Ben Cameron Speech
Ben Cameron Speech
A keynote speech by Ben Cameron at Dance/USA's Winter Council
" It is an honor for me to be here, not only because I've been a huge admirer of Andrea Snyder for a number of years – and we have known each other for 15 years at this point, having both been at the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] at the same time – but because I stand in awe of a lot of what you all do. Even though my official point of orientation is the theater, part of the great joy I've had over the years is experiencing other art forms, especially dance, during my years in Minnesota. Whether we're talking about work like Uncle Tom's Cabin by Bill T. Jones or The Hard Nut by Mark Morris, whether we're talking the companies of Amanda Miller or Susan Marshall, whether we're talking the phenomenal physical power of Elizabeth Streb or the incredible physical grace of a company like the San Francisco Ballet, whose Carmen on tour was the first thing I ever saw that was a professional dance experience in North Carolina in the late 1950s, you all have significantly altered and transformed my life and amplified the vocabulary with which I filter the human experience. So I am in debt to you for everything you do everyday.
That said, let's get right to it.
Last night at dinner, there was a group of six or seven of us who began to discuss the bifurcated leadership structure our organizations typically have. Certainly in our field that artistic director/managing director leadership structure is the predominate model for major organizations. We were asking the question, "Is this applicable? Is this appropriate? Is this even feasible in the current economic times in which we live?" Our conclusions, which I don't think we reached necessarily, probably were less powerful for me than the subtle uncovering of the essential differences of assumptions of our relative fields. Although I thought I understood in parallel much of how dance companies behave by analogy for how theater companies behave, nonetheless, that conversation subtly teased out the most miniscule, but the most revealing differences in our two fields.
For that reason I want to preface this by saying I'm not capable or equipped of talking to you about what dance should do, can do, ought to do, in order to survive these times. Maybe the better way of looking at my time before you is to let me share with you what the theater field is asking, what questions we are raising, how we are approaching these concerns in hopes that this will either stimulate flashes of recognition or provoke similar questions of your own. Clearly, the thing I don't need to say is that I'm standing in front of you, or we're all collected in a time of unprecedented stress. It's easy for us to benchmark the beginning of that time from 9/11 for those of us in the United States, and clearly we do. And while I wish I stood before you with more than antidotal information, with quantifiable fiscal survey information, we like Dance/USA conduct our fiscal analysis based on audits.
If dance companies work the same schedule as theaters do, most fiscal years end June 30 and the audits get approved in October or November, sometimes even slightly later. We are in the process of gathering those audits now and crunching those numbers to be able to say, "Here is the impact of that dire, unprecedented year fiscally on the theater field." We don't have those numbers yet. But given the enormity of what happened during 9/11, we took the unprecedented step at TCG [Theatre Communications Group] of saying to our membership at three different points in the year, "We know it's not audited, but times are too urgent. So we are going to ask you how you are doing." The last of those surveys came at the end of the fiscal year period.
And here is what our members told us: 35 percent of theaters nationwide said, "We experienced a shortfall in government giving"; 51 percent of theaters said, "We experienced a shortfall in individual giving"; 52 percent cited a shortfall in foundation giving; 55 percent said, "We experienced a shortfall in single ticket sales and subscriptions"; and 67 percent said, "We experienced a shortfall in corporate contributions." As horrific as these numbers are – and they are disturbing to say the least – we recognize this is the beginning of a much longer, much darker period. When I say only 35 percent experienced a government shortfall, I'm not saying the obvious. The bulk of government budgets were set before the events of 9/11, and already, if you live in a state like New Jersey, where I live, you know that state after state after state is encountering record debts of projections for state budgets. In those states, every arts budget is up for attack and to date 42 of the 50 states in this country have cut their arts budget over prior year levels in figures ranking from six or seven percent in North Carolina to 67 percent in Massachusetts. The New York governor just announced an additional 13.5 percent cut the day before yesterday. We know that government number will be much worse 12 months from now than it was this last go-round.
When I say corporate contributions are going away, I'm also not acknowledging the obvious that increasingly corporations continue to turn their backs or make the case that other priorities call on their attention more than the arts. Tim McClimon of AT&T in a conversation yesterday said, "In the last two years, my giving budget has gone from $51 million to $10 million. In fact, AT&T has less money to give away than it has ever had, including the year the foundation was founded. What I don't say about foundations is what's obvious for many of you, that many foundations give on a rolling average of three years' assets, and many foundation officers I know say, "Look, you guys in the arts are still experiencing the largesse of the stock markets of '98, '99 and '00, and when the stock markets of '00, '01 and '02 become the basis for that average, foundation giving in this country will crash and burn." Already we've seen The Pew Charitable Trusts withdraw from the national funding arena. We've seen the Irvine Foundation in California lay off its entire arts and giving staff but one, and this is just the beginning of that trajectory. Individuals are far less certain to give when their asset base is uncertain, so what, in sum, disturbs us is not simply the fall in one of these sectors.
Shortly after Andrea and I both left the NEA, government giving at a federal level fell precipitously, but it was offset by the rise in foundation giving. In comparison, this situation today, to anyone's memory, is the first moment that any one of us can recall where everything is trending south at the same time: foundation giving down; corporate giving down; individual giving down; all going down at the same moment. How we will prepare ourselves for that moment is anyone's guess. In the theater field, several central questions obsess us in this moment. How do we manage for the long term to keep alive the vision and vitality of the art form and the epic scale we exist to serve, while overcoming in the short term the very real financial obstacles that plague us? How do we reward the aspirations of an emerging and future generation of artists and leaders without dismantling the achievements of the past generation? How do we find the courage and the creativity to embrace the future, to be masters of change rather than casualties of change? To have the courage to risk, and by risk I don't mean behavior responsibility, I mean constantly pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zone remembering that risk lies at the heart of everything we do artistically. Without risk, there is no artistic moment; we all know that. How do we make sure our organizations have that same degree of commitment to risk, even in a time when everything else preaches to us we should be thinking in the opposite fashion?
For my own part, I have to begin by acknowledging that if we look on this as all caused by 9/11, we have totally missed the boat. I believe 9/11 caused none of the stress we are experiencing to date. 9/11 may have sped the degree to which these things came home to roost, but increasingly if we look backward in time, already in certain benchmarking trends we can see slowing and breaking movement happening that 9/11 simply threw forward into bold relief. If we're going to manage for the long term and understand the mission before us, I would propose that, regardless of what we're experiencing individually, collectively we have to ask ourselves at least three big questions.
