Bitter Gertrude: At major cultural inflection points, the role of the arts becomes critically important. The arts are where we, as a culture, determine who we are, what we want to be, what we hope for, what we fear, what we’re willing to fight for. The stories of a culture reflect that culture and shape it. The storyteller shapes the narrative; the narrative shapes opinion and belief; opinion and belief shape the culture.
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The arts community in the United States has always seen an upward trend in terms of popularity, development, content and industrial purposes. However, since the pandemic has began, the arts community in particular has taken the hardest hit. Artists and employees have been laid off and companies have shut down. All in all, the past 9 months have been terrible for the arts industry.
However, even with this, I am hopeful that the arts industry will make it out of this pandemic stronger and better. The pandemic has given so much time to everyone involved in it to look back at their current practices, such as "having no relief system in place" that it seems like if effort is put into place to correct these things, once the industry is up and about, it will be a better place to work at. Of course, that is after the pandemic is done with.
I feel like articles like these are a little bit silly. I feel like at this point in the pandemic predicting the future of theatre is like predicting the weather next month, where people can conjecture but it won’t be accurate so I definitely went into the article expecting to be disappointed. The first part of the article seems to attribute the current politics that have seemed to exist a lot longer than this inflection point (maybe not to the same degree but I want to acknowledge a lot of these problems of “bully” politics are not new). I am not sure that I agree with the statement of the article talking about how the arts have more power to shape culture than politics as our laws do a really great job at shaping our culture. I do though like the steps that this article tells arts institutions to take. I really resonated with the point about not staying neutral. I think not enough denounce things and take the power that they could have when it comes to racism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, sexism, classism, and more. I’ve worked for companies that feel they might alienate people if they do this and now this time as many arts leaders are saying to stop caring about these large donors or even not so large donors who are going potentially cause a fuss and stick to your mission. Overall a better read than I expected as it talked not about COVID and re-opening but about culture change.
I certainly was not expecting the political tirade at the precipice of this article, but I can't say it wasn't entire unwelcome. How exactly that preface fits into the idea of arts being revolutionary, I couldn't tell you. But I agree that if wielded correctly, the arts have much more power in society than many people in modern society give them credit for. It almost seems like too many people can go to a culturally significant event like a play about societal issues and not take away the impact that the playwright and director and actors attempted to convey. But that's an issue for another time. The "practical terms" that this article's author puts forward are many things that many of us have heard in some capacity or another before. Now, it's up to debate whether to say if these are arguments are less or more important because of their repetition, but the very act of repetition itself is important either way. However, the last one stuck out to me: "Remember who you are". When I first read this, I almost dismissed it as... childish, in a way. Other than that, it seems entirely subjective. But I guess that's the point. The arts have always been about expressing one' self: the anger, the joy, the grief, the love, the sadness of it all. If in a tumultuous time we give up who we are, then we have given up what has made us artists and creators. I think this is the most important thing to remember in these times. Be yourself and live as who you are.
This article was… a little bit all over the place. Several times in writing these articles this semester I have read articles about ‘revolutionizing theatre’ and how ‘theatre must change to survive’ just read an author ramble on about something off topic, and often not offer a solution at all. This article seemed to instead bash republicans, and while I certainly don’t mind that, we already know that the government is a problem, and we already know that the arts have suffered, and will continue to suffer under this administration, due to funding cuts and complete lack of empathy when the industry closed due to the pandemic. As far as the Trumps are concerned, I expect nothing else. However, the author is calling for a revolution for BIPOC and diversity in theatre, but didn’t offer any better insight than anything else I’ve read thus far. There are so many people speaking out to say ‘Let’s include BIPOC artists’ but then they do not recommend playwrights, designers, organizations, etc. They just let the issue die. They do not amplify voices, but instead provide this performative allyship.
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