OnStage: Many Broadway shows close as quickly as they open. With millions of dollars involved, if the financial forecast isn't looking pretty, don't expect to see the show running for very long. Broadway producers can do this with little uproar from the public, because most theatre folk know that, at the end of the day, this is a business and profits must be made. But when news hits that colleges are shutting down their theatre programs because they're not making money, something seems very wrong with that picture.
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It's hard to hear that universities like Eastern New Mexico are putting profits before education. While I understand that arts are the first to go in a difficult budget situation, I definitely think that theres a major conflict of interest when a college has to consider funding in a manner that puts cutting a program entirely in their potential scope of options. It's really poor planning on the part of the university, and it's also just a blatant lack of understanding of how other college arts programs work in the first place. Like CMU, for instance, that runs all of its productions at a deficit. Because when you focus on making your productions sizable and of a reasonable scope in variety, you put the focus on learning instead of focusing on profits, which runs in a totally different realm of the theatre industry in the first place. Theatre produced for the purpose of making profits can be educational, but in a college setting the best option, I believe, is to put the focus on learning, even when shows are being run at a deficit.
It is an unfortunate reality that when cutting things, the arts are usually considered non-essential enough to be first in line to the chopping block. While stem fields and humanities have somehow managed to make their cases to society, the arts have yet to be considered as essential as, say, engineering or computer science when it comes to educational institutions. While I'd like to think that this is because there are enough independent arts institutions to fulfill any needs a knowledge-hungry student might have. Sadly, this is not the case. Universities, seeing very little publicity/funding potential in their arts programs, don't hesitate when the time comes to sacrifice the artistic buffer zone. I'd like to make excuses for this sorry state, and I'd like to think that there are always alternatives ready and waiting to go in situations like this, but the truth is that our society, so used to equating the arts with Aunt Ethel's macrame, or the last terrible movie they saw, is brutally unforgiving when it comes to the subjective experimentation that is the foundation of all creative processes. It isn't financially viable to pay for open-ended quantum physics experimentation, yet that's essentially what arts programs are. To ensure a rich and productive arts education, students must be allowed to have creative freedom, to fuck up and learn from it. This costs money, unfortunately, and is easily lampooned and misunderstood. When your student's failures can be mounted and displayed to the world, and their successes utterly misinterpreted to the point of loathing, arts come to seem like a black hole of bullshit and black-clad, cigarette-smoking nihilists, and who the fuck wants to throw money at that? Never mind American society's artistic constipation, or the power of art to transcend boundaries, or even the small fact that maybe there are some engineers who would really benefit from sitting down and drawing a bowl of fruit in a quiet room. No, art is too hard to predict, too hard to control, and gets into the nooks and crannies of the American mind, and stays there (I think they call it thinking, actually.) How do you graph that? How do you calculate the return on that? The day they find an equation for art is the day they'll start mapping the beats of the human heart in relation the revolutions of Mars and the high A's being sung by a large woman on a cloudy Sunday in Berlin.
Even though we hear about this happening all over the country this is still so sad to hear. The cut specific cut makes no logical sense the school isn’t having the program cut or the taking away the theatre… they’re saying their own theatre majors can’t perform in their theatre? What about the theatre majors paying thousands to go to school there? This seems like bull shit to me, I would be enraged. I understand that when money is tight the arts, as non necessities, are usually the first field looked at, but again, this specific budget cut doesn’t seem to solve anything. It seems more like a power play from those at the top of the university, scoffing at the theatre department. I think this college needs to take a look around and realize how much design and media and idolized actors and actresses shape our whole world now. Because Media is quickly becoming a necessity in the eyes of the young people.
I’m the first to argue for a stronger support of subjects like computer science, in fact I pushed pretty hard in high school for our school to help open up opportunities for people to follow paths such as that. I’m a huge fan of the hard sciences… Well everything but chem and bio… O.K. so I like physics. Still I appreciate the great value that the sciences bring as well as the value of English, History, and Math. So for god sakes can we please, please, please, please! Stop treating art like it’s something valuable only for it’s profit motive. Art provides us a way to express ourselves, to communicate with others about our emotions, our sense of right and wrong. It’s not just data, it’s an empathy that binds us together and makes our society stronger. It helps us to remember the past and be inspired to shape a better future.
If this is the institution's attitude towards performing arts, then I'm not really sure what the quality of their performing arts education is in the first place. I'm glad to see that the instructors of theatre at that school is also questioning the decision and obviously cares about the arts. This also weirdly reminds me of my high school, which also in a way valued profit making over education - a lot of times workers were hired to do the work (instead of having students do the whole thing) in order to make the show to be built quickly and look professional. How the show looked took precedence over the students actually being able to learn skills. There are so many things in the performance arts that can take precedence over education, and while I can't do much to stop the other educational institutions for doing that, I'm glad that I'm now at an institution that values the education of performing arts.
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