-like system by which people "buy in" to supporting a local artist, only rather than doing it for financial dividends, they do it for artistic dividends. There was some criticism of the method.

For your reference, the earlier solutions posted were (you can stop reading here if you already read them:

• Involving Social Bigwigs - At the League of Independent Theater's Get Lit with LIT event, the New York State Council of the Arts' Director of Theater Robert Zuckerman (a good person to know) talked about strategies for getting politicians to notice what we do. He talked about a group in the Bronx (I can't remember their names -- sorry!) that have a Politicians' Amateur Night, basically a talent show for politicians. No matter how terrible the politicians are, it gets them visibly involved in arts--and Zuckerman observed that it also gets their lobbyist friends butts in the seats. Stemming from that, I would suggest that arts groups try to get comp tickets into the hands of politicos and maybe other important social heads. After all, there's no better "application" for support than having them enjoy your work.
• Instant Reviews - The post that used the phrase Guyyedwabian was actually about a South African group's attempt to start conversation in the immediate aftermath of a performance. Basically, they attended the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, and afterwards tried to engage the exiting audience in a review directly after the performance. The concept is outlined here, and an informative post-mortem is outlined here. (By the way, does your organization perform post-project post-mortems? You really should.)
  

• The Less than 100k Project - Built to address the NY-centrism of the theater world (although the principle could apply to any art discipline), Scott Walters is developing a funding approach to cultivate community arts in small communities. The thrust of the idea is to allow theater groups in small communities that lack theaters to apply for a 3 year developmental process that will eventually wean them into independence.
• Community Storytelling - A conversation I had with Scott about the aforementioned project asked "how do we make such a community theater actually part of the community?" My suggestion was that the theater focus on the stories and history within the community--go into the community, collect their stories, and present them. This invests the community in the product, and serves a needed social function. This idea was inspired by StoryCorps, the Laramie Project, and Anna Devere Smith's work, but as Scott pointed out, rather than having the stories leave the community (such as the way StoryCorps deposits the stories in the Library of Congress), the stories become a part of the community. Not everyone understands what "theater" is or could be, but everyone loves sharing stories.
• Shared Measurement - The company I currently work for specializes in standardizing business processes for Information Techonology companies. As the aforementioned FSG report documents, there is a rise in non-profits standardizing their tools of self-analysis, and sharing the results. In the same way that these metrics allow the for-profit world to study impact, non-profits need to have a more methodical approach to their role in society, both instrumental and intrinsic. My personal belief is that public policy needs to take this up rather than trying to match the foundation's per-project or per-organization funding model... but more on that when my analysis comes out.
  
• Healthcare Reform - We all want Healthcare Reform for a bigger, more universal reason than just the plight of artists. However, the current employer-based healthcare system discriminates against two groups: the unemployed, and free-lancers. Artists are, often, free-lancers (as opposed to the Arts Administrators who are often full-time employees). If a public option for healthcare were to support artists, it would ease the burden of artists attempting to support their healthcare--and might ease the bottom-line of small non-profits that have to spend a lot on healthcare for their employees. It might even help heal the divide between Administrators and Artists.
  
• Creativity Education - The current arts education approach has been, in my experience, a largely instrumental one: music training, for instance, teaches you how to play an instrument, not how to listen to music or how to write music. This is a large failing in the arts, because it tells people that art = craft, not art = creativity. Granted, as Theresa Rebeck rightly points out in her discussion on the topic, these two concepts are not mutually opposed. However, our early arts education stresses craft and ignores creativity, which probably creates the anti-craft backlash later on. Augusto Boal describes some very interesting approaches to what he called "Arts Literacy" that were attempted in Peru at the time--my favorite was where he talks about asking children questions and asking them to answer the questions in photographs. One question was "Where do you live?" and the answer was a photograph of a young boy whose upper lip was chewed off by rats. The teacher asked "How is that photo 'where you live?'" And the boy answered "I live in a country where these things happen." A much better understanding of art than learning how to draw a human face properly.

Solutions II: Addendum

I knew that the moment I walked away from the post I'd feel compelled to add a few that didn't come straight to mind (hence the need for the list in the first place!)