Before I tell you the three, let me also add that I think partly what we need to do is step back to say perhaps what we are experiencing is less a particular moment in history than it is the confusion that happens at any change when we experience a seismic upheaval in human consciousness. Now that's a mouthful, but if you've read [Tolstoy's The Death of] Ivan Ilich], it reminds us that there are certain fundamental changes in human consciousness. We used to be an agrarian or an agricultural society, and in that time what did history mean? History meant we came together, we sang songs, we danced dances, we chanted chants and in that way history was a tribal, collective, oral, on-the-ear activity. But then came the printing press, and we moved from being an agrarian society into an industrial society and in that moment everything changed. How we thought of the individual changed; how we thought of history changed. Instead of being tribal, collective and oral it became private, individual and visual as history was recorded on the printed page.
Indeed, how memory was even conceived changed. Memory used to be you made architecture in your mind and you stored memories in rooms and you sent a runner to retrieve the memory from that room, if you read classic Greek; that was memory. Now memory is a file on the printed page. Ilich would say we are at another such seismic moment as we move out of the industrial age into the
information/technological/digital/whatever-you-want-to-call-it age. And it's not that computers and technology are good or bad, but it's that they are. And in this moment everything we have come to hold sacred is up for grabs.
Tom Friedman, a global economist for The New York Times, spoke at our conference two months before 9/11 and presciently and ominously predicted virtually everything that came to pass, but he also offered a powerful metaphor that makes this case. He said, "For those of us over 40, the world we grew up in was a world symbolized by the Berlin Wall. In a world of the wall, it's easy to know good from bad, friend from foe, black from white. But the world we live in now is not the world of the wall, it's the world of the web. And in the world of the web, everything is intermingled. It's not so easy to distinguish friend from foe; it's not so easy to distinguish black from white. As he reminds us, in the world of the wall, every Nobel Prize winner was a king, an emperor, a prime minister, a powered individual, but in the world of the web think about the housewife who won the Nobel Peace Prize by starting an anti-landmine campaign on e-mail. Not an individual benign with power, a super-empowered individual. And it takes no more than 9/11 to remind us that it takes only 18 super-empowered individuals to temporarily bring a world order to its knees. Now, in that construct there are at least three big questions, again, that I think we need to ask ourselves or to look at, and for my mind the questions are defined as follows: they examine who we are; how we think; and how we congregate. Now I want to take each of those briefly in turn with you.
First of all, who we are. I always preface by saying that it's odd that someone who is going to talk to you about cultural diversity is a white male, but I'm your speaker so that's what you've got. I also want to preface by saying, as a former funder I worry that we've had this conversation for precisely the wrong reasons. I worry that we've talked about cultural diversity in the context of the changing demographics; that we all know by the year 2050 the majority of people in this country will be people of color, and that many of us have said, "Ooh hoo, God, the audience has changed. Boy, I better get with the program or I'm going to be out of business." I call that demographic blackmail. Demographic blackmail is not the reason to walk the road of cultural diversity for me.
We've often, at least in the theater field, chased the dream of cultural diversity, in part because funders encouraged us to do so. As a former funder, I take responsibility to acknowledge that in retrospect I worry that what we were really doing was perpetuating old patterns of funding. Essentially, what we were able to say is, "Gee, let's give the way we've always given because we'll give a million dollars to the orchestra, but here if you'll only diversify while we continue to give the African American theater ten thousand dollars." That was about perpetuation of existing standards not about changing behavior, and money for me is not a reason to diversify. I think I'm going to talk about cultural diversity, which is, in theater at least, a hard, difficult, painful road often fraught with frustration and setbacks and misunderstanding. We have to reach to a more personal place to make that commitment.
The place from which I come to this is actually my background as a Southerner. Here's my road into cultural diversity. I was born and raised in North Carolina in a town called High Point, and I did my college years at Chapel Hill. Every Southerner I've talked to, no matter where you were born and raised, when you were born and raised in the south you were acutely conscious of how the rest of the world thinks about you. You know that the rest of the country thinks you're Dolly and Dogpatch, grits and collards, Gomer, Guber, maybe Scarlett and Rhett. Every Southerner I know has experienced the look of condescension that crosses a Yankee face when they hear your Southern accent for the first time, and the subsequent look of amazement when you put two intelligent consecutive sentences together. I heard somebody say, "That's so true." And the media, rather than dispelling these limiting images, tended to reinforce them. I didn't know Gomer and Guber growing up in North Carolina. I'm sure they existed; they weren't part of my world. But when people have said to me, "What was it like to grow up in the south?" I say, "The world I think about first is the world of my grand-daddy Brown, who I pay honor to partly at this moment: a man who was briefly in Ripley's Believe it or Not for delivering his 6,000th baby on his 97th birthday; a man who was an Appalachian country doctor in the back hills of a little town at that point called Hendersonville, North Carolina, which has grown much better; and a man who was probably the single biggest formative influence on how I look at the world. When I was four, grand-daddy said to me, "Get in the car. We're going to go collect $200 worth of bills." I got in the car, and grand-daddy had palsy so he shook, which meant he couldn't keep the car quite on the road, so everybody in town knew if you see Doctor Brown coming, get out of the street. So we're going bumpity-bumpity-bump down these streets and little kids were going, "Ahh, Doctor Brown," and diving into the doorways. When we came back at the end of the day, we had a side of ham and a bushel of corn and 30 jars of jelly and five dollars in cash. I was very impressed with that, and grand-daddy said we broke even.
When I go back to Hendersonville, North Carolina, today, I go to a thing called Curb Market, which is their equivalent to a farmer's market, and I look for the oldest person I can find and I say, "Did you know Doctor Brown?" And they all say, "Why sure I do, Doctor Brown." And I'll say, "Well, I'm his grandson." Then they say, "James Steven Junior, you come over here," and they'll say, "This is James Steven. When your grand-daddy delivered him, we couldn't afford to pay him so we just named the baby for him." I think there are more James Stevens per capita in Hendersonville, North Carolina, than in the rest of the country. After a short, fantastic conversation about grand-daddy, there's inevitably the part where they try to say to me, "Now, this pound cake is just going to waste," and, "You need some of this jelly. This plant will look real nice in your New York apartment," and on and on and on. Ultimately, my point being as follows: yes, the south is the world of ignorance and prejudice in many cases that outsiders tend to see first, but it is also the world of infinite generosity, of deep family connection, of unbelievable graciousness even in the face of the most austere of conditions.
