Mike Lew - Playwright: I’ve been avidly following coverage of The Summit and there’s a lot of FANTASTIC discussion coming out of that, but one thing that caught my attention that hasn’t been really dissected yet is the false notion that arts education will save the theater.
When confronted with the stark reality that “the youth” won’t buy theater tickets, theaters oftentimes place the blame on the school system. The argument goes that decreased arts funding in schools begets students who aren’t accustomed to coming to theater, and that by not being exposed to theater at a young age we’re losing all our potential patrons. It’s a chestnut that found its way into The Summit, and it’s a position that Isherwood floated in an article about Rocco Landesman’s tenure at the NEA.
It’s also a myth.
1 comment:
I recently attended a lecture on this exact topic presented by the Master of Arts Management program here at CMU. The speaker was the general manager of Off-Center @ The Jones, a theatre company that functions as a sub-set of the huge, mainstream Denver Center for the Performing Arts. She explained that the founding members of Off-Center came to the same conclusion as the writer of the article regarding why certain people just weren't going to the theater, and they decided to create a company that would cater to those possible audiences.
Rather than come up with fancy hip (and useless) marketing campaigns for productions that would not otherwise appeal to those absent audiences, they created the theatre's programming based on what those people might want to see. The result was a lot of different productions, some of which barely even resemble theatre, that all have in common a form of performance on a varying scale of traditional structure and audience participation at different levels of intensity.
The speaker had a lot of interesting insight into the company's development as they were figuring what worked, what didn't, and what people did want to come see. There was a heavy focus on what is available to audiences before and after the performance itself, and on ways for audience members and participants to bond during the shows/experiences.
Overall, it was a very interesting lecture and corroborated a lot of the points made in this article regarding who isn't going to the theatre, and why, and how to get them there. I think that it's going to be increasingly important for theaters to adapt their programming to the audiences that they are trying to draw in as well as the community that they are already a part of.
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