• Involving Social Bigwigs - At the League of Independent Theater's Get Lit with LIT event, the New York State Council of the Arts' Director of Theater Robert Zuckerman (a good person to know) talked about strategies for getting politicians to notice what we do. He talked about a group in the Bronx (I can't remember their names -- sorry!) that have a Politicians' Amateur Night, basically a talent show for politicians. No matter how terrible the politicians are, it gets them visibly involved in arts--and Zuckerman observed that it also gets their lobbyist friends butts in the seats. Stemming from that, I would suggest that arts groups try to get comp tickets into the hands of politicos and maybe other important social heads. After all, there's no better "application" for support than having them enjoy your work.
• Instant Reviews - The post that used the phrase Guyyedwabian was actually about a South African group's attempt to start conversation in the immediate aftermath of a performance. Basically, they attended the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, and afterwards tried to engage the exiting audience in a review directly after the performance. The concept is outlined here, and an informative post-mortem is outlined here. (By the way, does your organization perform post-project post-mortems? You really should.)
  

Solutions I

I got a smile this morning when I saw the phrase "Guyyedwabian/Culturefuturesque" dropped casually into a fellow arts wonk's blog.

At any rate, I've been focusing on an upcoming more in-depth analysis of the FSG Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement report that I've been swimming in for a while. That's why posting continues to be slow (I usually post in fits and starts, though, so I'm sure you're used to it).

Since my blog-roll is a little backed up and I haven't posted in a while, I thought I'd post something that should become my own little CultureFuture running segment.

When I first started this blog, the question was, "How do I influence the future of culture?" That was the impetus behind the name. Until I got on this arts-wonkery rampage, I didn't really focus very closely on this message. At the time, my belief was that simply talking about the future of culture was a start--and I was right. But it was time to move on to solutions.

When I first started diving into the theatrical blogosphere, I saw everywhere--everywhere!--prescriptions about what was wrong with American theater. Mike Daisey, perhaps, takes the cake for being one of the louder and more forceful voices, but there were a lot of people raising a million issues.

In a way, the problem with the arts is similar to the problem of Health Care: there isn't one thing that needs to be changed, there's a system of problems. And because of the scale of the problems, artists didn't seem to know where to start.

Like in health care (climate change too), I've watched the debate evolve from "What's wrong?" to "What are the solutions?" You start seeing posts like: "Well here's one simple thing we can do..."

For instance: I have a close friend who graduated with a degree in Experimental Theater, but wound up on the front-lines of the health-care battle. She's not actually involved in the healthcare reform debate right now--instead, she works with a small not-for-profit (operating entirely on donated food and office space) whose charter is to find low-income clinics that are being closed, and organize the community to defend them.

The health-care bill is large, but I don't know if that's one issue they've tackled: making sure that hospitals are close. After all, having health insurance won't help if you get a heart attack and have to sit in a car for 25 minutes before a cardiologist can see you. And as the economic crisis and the rising cost of health-care take their toll, more and more hospitals are closing their low-income accessible clinics.

But that's just one part of the puzzle. Keeping track of all the healthcare solutions (tort reform, insurance regulations, public option, defense of low-income clinics, preventative care techniques, etc.) or all of the climate change solutions (smart grid, solar panels, painting roofs and roads white, etc.) is difficult.

So for the arts, I've started hearing solutions that sound reasonable, and should be kept track of. So starting now, I'm going to create a quick bullet-point list of solutions--different approaches or policies--that I (or other folks) think would help the arts. And I want the list to grow. To the point that eventually becomes a checklist. Any artist should be able to look at the list and go: "Which of these do I do? Which of these can I do?"

Without further ado, my current list of solutions. Comment this post if you know of any specific solutions you've come across:

• The Less than 100k Project - Built to address the NY-centrism of the theater world (although the principle could apply to any art discipline), Scott Walters is developing a funding approach to cultivate community arts in small communities. The thrust of the idea is to allow theater groups in small communities that lack theaters to apply for a 3 year developmental process that will eventually wean them into independence.
• Community Storytelling - A conversation I had with Scott about the aforementioned project asked "how do we make such a community theater actually part of the community?" My suggestion was that the theater focus on the stories and history within the community--go into the community, collect their stories, and present them. This invests the community in the product, and serves a needed social function. This idea was inspired by StoryCorps, the Laramie Project, and Anna Devere Smith's work, but as Scott pointed out, rather than having the stories leave the community (such as the way StoryCorps deposits the stories in the Library of Congress), the stories become a part of the community. Not everyone understands what "theater" is or could be, but everyone loves sharing stories.
• Shared Measurement - The company I currently work for specializes in standardizing business processes for Information Techonology companies. As the aforementioned FSG report documents, there is a rise in non-profits standardizing their tools of self-analysis, and sharing the results. In the same way that these metrics allow the for-profit world to study impact, non-profits need to have a more methodical approach to their role in society, both instrumental and intrinsic. My personal belief is that public policy needs to take this up rather than trying to match the foundation's per-project or per-organization funding model... but more on that when my analysis comes out.
  