I was in the twelfth grade before anybody showed me the work of William Faulkner, and it was manna from heaven, because for the first time I didn't see the story told about the south or to the south. I heard the story of the south, told by the south, for the south as only the south can tell it. From what I know as a Southerner, it is not a leap for me to make to a child of color who goes to our arts events time after time after time and never sees himself or herself walk out on that stage. From what I know as a Southerner, it is not a leap for me to make to the economically disenfranchised, who walk into the opulence of our orchestra halls and feel that the surroundings are shouting at them, "You don't belong." And from what I know as a Southerner, it's not a leap for me to make to funding panels where I hear the artists of color saying, "My brothers and sisters are killing each other in the streets and the arts are going to make the difference," and the white artists are talking about psychological transformation and getting in touch with their feelings, oblivious to the privilege that inheres if that's your most pressing concern.
If we're going to talk about diversity, we need to understand the role we have played historically in determining whose stories are told and how. We cannot congratulate ourselves for introducing the inauthentic. This is a very theatrical set of examples that may or may not resonate, but I've always thought that the film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the story of integration told for the comfort of white people, did not open the door for Spike Lee. Miss Saigon, the story of the Asian-American experience in Vietnam told for the comfort of white people, did not open the door for Amy Tan, and Philadelphia, the story of AIDS told for the comfort of the HIV-negative and straight, did not open the door for Tony Kushner. Yet, how grateful audiences are when Spike Lee, Amy Tan and Tony Kushner finally can speak. This is a hard road, as I've said, and I would certainly not expect every organization to make the case to embrace this priority, but, for my mind, if we fail to embrace this priority we collude with oppression, we block total self-fulfillment, we turn our backs on much of what is great about this country and, for me, that is just wrong.
Now, I also preface by saying maybe this is something that a younger generation gets that we don't. When I look at kids today, I see a cross-fertilization in hip-hop music and dance and a rise in interracial dating and interracial marriage that was inconceivable growing up, for me to ever see in my lifetime, given where I born and raised in the 1950s. Yet I have to ask, what do those kids see when they see us, and does our de facto segregation create a chasm with them that we will never ever ford? This issue of young people gets me to the second point – and this is really such a strong theatrical concern I'm just going to allude to it briefly in passing – which is how we think. We spend a lot of time in theater trying to appreciate the difference in perceptual frameworks, and I'm really going to shortchange you through this and not go through a lot of the background in this, because I don't know that this resonates with you in the same way. But to distill this idea, cognitive studies basically show that people over 40 think in linear narrative patterns, people under 20 think in visual and associative patterns. Think of the difference between ABC news and MTV news. Think of the difference between the sort of narrative stories we read as children and the Sesame Street format of "here's the letter A, now the number 10, and now let's all go to Afghanistan." It's a different perceptual framework that they are encouraged to use, and for us in the theater field, one of the critical issues we have to face is, what will it mean for our art form, in which 90 percent of our stories are told in a linear narrative construct, if increasingly we are being asked to tell them to an audience who is primed to hear stories told in a visual and associative way? All our talk, I think, about student matinee tickets is totally misplaced because when we say, "Gee, if we just cut student rush ticket prices, they will come flocking in our doors." I am sorry, but if it's about economics why, when I'm at Tower Records at midnight, am I number 47 in line behind kids who are carrying stacks of CDs at 15, 16, 17 bucks apiece? If it's an economic issue why, when I go back to Minnesota and go see the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince because he's Prince again, am I surrounded by kids who spend $105 per seat to be there? For me, in theater, I think this disconnect between our perceptual frameworks is profound, again possibly not of relevance. If you want to talk more about this, I'm happy to because we've got studies about this and I've got lots of stuff I could feed you about this.
But point number three is, "How do we congregate." Here again to be in the shorthand, when a book with the title Bowling Alone lands on the best-selling list, the title itself tells you we don't behave like we used to behave. Increasingly, of course, what we're learning to uncover is that people increasingly look at community as a virtual, rather than as a geographical construct, and that study after study after study of younger people when asked to define their primary community, they often refer to the people with whom they chat online at one or two in the morning. If this is what community comes to be, the question will be raised, "Why should I support the museum down the street if my community is the people spread over thousands and thousands of miles and will never benefit from its programs?" – a huge fundamental shift in the way we congregate and gather.
Now, in this moment I think we have two choices. We can either fold our tents and say, "OK, we're the dinosaurs. Let's just run for the barn with whatever meager pension plans we have in our collective hands and leave this to the next generation," and confirm our olds ways of behavior and look to entrench them even further. Or we can be inspired by at least an anecdote and by a speaker, the anecdote being the Wallenda story, which I found really powerful for me. There's a story about one of the [Flying] Wallendas crossing the wire who was always told that when the big gust of wind comes and blows you off the wire, you let go of the balancing pole and you grab the wire. Of course, you know what I'm going to say. Ultimately, he's on the wire and a big gust of wind comes up and he's got the pole, but that pole has sustained him his whole life; he's never walked the wire without the pole. The pole has tilted here and tilted there and brought him back more than once, and when the wind comes up, he refuses to let go of the pole and over he goes down to his death. We're in gale winds on the wire, and part of our challenge is whether we have the courage to drop the pole.
