Audience Revolution: Dispatches from the Field

Caridad Svich

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781559365413
• eBook ISBN: 9781559368643
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

A collection of thoughtful and provocative reflections on how theatre practitioners think about and engage with audiences, as well as define and explore sites for performance. Through shared experience and ritual, live performance functions as a catalytic medium for progress and evolution. In the hands of artists and audience, the stage is set for the re-makings of commonwealth, or necessary revolution.

Caridad Svich received a 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theater, a 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award for GUAPA, and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based on the Isabel Allende novel.

CHAPTER ONE

Evolution and Resistance

EVOLUTION > REVOLUTION?

Carlton Turner

For me, there is a very distinct difference between evolution and revolution. A revolution orbits the same dynamics. What changes is positioning—who’s in power, who’s on top. It’s like a revolving door—the door doesn’t move, it’s just a cycle of people in and out of that door.

In evolution the entire being, the entire system, changes; it’s a move not just in positioning but in purpose. For me, an evolution marks that you’ve learned something and you’ve graduated to a different level, or rather gained a different perspective. Sometimes that means that you are starting over, shifting the entire dynamic and your understanding of something completely. The evolutionary practice is one in which we’re constantly seeking transformation, not just transition.

Organizational Evolution > Audience Development

Some of the questions this book asks are really important ones: “When making work, who is it for? Who is making decisions? Who is impacted? How is the audience invited into a process, a work, a building over time?” It’s always about the audience—how can we shift the audience, how can we reeducate the audience, how can we cultivate a new audience? But I think that the emphasis on audience is misplaced because this collection is not directed toward the audience; it is directed toward the arts leaders and practitioners. And as leaders I think we need less focus on the audience and more on understanding how artists and organizations can shift their practices to be more relevant to changing times, changing demographics, to all of the shifts that are happening as our communities and our world are changing. We need to ask: How is the organization evolving? How does the mission evolve? How does the purpose of your organization and the work that you’re creating, presenting, producing evolve to match the need of an audience at this particular moment in history?

So, those initial questions in reverse would be: Why doesn’t the audience member feel engaged? Why do they feel like this work isn’t for them? Why are there barriers to their participation in the decision-making process? And what put the culture or the artistic process so far out of reach of the audience that they feel like they need to be invited back into the process? Because, from a cultural position, the art belongs to the community—it belongs to the culture, not to the artist. The artist is there in service of the culture they are representing. And the arts community has shifted that dynamic to where the audience is in service of the artist or the institution, rather than the institution being in service of the audience.

Thinking about this in terms of evolution: The process of evolving responds to the environment around you. The problem that we’re facing as an arts sector, as a performing arts sector specifically, is we’ve disconnected ourselves from the natural and social environment and created a very insular space in which to make and show art as product. We see this happening with institutions in the ethereal sense—an organization, a 501(c)(3)—and in the physical sense, a bricks-and-mortar building so tied to programming that it’s hard for people to think outside of that structure. We see this happening with institutions that weren’t necessarily created in response to a demand from the community, but as a way to pay homage to an artist or group, or a particular discipline. And so many of the buildings are constructed as a monument to the ego. In contrast to these systems and structures, the work that needs to happen in the community is driven by need and necessity and the spirit of the people.

Looking at Alternate ROOTS as an example, it’s an organization that came out of a very specific space, time, and need—the space being the South in general and the Highlander Research and Education Center specifically; the time being post–Civil Rights and antiwar movements; and the need was to understand how the performing arts are implicated in supporting the struggle for human dignity. ROOTS’s founders were asking a question about how to continue, as artists, as citizens, to be engaged in a process of transforming the society around them. If we look back forty years to the organization’s founding, or if we look back three-to-four years in the recent history, we see the attempts to answer those questions forming the legacy of the organization.

In the beginning, ROOTS created an aspirational mission: to strive for the elimination of all forms of oppression. As a collective, they were trying to embody those words they articulated at the beginning of their existence together. They didn’t quite live those words when they first uttered them to each other. But through time, years of being together, they began to actually live and be those principles that they put out as the foundation of their relationship to one another. In the words of Linda Parris-Bailey, one of ROOTS’s founding members, “We hung in there because people had that vision. What we did was agree to struggle together.” Those original members chose to make that journey together and to walk with one another throughout that process and to hold each other accountable over time.

Reciprocity > Ministry

In addition to challenging a focus on audience development, I also want to push back against the idea of art as ministry and arts institutions as ministering to communities. Like many Southerners, I also come from a religious community. The church was literally in the front yard of my grandmother’s house. So, growing up, I spent a lot of time in church and dealing with ministers, and I saw many of them as disconnected from the people. Even though they were supposed to be the connective tissue between the people and a higher power, often they came across like pretentious gatekeepers.

This idea of ministry doesn’t feel like an authentic practice for what the work in performing arts actually is. It’s not necessarily ministering to anyone because people know, they come into the world knowing, and ministering to me indicates that someone is providing a more spiritual path or a more right path or a more righteous way of doing or being, and they need to share that or spread that to other people. And to think that’s what the theatre is considering itself is a really dangerous idea.