• Healthcare Reform - We all want Healthcare Reform for a bigger, more universal reason than just the plight of artists. However, the current employer-based healthcare system discriminates against two groups: the unemployed, and free-lancers. Artists are, often, free-lancers (as opposed to the Arts Administrators who are often full-time employees). If a public option for healthcare were to support artists, it would ease the burden of artists attempting to support their healthcare--and might ease the bottom-line of small non-profits that have to spend a lot on healthcare for their employees. It might even help heal the divide between Administrators and Artists.
  
• Creativity Education - The current arts education approach has been, in my experience, a largely instrumental one: music training, for instance, teaches you how to play an instrument, not how to listen to music or how to write music. This is a large failing in the arts, because it tells people that art = craft, not art = creativity. Granted, as Theresa Rebeck rightly points out in her discussion on the topic, these two concepts are not mutually opposed. However, our early arts education stresses craft and ignores creativity, which probably creates the anti-craft backlash later on. Augusto Boal describes some very interesting approaches to what he called "Arts Literacy" that were attempted in Peru at the time--my favorite was where he talks about asking children questions and asking them to answer the questions in photographs. One question was "Where do you live?" and the answer was a photograph of a young boy whose upper lip was chewed off by rats. The teacher asked "How is that photo 'where you live?'" And the boy answered "I live in a country where these things happen." A much better understanding of art than learning how to draw a human face properly.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some solutions, so I'll periodically do this feature again, hopefully with a longer and longer list of solutions.

Another Short Criticism of Gifts of the Muse

A short criticism of Gifts of the Muse that really irritated me. The logic, as I understood from the summary Ian put forward, is thus:

1) Data on extrinsic (instrumental) benefits of the arts are not well documented.
2) Data on intrinsic benefits of the arts are difficult to define, and thus also not well documented.
3) Thus, we need to focus more on the intrinsic benefits of the arts.

It's not so much as there's a flaw of logic there as I'm not sure where the logic is coming from. Given that neither has a particularly well-proven or well-documented correlation (although both have strong indicators), why would that be an argument for choosing one over the other?

The sagest thing they say is "not much is gained by separating the discussion of instrumental benefits from that of intrinsic benefits--the two are intimately linked."

I'll see when the book arrives and I can read it myself why it had such an impact on behalf of intrinsic benefits. I find myself unconvinced one way or the other.

Are the Arts for Everybody?

Posting has been lax at this end for a number of reasons. One are the three professional websites; another is the book launch; lastly is my reading FSG's Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement, which gave me so much damn information that I haven't had the chance to process it all and post away on it, since I think it's going to be the core of what the Thriving Arts Report started sparking in my mind.

Before I get to FSG (I'm still neck-deep in sifting through my notes, and I only ever got a third of the way into my notes of Florida's Rise of the Creative Class), I'd like to take a moment to look over Createquity's Arts Policy Library, namely his first summary of Gifts of the Muse.

Before I launch into this, I would like to point out that although I have purchased the book Gifts of the Muse, I haven't gotten it to read yet, so my response is not to the book, but rather to Ian's response to the book. I'll report back once I've read it about whether I find it to be accurate. I trust it to be.

There is a central problem working in this book, though, as Ian describes it:

The one major gaffe I found in Gifts has to do with a central premise: that the intrinsic benefits the authors identify are distinguished from instrumental benefits by virtue of their uniqueness to the arts. McCarthy et. al. [the authors] state that the intrinsic benefits are “inherent in the arts experience” and include “a distinctive type of pleasure and emotional stimulation.” The inference, it seems, is that the reason people participate in the arts in the first place (and the reason, therefore, to subsidize them) is because they can’t get these kinds of benefits anywhere else. Or at least that is the position implied by the authors’ withering criticism of the instrumental benefits literature for not considering the opportunity costs of supporting the arts to achieve broader policy goals.