Now in this life Doug Rushkoff has given me the greatest way into this, the media specialist whose booked media buyers, I hope you know. When he said to us at the same conference where Friedman talked, "You know I look at this moment as a renaissance, and what's a renaissance? A renaissance is a renegotiation of old ideas to reach a new consensual reality." I love that phrase. It's a renegotiation of old ideas to reach a new consensual reality. Looking at this moment not as a moment of war and factions who seek to overcome us, but as a renaissance moment, suddenly the barrier has become different for me. Rushkoff reminds us the old renaissance gave us four things: it gave us global circumnavigation; it gave us forced-perspective drawing; it gave us Newtonian physics; and it gave us coffee, thank God, for many of us. He would contend that the new renaissance is giving us four new things: instead of global circumnavigation, space exploration; instead of forced-perspective drawing, holograms; instead of Newtonian physics, fractals; instead of coffee, Starbucks. So in that life how do we look at the three questions as defined with renaissance, in a renaissance perspective? Already I've alluded that in terms of race issues we have an amazing cross-fertilization of cultural influence that promises a whole new set of race relations in the United States that could rebound to our benefit. In terms of the technology that drives the difference in this perceptual framework, in terms of these computers, if we look at this not as an "either/or" but as a "both," and what we see, in the theater at least, is an unbelievable explosion right now of technological possibilities. We see scene designers designing in fantastic new ways. We see playwrights writing in bursts of new rhythm almost, as somebody said, like they are channel-surfing on TV watching five shows at once. But scene rhythms have gone to short, pop, simultaneous storytelling, interweaving narrative. It's a fantastic new burst of creative energy among writers. And we talk about this means to convene, and this for me is the most profound, this way we socialize differently. I'm most compelled by a survey done in Philadelphia by a real estate developer who was afraid he was going to lose his tenants to cheaper buildings with an explosion of buildings. He surveyed his local tenants four times because he couldn't believe what he was hearing. He was saying, "What's the thing you want most in life that you don't have?" thinking people would say, "I don't get enough exercise and so let's put free gyms in all the buildings so nobody will get fat." The number one answer that came back every time was, "We want the opportunity to socialize with people other than the ones we work with," very profound, very specific. For those of us in the south, you've probably heard the joke "air conditioning was the death of the Southern neighborhood," and it's not really a joke. When I grew up in the south, it was too hot to stay indoors in July. Every adult put their chairs up on the porch, every kid rode their bicycles up and down the street. You knew all your neighbors because you could not stay inside. Now in the south people go, "I'm in the summer months," slam the doors, crank up the AC, and they don't know people two doors away. That pales by the current pressures people feel by work schedules, rigor and technology, and people want to socialize with people they don't know. For that reason, we are saying smart theaters are asking the question, "Our mission is no longer to produce performances. Our mission is the orchestration of social interaction, in which the performance is a piece, but only a piece, of what we're called to do." And smart artistic directors and managing directors around the country are saying, "I just realized I have a main stage, an upper stage, a cabaret maybe, my lobby is my fourth stage and my lobby needs the same degree of curating and programming as my other official stages meet." That's a profound shift in the sensibility of how we think about our work.
Clearly we can't do all this alone. And even so, in the middle of this I am optimistic about our future, and I'm optimistic for three reasons. Number one, I'm optimistic in a sense because in those numbers I mentioned initially, 51% down here, 60% down there, on each of those questions roughly 30-35% of theaters said to us, "We're not sure we understand why, but we're having a better year than we've ever had." And beginning to poke at that a little more and say, "OK, so you had a great year. What was that about?" We are hearing three things. Number one, some theaters are saying, "We have to admit we had big reserves, we had good investments," and we even had one theater say, "We made money on our investments in the last year," which was pretty amazing, but in some rare cases we leaned more heavily on reserves than we needed to but we made it through.
The second group of theaters said, "Well, we had a hit, you know pure and simple, we had a hit." Milwaukee Repertory's Shear Madness ran for four months. They kept it open and managed to make the box office. In many theaters, they weren't expected, for example, Berkeley Repertory had a big hit with Homebody/Kabul, the four-hour Tony Kushner play about Afghanistan. So it's not necessarily just palatable fare, but it was a hit and it mattered.
But the third thing we heard was it's the board. If there's anything that is most critical to how we think about these times, in addition to refashioning our thinking in new frameworks, it's about how we think of our board of directors and that partnership. We're being very aggressive in telling our board members, it used to be enough to be a supporter of an arts organization to sit on its board: you wrote a check, you came to a dinner and were honored, you came to a few meetings a year, that was enough. It's no longer enough. To warrant a place on the board of directors now, to be charged with the steering of the destiny of a collective of artists and managers, to sit on that board you can no longer be a supporter of that organization. You must be an activist on behalf of that organization and that's a different shift of energy. Activists write letters to the editor and go to Albany or whatever state capital arts cuts are threatened because, as we all know, in this moment the voice of the artist is heard as too self-interested and it's the lawyer, it's the doctor, it's the banker, it's the housewife, it's the constituent who can be heard when art professionals cannot be. An activist board member takes a kid every time he goes to a theater or dance concert, in part because we know that everyone with a significant relation to the art had it before they were 18. If you get beyond 18, you're never going to be convinced, and in our long-term health getting kids to experience art at a young age is pivotal. Even better, they take a kid and a kid's friend because we know the two most powerful impacts on the investment in the arts are parental example and peer reinforcement – if you watched your parents go to the arts or they took you and if you had a friend who thought it was cool. I would bet all of you in this room could relate to those two things. That ensures arts investment. An activist board member leverages their social contacts. Steppenwolf [Theatre] has a big auction every year, which I love going to. It's their charity fundraiser. They've taken over a million dollars a year on this auction, and they auction things from pots and pans to dinner with Gary Sinise, which last year went for $75,000, and they sold two of them – unbelievable. One of the things they always auction off, which is my favorite, is a walk-on on Frasier because if you watch Frasier you may not realize John Mahoney, who plays Martin Crane the father, is a founding member of Steppenwolf. (The walk-on is, if this is the camera that was the walk-on. They sort of play it back so people can see what they did. They even sort of play it in slow motion because otherwise you'd have to say, "What, oh I thought – run it again.") It comes with first-class airline tickets, a suite at the Beverly Hilton, et cetera. The same corporate CEO has bought the walk-on for the last three years running at $35,000 a pop. He has never done the walk-on. He holds an essay contest in his corporation about why the arts are important, and the employee who writes the best essay gets the walk-on trip.
Activist board behavior, leveraging social contact, empowering and charging our boards to behave in this new fashion is absolutely critical to our success. Activism implies partnership, support implies delegation, and we cannot delegate the solutions to our financial problems.