I do feel there is an aspect of ministry that is relevant to this conversation: that people are coming because they feel they are being fed. And that the space you are creating—again, whether it be a virtual, ephemeral space of the ritual you’re creating through theatre, or the physical space of the bricks-and-mortar building—is one that people feel comfortable to come to, to share, to be fed, and to be of service to others. There’s a reciprocal process where they’re coming to be fed and to feed others. The best work that I’ve experienced has been in that vein where there’s an exchange, whether that’s an exchange of energies or an exchange of support or an exchange of vision or creativity or even laughter—that there is an exchange that happens. And the audience comes to participate in that exchange. You go to the sacred space knowing that you’re going to get something from it and you’re going to give something. And that’s part of this balance that we should be creating with any type of cultural or artistic engagement.

Holistic Spaces > Art Centers

The concept of arts institutions as holistic community centers sits better with me than this idea of ministry. I think that’s what the centers should be striving for altogether—any place that is a public facility should be dedicated to holistic community wellness. The arts is just one place that we can model that in a way that is very rooted and connected to our traditions and our spirit.

We also need to recognize that in order to truly create holistic spaces, you may have to drop the arts from the center. Holistic means the whole being, and art is merely an identifier. It is not the source; it is not the center. Art is a representation of the wholeness that you’re creating, that you’re fostering, a visual/aural illustration of the culture that you come from and/or are trying to create. A performing arts space is not considered holistic just because the offering is art.

The best example of an organization operating in this spirit would be Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans. During Hurricane Katrina the space did not flood, and so after the storm, when people came to Ashé, the space was filled with cleaning materials. Mops and buckets and bleach and Lysol and ammonia—whatever you needed. And people came in and were like, “When are you going to get back to producing art?” And Carol Bebelle, Ashé’s executive director, was like, “Baby, this is the art. This is what the people need at this moment, and that’s what we are going to provide.”

There’s something vital about that approach—their space is open to multiple forms of engagement that are in support of the community. They’re not trying to create something that the community might one day learn to love or understand. Everything they create is in response to the community. This week it may be cleaning supplies; next week it may be HIV testing; the following week it may be a performance around the seven Kwanza principles. It can be whatever it needs to be, based on the needs of the community. That doesn’t lessen the artistic practice, but it does strengthen the rigor of being in service to the community.

Reimaging Power > Shifting Power

Ultimately, the question I would ask is: To what end? At the end of the day, when you get a new audience, a different audience, into your space to see your work—what do you hope to shift as a result of that audience witnessing what you’re providing? What do you hope to shift in the world as a result of that work, both as short-term impact and long-term legacy building? Are we waiting on a revolution in our sector, in our society, a shift in who has the power? Or are we looking to model the evolution of practice and reimagine the entire designation of power?

Carlton Turner is the executive director of Alternate ROOTS, a regional nonprofit arts organization based in the South, supporting artists working at the intersection of arts and social justice, and cofounder and co–artistic director, along with his brother, Maurice Turner, of the group M.U.G.A.B.E.E. (Men Under Guidance Acting Before Early Extinction), a Mississippi-based performing arts group that blends of jazz, hip-hop, spoken word poetry, and soul music together with nontraditional storytelling. This piece was coedited by Nicole Gurgel-Seefeldt, Alternate ROOTS communications manager.

COMMUNITY/RESISTANCE: REFLECTIONS ON DISCOURSE AND COMMUNITY

Diana Damian Martin

In The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (Verso 2014), Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval present an articulation of neoliberalism as a particular rationality, one that “tends to structure and organize not only the action of rulers, but also the conduct of the ruled.” Neoliberalism is defined here as capitalism’s contemporary rationality, one that encompasses discourses, practices, and mechanisms, which determine “a new mode of government of human beings in accordance with the universal principle of competition.” Dardot and Laval’s conceptualization of neoliberalism offers something different from other contemporary discussions on this political phenomenon; the authors examine how neoliberalism has come to signify the fiscalization of matters both private (affect and identity, for example) and public (labor, for example). This, they propose, has come hand in hand with both the increasing privatization of public space and the erosion of the collective in favor of the individual (the entrepreneur as the ultimate form of independence and success).

In this political landscape, cultural discourse becomes precarious, its sustainability tied to economic factors. The few remaining public spaces become battlegrounds for different ideologies of resistance, whilst also at threat from being consumed by homogenizing discourses. At the heart of this is a politics guided by emotions like anxiety and fear, instilled by the ethical dimensions of artistic practice and its personal implications on cultural operators and artists. As Slavoj Žižek argues in a recent article for The Guardian, “The only way [the government] actively mobilizes people is through fear: the fear of immigrants, the fear of crime, the fear of godless sexual depravity, the fear of excessive state…” (October 3, 2010). He gives the example of the cooption of language into these mechanisms, explaining the ways in which political correctness acts as an exemplary form of the politics of fear.

Within this landscape of emotional practice, discourse, be it explicitly verbal or not, becomes fundamental to authentic conversations and transactions of meaning that can instill action and develop a more grounded, sustainable, and resistant cultural landscape. Culture is also the site in which the political and the aesthetic come together, and where temporary public spaces are constructed. It is this temporary construction that also makes them powerful, slippery, not easily grasped by the mecha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Program Description: Audience (R)Evolution
• Foreword: Audience Revolutions
• Introduction: Dispatches from the Field
• CHAPTER ONE: EVOLUTION AND RESISTANCE
• CHAPTER TWO: SEEING
• CHAPTER THREE: PLACE AND PLAY
• CHAPTER FOUR: BEING