HowlRound: Someday, I want to establish my own arts not-for-profit, and help to propel the arts and culture forward in American society. Moreover, I want to create an organization that creates socially responsible content for a particular community. It’s not unreasonable for one to roll their eyes when they see these types of phrases uttered by artists and arts administrators alike. Indeed, in today’s artistic world, we constantly encounter those talking about “socially responsible theatre,” “theatre for social change,” and “artivism.” These themes signify an understanding of theatre’s social potential and a desire to use theatre as a tool to influence public attitudes on specific social issues, questions, and policies. More often than not, however, theatremakers diverge on how to create work with this type of impact. During my senior year of college, I was fortunately caught directly between opposing lines of thought during a theatrical capstone project, forcing me to understand the nuances on this increasingly popular topic.
2 comments:
This author does a great job at highlighting one of the big issues for socially conscious theatre in that it’s much easier to be socially conscious when the theatre is small and has the ability to literally knock on resident’s doors and ask them what the need or what they’re concerned about. In larger scale theatre, profit is everything and therefore, they need to appeal to the people who have money in order to generate serious revenue. Not for profits, according to Molly, can only swim if the community supports them. These communities have the absolute right to shut down a theatre if they dislike the theatre’s actions – and in that way it forces these smaller theatres to become socially conscious and operate on that level. The tricky part of this industry is to take those small scale ideas and bump them up to the larger productions and have them picked up by producers and tour, just like all the others.
Nice Article! A lot of really important things here that I think even successful theatre should take a look at. As for all you unsuccessful theatres, here’s why! Subscribers are dying and your community doesn’t care about the Taming of the Shrew set in the 20’s! If you’re in a city with lots of minorities and you want them to see your work you have to do your research. I think this article makes numerous good suggestions, but I think the easiest ne to stat with, as talking to people can be difficult sometimes is exploring the history of your community, and not just the white history. The reason it is not enough to take a show that sympathizes with problems felt by predominately white people and put a diverse cast on stage and call it a day is because people of color face different problems in their lives and have different history. That is another thing this article touches on, not being homogenous with your art, if you’re going to pay homage to something, respect it, and respect with makes it specific to a part of your community. If you make art that is surface level enough to please everyone in the hopes of maximum ticket sales you will bore everyone and fail.
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