Ultimately, activist board members additionally have shifted their orientation. In the theater field, we are quality-obsessed. We spend all our time in rehearsals saying, "How do I get a better performance? How do I get a better scene out of this? How do I get a better director?" It's better, better, better. If you're a manager you want more zeros on the budget because if you got more money you hire better talent, work gets better. Every grant application starts talking about artistic excellence, quality, better, better, better. As many of you may know, I left the NEA and went to Target stores (or Tar-jay as many of you may call it). At that point when I arrived there the people at Target taught me many incredible lessons, with the first and most pivotal being these: that while we were talking about quality, the rest of the country had moved on, and it is no longer quality that determines investment of time, money and energy; it's value. At Target, they always say, "You can have the best toilet paper in the world on the shelves. If people don't see the value of coming in the store in the first place, they never get to see you've got the good or the bad. And p.s., you better have the best on the shelf once they're inside the store." But value precedes quality as a source of investment. To that end, we ask each of our theaters to answer three clear questions that are hard. We say, "What is the value of your theater, or in your case, what is the value of your dance company?" Number two is harder – "What is the value that your dance company alone offers or offers better than anyone else?" – because duplicative or second-rate value in this economy will not stand. The hardest is "How will your community be damaged if your dance company closes its doors and goes away tomorrow?" If you can't answer those three questions, the only supporters you have are the people who are in your seats.
In the theater field we've become better about quantifying that value. Some of this crosses over. We already know that every dollar spent on an arts ticket leverages five to seven dollars for the local economy, between parking and restaurants and the fabric store where the fabric is built for the costumes. For the Chamber of Commerce, that's a fantastic argument of value that you need to have in your arsenal. We know that kids who participate in the arts do 80 points higher on SATs than kids who don't, and if you care about education in your community, you have got to care about the arts. We know that kids who study Shakespeare have greater verbal acuity, greater complexity of thought, greater tolerance of ambiguity. If you're concerned about mental development and intellectual development, you have to care about the arts. In race relations, there's a UCLA study that shows kids who have been active in theater are 42 percent less likely to tolerate racist behavior than kids who haven't. If you care about race relations, you have to care about the arts. Those are value arguments.
Indeed, when I was at Target, we used to go from community to community to introduce ourselves when we walked in the door. We would come to town and we'd say, "We're going to open a new store, we're going to give away a lot of money, and here's how you get a piece of that." And in every community people would begin by saying, "Excuse me, you don't know this because you're not from here, but we have AIDS exploding through the ceiling, we have welfare to work issues, we have a food bank without enough food to put on the plates, a homeless shelter without enough beds, we have a school system that can't put books in the kids' hands. Why the hell do you people give so much money to the arts?" And in every case, we'd say, "How many of you grew up singing in the church choir, acting in the school play, or whatever?" And almost every hand would go up and I'd say, "Tell me, what did you learn from this?" Somebody would say, "I learned exit stage left," or "I learned a musical scale," and then somebody else would say, "Well, I actually learned punctuality because I ditched class all the time, but you can't show up at 8:15 when the curtain goes up at 8." Somebody else would say, "I learned teamwork because when you sing in the church choir, it's not how well you sing, it's how well you listen and blend with others." There was a retired Marine in North Carolina who said to me, "I didn't learn discipline in the Marines; I learned discipline playing the French horn." Ultimately, when it came to value, the audiences we had were far more articulate about the value we offer than I ever could have been. If we don't know our value, all we have to do is ask our audience.
Now I want to share with you in closing two things, the first being on this value, a speech I ran across by McNeil Lowry from 1963, a visionary that many of you may know as the man who engineered the Ford giving program that led to the growth in the not-for-profit arts industry in this country. Lowry offered ten arguments for the importance of the arts, and I want you to hear both the beauty and the eloquence in the precision of the phrasing and also the double time that we're talking about his arguments in 2003 for arguments he wrote in 1963.
But here they are: the importance to the image of American society abroad; a means of communication, and consequently of understanding, between this country and others; an expression of national purpose; an important influence in the liberal education of the individual; I love this next one – an important key to an American's understanding of himself, his times and his destiny; a purposeful occupation for youth; in their institutional form, a vitality to the social, moral and educational resources of a community, and therefore, good for business, especially in new centers of population; as a component for strengthening moral and spiritual bastions in a people whose national security is threatened; and as an offset to the materialism of a new and affluent society. If we can't make this case, based on these things we know, then it's not going to matter about welfare-to-work or AIDS or homelessness or education. If we don't have these abilities, then we can't even have the conversations.
In closing, I want to share with you my favorite quote by Ann Bogart, an artist. We should always end and begin with artists, I think, and here's what Ann Bogart tells us in this time: "Do not assume that you have to have some prescribed conditions to do your best work, do not wait. Do not wait for enough time or money to accomplish what you have in mind. Work with what you have right now; work with the people around you right now; work with the architecture you see around you right now. Do not wait for what you assume is the appropriate, stress-free environment in which to generate expression. Do not wait for maturity or insight or wisdom. Do not wait until you are sure you know what you are doing. Do not wait until you have enough technique. What you do now, what you make of your present circumstance, will determine the quality and scope of your future endeavors. And at the same time be patient."
I've always said when I left Target that I did it for one reason – people, if anybody ever offers you the job of working at the Target charitable giving program, take that job, it is the best job in the whole world! and ultimately there's a joke about corporate philanthropy because, well, in corporate philanthropy you just had your last bad meal and your last sincere compliment – but I left it because I am convinced that when we give our lives to the arts, what we all do, regardless of discipline, is we honor the past, we commemorate the present, we shape and change the future in a way that does honor to all and violence to none. I don't care how much Jesse Helms may try to shame us from that path, it is God's work we do. In that light, I want to thank you for your part in doing God's work. I want to say to you TCG is here with its hands outstretched in friendship anytime we can be of help to you or Dance/USA. And I would like to thank you for your patience and kindness in listening to me today. Thank you very much."
A keynote speech by Ben Cameron at Dance/USA's Winter Council
" It is an honor for me to be here, not only because I've been a huge admirer of Andrea Snyder for a number of years – and we have known each other for 15 years at this point, having both been at the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] at the same time – but because I stand in awe of a lot of what you all do. Even though my official point of orientation is the theater, part of the great joy I've had over the years is experiencing other art forms, especially dance, during my years in Minnesota. Whether we're talking about work like Uncle Tom's Cabin by Bill T. Jones or The Hard Nut by Mark Morris, whether we're talking the companies of Amanda Miller or Susan Marshall, whether we're talking the phenomenal physical power of Elizabeth Streb or the incredible physical grace of a company like the San Francisco Ballet, whose Carmen on tour was the first thing I ever saw that was a professional dance experience in North Carolina in the late 1950s, you all have significantly altered and transformed my life and amplified the vocabulary with which I filter the human experience. So I am in debt to you for everything you do everyday.
