These are the first three challenges I’ve encountered as I embark on a six-month journey toward independent production in a regional market. I’ve never done it before. I’ve worked in the DC theatre community in a number of capacities—director, playwright, performer, and dramaturg—but I’ve never taken on producing before. This year, the folks at CulturalDC’s Mead Theatre Lab Program had enough confidence in me to select my project as part of their 2015-2016 season.
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Right off the bat, in one of the first few sections of this blog this producer talks about the importance of communication. If you cannot clearly an confidently rely your vision to others, who is going to work with you on this? It must be extremely important to relay ideas clearly when it comes to explaining a devised piece or any project that is non-traditional in content or process. As for finding and convincing a team to hop on board, I would agree it probably does ride a lot on who you have seen and who you know. But that really is no surprise considering the base of our industry is based on who you know. Nothing can ever really happen if you don’t, “got a guy”. As this producer pointed out, if you don’t know anyone it can take a little while to build up relationships. Although I would think as a producer you would want to get your foot in the door with meeting people as soon as possible. I wonder why it seems like such a mystery to this producer.
The idea of mounting a production outside of an existing company is daunting, and I think that the three challenges outlined by this producer point to all the structures that we expect to work with and have within a theater company, and the difficulty of supplementing them in alternate ways once that cocoon isn't there. I especially like her pros and cons for all the producing models that she presents as options for independent productions in the DC area, because the take-away is as clear as the challenge.
I'm going to try to follow her posts about this project, because I'm quite interested to know how producing this piece will change her approach, and whether she will still believe at the end that the three challenges she described actually are the three primordial aspects of independent producing.
One thing she did not explicitly state in her article is the importance of understanding the ins and outs of the scene and community in which you work, although she did demonstrate that implicitly with her understanding of the DC theater scene and the importance of finding resources that work best for you and your purpose.
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