In the course of their discussion of the intrinsic benefits, though, the authors let slip an interesting quote from one of the few sources directly cited in the chapter. It’s buried in a footnote on page 46, so the casual reader could be forgiven for missing it. But it casts a profound shadow over the entire discussion of intrinsic benefits. The footnote is drawn from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity: Flow and the Discovery of Psychology and Invention, and is as follows:

"When people are working creatively in the areas of their expertise, whether arts or nuclear physics, their various everyday frustrations and anxieties are replaced by a sense of bliss. That joy comes from what they describe as “designing or discovering something new” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, p. 108)"

So nuclear physics counts too, eh? Indeed, elsewhere on the page, McCarthy et al. write “[Csikszentmihalyi]’s study of creativity is based on interviews with 91 exceptionally creative people from the arts, sciences, business, and government, [and] argues that we have underrated the role of pleasure in creativity of all kinds. His subjects all talk about the joy and excitement of the act of creation itself. But that enjoyment comes with the achievement of excellence in a certain activity rather than from the direct pursuit of pleasure.”

There's a terribly worrying, but nonetheless accurate question, which is: what is it that is unique about arts? Ian continues:

The entire chapter on participation patterns—everything from gateway experiences to frequent participation—could have written about any of a million hobbies and Pro-Am activities, from gardening to stamp collecting to astronomy to cooking and beyond. But curiously, the one “intrinsic” benefit that truly is unique to the arts—the creation of a space in society for experimentation and imagination for its own sake—is never mentioned. Nor is the capacity for communication between artists, either in the same generation or across generations, which allows them to cultivate a common language and heritage of aesthetic expression that is specifically about art itself.

Unfortunately, even the benefits that Ian describes don't seem to me to be completely unique to the arts. A space for experimentation and imagination for its own space--I saw that at the Williamsburg Cupcake Cook-off (an event I highly recommend, by the way). Communication within artists is unique to art, but only because of the stipulation that they be artists. If you're a foodie, you've joined a community of food-enthusiasts who also foster communication and culture and etc, that gives a "common language and heritage of aesthetic expressio0n that is specifically about art itself.

Unless.

Obviously, I like the arts, I don't think they're vestigal. I, as of yet, have not found anything unique about art that can be gotten nowhere else. It's just a different form of pursuing those goals. A different language.

To return to Ian for a moment, to his final conclusion:

I guess what I’m trying to say is that maybe the arts aren’t for everybody—and maybe that’s okay. We should be glad that they produce all of these various benefits for some people, especially those who might have a hard time getting those benefits elsewhere, and equally happy that there are many opportunities for individuals who don’t connect to the arts to express their creativity and strive for excellence and seek to understand the world around them in other contexts. ... I don’t necessarily agree that the goal should be “to bring as many people as possible into engagement with their culture through meaningful experiences of the arts.” I don’t see how that represents success, unless that’s what those people want for themselves.

It's very true that the arts are not for everybody. But creativity is.

See, one of the mistakes we do get lured into is considering creativity to be the arts. As Richard Florida points out with some very compelling personal anecdotes about his father's manufacturing firm, creativity can be found in every line of work.

What has driven people away from creativity is the concept that it is something only artists can do. What we should be focusing on is the availability of creative environments, in which arts is a prominent but not a sole component. The arts should be something that everybody can do but not should do.

For instance: a group of my friends have created a brand-new sport called Circle Rules Football. Do you know how much more fun I would have had in physical education if we'd tried inventing a sport? My best subjects were English, Theater, and History, because I got the opportunity to be creative in each of those (yes I got to be creative in History. I don't know who else gets that opportunity). In high school, I wound up being very good at math, because we tackled math with creativity at that point.

I will be writing a submission to 20 under 40 tackling this subject: we've gotten to the point where we treat the arts like a trade, and thus we focus on the skills of art rather than the creativity of art. Can you imagine that I learned how to play the piano for five years and never listened to classical music? I never got the opportunity to write anything, to improvise--to do anything other than mechanically replicate the song at hand.

Theresa Rebeck has an essay on Lark Theatre's blog entitled "Can Craft and Creativity Live On The Same Stage?" I agree with her that the answer is yes, craft and creativity have to work together. But my problem with a lot of arts programs and arts education is a lack of exploration of creativity.

Partially that's because, as Gifts of the Muse and other publications make painfully clear, we still have a long way to go in terms of developing the language and information to analyze what exactly that means.

But we can do it. If anyone has read Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, there is a passage wherein he describes the artistic literacy programs in Peru. That's the direction to go: treating creativity as a language that crosses alphabets, and learning how to converse in that language.

Once we get into this "arts as a language" mode, the instrumental versus intrinsic benefits argument will become more moot. What are English's benefits: instrumental or intrinsic? There are strong arguments to be made for both, although both are exceedingly difficult to quantify.