That said, let's get right to it.
Last night at dinner, there was a group of six or seven of us who began to discuss the bifurcated leadership structure our organizations typically have. Certainly in our field that artistic director/managing director leadership structure is the predominate model for major organizations. We were asking the question, "Is this applicable? Is this appropriate? Is this even feasible in the current economic times in which we live?" Our conclusions, which I don't think we reached necessarily, probably were less powerful for me than the subtle uncovering of the essential differences of assumptions of our relative fields. Although I thought I understood in parallel much of how dance companies behave by analogy for how theater companies behave, nonetheless, that conversation subtly teased out the most miniscule, but the most revealing differences in our two fields.
For that reason I want to preface this by saying I'm not capable or equipped of talking to you about what dance should do, can do, ought to do, in order to survive these times. Maybe the better way of looking at my time before you is to let me share with you what the theater field is asking, what questions we are raising, how we are approaching these concerns in hopes that this will either stimulate flashes of recognition or provoke similar questions of your own. Clearly, the thing I don't need to say is that I'm standing in front of you, or we're all collected in a time of unprecedented stress. It's easy for us to benchmark the beginning of that time from 9/11 for those of us in the United States, and clearly we do. And while I wish I stood before you with more than antidotal information, with quantifiable fiscal survey information, we like Dance/USA conduct our fiscal analysis based on audits.
If dance companies work the same schedule as theaters do, most fiscal years end June 30 and the audits get approved in October or November, sometimes even slightly later. We are in the process of gathering those audits now and crunching those numbers to be able to say, "Here is the impact of that dire, unprecedented year fiscally on the theater field." We don't have those numbers yet. But given the enormity of what happened during 9/11, we took the unprecedented step at TCG [Theatre Communications Group] of saying to our membership at three different points in the year, "We know it's not audited, but times are too urgent. So we are going to ask you how you are doing." The last of those surveys came at the end of the fiscal year period.
And here is what our members told us: 35 percent of theaters nationwide said, "We experienced a shortfall in government giving"; 51 percent of theaters said, "We experienced a shortfall in individual giving"; 52 percent cited a shortfall in foundation giving; 55 percent said, "We experienced a shortfall in single ticket sales and subscriptions"; and 67 percent said, "We experienced a shortfall in corporate contributions." As horrific as these numbers are – and they are disturbing to say the least – we recognize this is the beginning of a much longer, much darker period. When I say only 35 percent experienced a government shortfall, I'm not saying the obvious. The bulk of government budgets were set before the events of 9/11, and already, if you live in a state like New Jersey, where I live, you know that state after state after state is encountering record debts of projections for state budgets. In those states, every arts budget is up for attack and to date 42 of the 50 states in this country have cut their arts budget over prior year levels in figures ranking from six or seven percent in North Carolina to 67 percent in Massachusetts. The New York governor just announced an additional 13.5 percent cut the day before yesterday. We know that government number will be much worse 12 months from now than it was this last go-round.
When I say corporate contributions are going away, I'm also not acknowledging the obvious that increasingly corporations continue to turn their backs or make the case that other priorities call on their attention more than the arts. Tim McClimon of AT&T in a conversation yesterday said, "In the last two years, my giving budget has gone from $51 million to $10 million. In fact, AT&T has less money to give away than it has ever had, including the year the foundation was founded. What I don't say about foundations is what's obvious for many of you, that many foundations give on a rolling average of three years' assets, and many foundation officers I know say, "Look, you guys in the arts are still experiencing the largesse of the stock markets of '98, '99 and '00, and when the stock markets of '00, '01 and '02 become the basis for that average, foundation giving in this country will crash and burn." Already we've seen The Pew Charitable Trusts withdraw from the national funding arena. We've seen the Irvine Foundation in California lay off its entire arts and giving staff but one, and this is just the beginning of that trajectory. Individuals are far less certain to give when their asset base is uncertain, so what, in sum, disturbs us is not simply the fall in one of these sectors.
Shortly after Andrea and I both left the NEA, government giving at a federal level fell precipitously, but it was offset by the rise in foundation giving. In comparison, this situation today, to anyone's memory, is the first moment that any one of us can recall where everything is trending south at the same time: foundation giving down; corporate giving down; individual giving down; all going down at the same moment. How we will prepare ourselves for that moment is anyone's guess. In the theater field, several central questions obsess us in this moment. How do we manage for the long term to keep alive the vision and vitality of the art form and the epic scale we exist to serve, while overcoming in the short term the very real financial obstacles that plague us? How do we reward the aspirations of an emerging and future generation of artists and leaders without dismantling the achievements of the past generation? How do we find the courage and the creativity to embrace the future, to be masters of change rather than casualties of change? To have the courage to risk, and by risk I don't mean behavior responsibility, I mean constantly pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zone remembering that risk lies at the heart of everything we do artistically. Without risk, there is no artistic moment; we all know that. How do we make sure our organizations have that same degree of commitment to risk, even in a time when everything else preaches to us we should be thinking in the opposite fashion?
For my own part, I have to begin by acknowledging that if we look on this as all caused by 9/11, we have totally missed the boat. I believe 9/11 caused none of the stress we are experiencing to date. 9/11 may have sped the degree to which these things came home to roost, but increasingly if we look backward in time, already in certain benchmarking trends we can see slowing and breaking movement happening that 9/11 simply threw forward into bold relief. If we're going to manage for the long term and understand the mission before us, I would propose that, regardless of what we're experiencing individually, collectively we have to ask ourselves at least three big questions.
