Createquity.: If all the world’s a stage, who can compete with Broadway? While gathering research as a doctoral student at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ, Mirae Kim interviewed numerous arts organizations about funding issues. She spotted a pattern among local nonprofit venues: “Many theaters in New Jersey mentioned their need to compete against Broadway theaters in New York City – which perfectly made sense since they are only about ten to 20 miles away from Broadway,” Kim recalls. “They mentioned they cannot compete against Broadway theaters in the traditional way because of the different financial sizes, so several of them highlighted their community basis as a way of differentiating themselves from ‘commercial’ theaters.”
4 comments:
I’ve noticed a similar issue where I live that the small theaters in New Jersey also experience. I live about an hour and a half from New York, and an hour or so from Philadelphia. Small, community theaters struggled when first opening to gain a crowd, because why not just go to Broadway? These theaters now have a loyal following by the community, but I think Kim’s study is very interesting. Community theater and nonprofits that rely on public donation and funding have always struggled with balancing putting on a good show and maintaining their nonprofit identity. While her study might not answer her research question completely, it does get the reader questioning whether collaboration with other organizations helps or hurts nonprofits. I believe this could encourage anyone who reads it to support local theater, and to considering donating to community organizations to keep them running!
Adding onto what Beck said - I think that when a local community connects with a local theater, attendees attend because they want to support the people they know. I think Kim's study was interesting as it compared the correspondence between civic engagement alongside nonprofits and their collaboration. I do believe Kim’s study highlights an extremely important part of theater - collaboration. Whether these local theaters are more civically engaged from the collaboration or not, theater is all about people working together to put on a performance. I believe that local theaters can be central to communities and nonprofits are an important part of the art community. However, there comes a point where local theatres can’t compare themselves to Broadway, simply from an economic perspective. The lack of money, space, people, and time is very representative in the quality of theater one can watch at their local performance space vs. a broadway show.
I was a little bit surprised to read that Mirae Kim didn’t see the importance of civic and community engagement as what differentiates not-for-profit theatre’s from commercial theatre companies. I guess having a foundation at a local 501(c)(3) theatre company, I’ve seen the importance of this, though it is somewhat common sense. The company I work for back home has many partnerships with local businesses to promote one another. Also, the company goes out into the community to perform, especially to senior centers. Not only does this make a good impression of the company to the community, but I’ve seen when working the box office community members coming out from these places to see shows. In smaller companies there is a greater dependence on the community to support the company, thus creating a need for civic and community engagement in local not-for-profit theatres. Createquity’s findings that most funding in small not-for-profit theatre’s makes sense because many grant granting programs expect a certain credibility that some smaller companies don’t have. Also, grants aren’t as steady a stream of funding that local theatres require, thus, it makes a lot of sense that most funding is private in this setting. Overall, I’m glad this research is being done as someone who is lover and supporter of small local not-for-profit theatre and would love to read the study in its entirety.
I really liked this article because it gave me an entirely new perspective on what it means to work on community theatre versus big-budget regional theatre or Broadway productions. Coming from Los Angeles, there is good regional theatre that shows both local and touring shows, however that is not the type of theatre that stood out to me from every kind of show I watched growing up. The things that shown out were the productions put on by theatres that were not more than ten minutes away from my house. These were the theatres where I watched productions like A Christmas Carol with my family before Christmas Eve. I think that Ella and Beck both bring up good points about local theatre feeling different than bigger budget theatre to the audience. This feeling comes from knowing the people in the cast and crew and where they come from, along with feeling like you could be one of them.
Post a Comment