Before I tell you the three, let me also add that I think partly what we need to do is step back to say perhaps what we are experiencing is less a particular moment in history than it is the confusion that happens at any change when we experience a seismic upheaval in human consciousness. Now that's a mouthful, but if you've read [Tolstoy's The Death of] Ivan Ilich], it reminds us that there are certain fundamental changes in human consciousness. We used to be an agrarian or an agricultural society, and in that time what did history mean? History meant we came together, we sang songs, we danced dances, we chanted chants and in that way history was a tribal, collective, oral, on-the-ear activity. But then came the printing press, and we moved from being an agrarian society into an industrial society and in that moment everything changed. How we thought of the individual changed; how we thought of history changed. Instead of being tribal, collective and oral it became private, individual and visual as history was recorded on the printed page.
Indeed, how memory was even conceived changed. Memory used to be you made architecture in your mind and you stored memories in rooms and you sent a runner to retrieve the memory from that room, if you read classic Greek; that was memory. Now memory is a file on the printed page. Ilich would say we are at another such seismic moment as we move out of the industrial age into the
information/technological/digital/whatever-you-want-to-call-it age. And it's not that computers and technology are good or bad, but it's that they are. And in this moment everything we have come to hold sacred is up for grabs.
Tom Friedman, a global economist for The New York Times, spoke at our conference two months before 9/11 and presciently and ominously predicted virtually everything that came to pass, but he also offered a powerful metaphor that makes this case. He said, "For those of us over 40, the world we grew up in was a world symbolized by the Berlin Wall. In a world of the wall, it's easy to know good from bad, friend from foe, black from white. But the world we live in now is not the world of the wall, it's the world of the web. And in the world of the web, everything is intermingled. It's not so easy to distinguish friend from foe; it's not so easy to distinguish black from white. As he reminds us, in the world of the wall, every Nobel Prize winner was a king, an emperor, a prime minister, a powered individual, but in the world of the web think about the housewife who won the Nobel Peace Prize by starting an anti-landmine campaign on e-mail. Not an individual benign with power, a super-empowered individual. And it takes no more than 9/11 to remind us that it takes only 18 super-empowered individuals to temporarily bring a world order to its knees. Now, in that construct there are at least three big questions, again, that I think we need to ask ourselves or to look at, and for my mind the questions are defined as follows: they examine who we are; how we think; and how we congregate. Now I want to take each of those briefly in turn with you.
First of all, who we are. I always preface by saying that it's odd that someone who is going to talk to you about cultural diversity is a white male, but I'm your speaker so that's what you've got. I also want to preface by saying, as a former funder I worry that we've had this conversation for precisely the wrong reasons. I worry that we've talked about cultural diversity in the context of the changing demographics; that we all know by the year 2050 the majority of people in this country will be people of color, and that many of us have said, "Ooh hoo, God, the audience has changed. Boy, I better get with the program or I'm going to be out of business." I call that demographic blackmail. Demographic blackmail is not the reason to walk the road of cultural diversity for me.
We've often, at least in the theater field, chased the dream of cultural diversity, in part because funders encouraged us to do so. As a former funder, I take responsibility to acknowledge that in retrospect I worry that what we were really doing was perpetuating old patterns of funding. Essentially, what we were able to say is, "Gee, let's give the way we've always given because we'll give a million dollars to the orchestra, but here if you'll only diversify while we continue to give the African American theater ten thousand dollars." That was about perpetuation of existing standards not about changing behavior, and money for me is not a reason to diversify. I think I'm going to talk about cultural diversity, which is, in theater at least, a hard, difficult, painful road often fraught with frustration and setbacks and misunderstanding. We have to reach to a more personal place to make that commitment.
The place from which I come to this is actually my background as a Southerner. Here's my road into cultural diversity. I was born and raised in North Carolina in a town called High Point, and I did my college years at Chapel Hill. Every Southerner I've talked to, no matter where you were born and raised, when you were born and raised in the south you were acutely conscious of how the rest of the world thinks about you. You know that the rest of the country thinks you're Dolly and Dogpatch, grits and collards, Gomer, Guber, maybe Scarlett and Rhett. Every Southerner I know has experienced the look of condescension that crosses a Yankee face when they hear your Southern accent for the first time, and the subsequent look of amazement when you put two intelligent consecutive sentences together. I heard somebody say, "That's so true." And the media, rather than dispelling these limiting images, tended to reinforce them. I didn't know Gomer and Guber growing up in North Carolina. I'm sure they existed; they weren't part of my world. But when people have said to me, "What was it like to grow up in the south?" I say, "The world I think about first is the world of my grand-daddy Brown, who I pay honor to partly at this moment: a man who was briefly in Ripley's Believe it or Not for delivering his 6,000th baby on his 97th birthday; a man who was an Appalachian country doctor in the back hills of a little town at that point called Hendersonville, North Carolina, which has grown much better; and a man who was probably the single biggest formative influence on how I look at the world. When I was four, grand-daddy said to me, "Get in the car. We're going to go collect $200 worth of bills." I got in the car, and grand-daddy had palsy so he shook, which meant he couldn't keep the car quite on the road, so everybody in town knew if you see Doctor Brown coming, get out of the street. So we're going bumpity-bumpity-bump down these streets and little kids were going, "Ahh, Doctor Brown," and diving into the doorways. When we came back at the end of the day, we had a side of ham and a bushel of corn and 30 jars of jelly and five dollars in cash. I was very impressed with that, and grand-daddy said we broke even.
When I go back to Hendersonville, North Carolina, today, I go to a thing called Curb Market, which is their equivalent to a farmer's market, and I look for the oldest person I can find and I say, "Did you know Doctor Brown?" And they all say, "Why sure I do, Doctor Brown." And I'll say, "Well, I'm his grandson." Then they say, "James Steven Junior, you come over here," and they'll say, "This is James Steven. When your grand-daddy delivered him, we couldn't afford to pay him so we just named the baby for him." I think there are more James Stevens per capita in Hendersonville, North Carolina, than in the rest of the country. After a short, fantastic conversation about grand-daddy, there's inevitably the part where they try to say to me, "Now, this pound cake is just going to waste," and, "You need some of this jelly. This plant will look real nice in your New York apartment," and on and on and on. Ultimately, my point being as follows: yes, the south is the world of ignorance and prejudice in many cases that outsiders tend to see first, but it is also the world of infinite generosity, of deep family connection, of unbelievable graciousness even in the face of the most austere of conditions.
I was in the twelfth grade before anybody showed me the work of William Faulkner, and it was manna from heaven, because for the first time I didn't see the story told about the south or to the south. I heard the story of the south, told by the south, for the south as only the south can tell it. From what I know as a Southerner, it is not a leap for me to make to a child of color who goes to our arts events time after time after time and never sees himself or herself walk out on that stage. From what I know as a Southerner, it is not a leap for me to make to the economically disenfranchised, who walk into the opulence of our orchestra halls and feel that the surroundings are shouting at them, "You don't belong." And from what I know as a Southerner, it's not a leap for me to make to funding panels where I hear the artists of color saying, "My brothers and sisters are killing each other in the streets and the arts are going to make the difference," and the white artists are talking about psychological transformation and getting in touch with their feelings, oblivious to the privilege that inheres if that's your most pressing concern.
If we're going to talk about diversity, we need to understand the role we have played historically in determining whose stories are told and how. We cannot congratulate ourselves for introducing the inauthentic. This is a very theatrical set of examples that may or may not resonate, but I've always thought that the film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the story of integration told for the comfort of white people, did not open the door for Spike Lee. Miss Saigon, the story of the Asian-American experience in Vietnam told for the comfort of white people, did not open the door for Amy Tan, and Philadelphia, the story of AIDS told for the comfort of the HIV-negative and straight, did not open the door for Tony Kushner. Yet, how grateful audiences are when Spike Lee, Amy Tan and Tony Kushner finally can speak. This is a hard road, as I've said, and I would certainly not expect every organization to make the case to embrace this priority, but, for my mind, if we fail to embrace this priority we collude with oppression, we block total self-fulfillment, we turn our backs on much of what is great about this country and, for me, that is just wrong.
Now, I also preface by saying maybe this is something that a younger generation gets that we don't. When I look at kids today, I see a cross-fertilization in hip-hop music and dance and a rise in interracial dating and interracial marriage that was inconceivable growing up, for me to ever see in my lifetime, given where I born and raised in the 1950s. Yet I have to ask, what do those kids see when they see us, and does our de facto segregation create a chasm with them that we will never ever ford? This issue of young people gets me to the second point – and this is really such a strong theatrical concern I'm just going to allude to it briefly in passing – which is how we think. We spend a lot of time in theater trying to appreciate the difference in perceptual frameworks, and I'm really going to shortchange you through this and not go through a lot of the background in this, because I don't know that this resonates with you in the same way. But to distill this idea, cognitive studies basically show that people over 40 think in linear narrative patterns, people under 20 think in visual and associative patterns. Think of the difference between ABC news and MTV news. Think of the difference between the sort of narrative stories we read as children and the Sesame Street format of "here's the letter A, now the number 10, and now let's all go to Afghanistan." It's a different perceptual framework that they are encouraged to use, and for us in the theater field, one of the critical issues we have to face is, what will it mean for our art form, in which 90 percent of our stories are told in a linear narrative construct, if increasingly we are being asked to tell them to an audience who is primed to hear stories told in a visual and associative way? All our talk, I think, about student matinee tickets is totally misplaced because when we say, "Gee, if we just cut student rush ticket prices, they will come flocking in our doors." I am sorry, but if it's about economics why, when I'm at Tower Records at midnight, am I number 47 in line behind kids who are carrying stacks of CDs at 15, 16, 17 bucks apiece? If it's an economic issue why, when I go back to Minnesota and go see the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince because he's Prince again, am I surrounded by kids who spend $105 per seat to be there? For me, in theater, I think this disconnect between our perceptual frameworks is profound, again possibly not of relevance. If you want to talk more about this, I'm happy to because we've got studies about this and I've got lots of stuff I could feed you about this.
But point number three is, "How do we congregate." Here again to be in the shorthand, when a book with the title Bowling Alone lands on the best-selling list, the title itself tells you we don't behave like we used to behave. Increasingly, of course, what we're learning to uncover is that people increasingly look at community as a virtual, rather than as a geographical construct, and that study after study after study of younger people when asked to define their primary community, they often refer to the people with whom they chat online at one or two in the morning. If this is what community comes to be, the question will be raised, "Why should I support the museum down the street if my community is the people spread over thousands and thousands of miles and will never benefit from its programs?" – a huge fundamental shift in the way we congregate and gather.
Now, in this moment I think we have two choices. We can either fold our tents and say, "OK, we're the dinosaurs. Let's just run for the barn with whatever meager pension plans we have in our collective hands and leave this to the next generation," and confirm our olds ways of behavior and look to entrench them even further. Or we can be inspired by at least an anecdote and by a speaker, the anecdote being the Wallenda story, which I found really powerful for me. There's a story about one of the [Flying] Wallendas crossing the wire who was always told that when the big gust of wind comes and blows you off the wire, you let go of the balancing pole and you grab the wire. Of course, you know what I'm going to say. Ultimately, he's on the wire and a big gust of wind comes up and he's got the pole, but that pole has sustained him his whole life; he's never walked the wire without the pole. The pole has tilted here and tilted there and brought him back more than once, and when the wind comes up, he refuses to let go of the pole and over he goes down to his death. We're in gale winds on the wire, and part of our challenge is whether we have the courage to drop the pole.
Now in this life Doug Rushkoff has given me the greatest way into this, the media specialist whose booked media buyers, I hope you know. When he said to us at the same conference where Friedman talked, "You know I look at this moment as a renaissance, and what's a renaissance? A renaissance is a renegotiation of old ideas to reach a new consensual reality." I love that phrase. It's a renegotiation of old ideas to reach a new consensual reality. Looking at this moment not as a moment of war and factions who seek to overcome us, but as a renaissance moment, suddenly the barrier has become different for me. Rushkoff reminds us the old renaissance gave us four things: it gave us global circumnavigation; it gave us forced-perspective drawing; it gave us Newtonian physics; and it gave us coffee, thank God, for many of us. He would contend that the new renaissance is giving us four new things: instead of global circumnavigation, space exploration; instead of forced-perspective drawing, holograms; instead of Newtonian physics, fractals; instead of coffee, Starbucks. So in that life how do we look at the three questions as defined with renaissance, in a renaissance perspective? Already I've alluded that in terms of race issues we have an amazing cross-fertilization of cultural influence that promises a whole new set of race relations in the United States that could rebound to our benefit. In terms of the technology that drives the difference in this perceptual framework, in terms of these computers, if we look at this not as an "either/or" but as a "both," and what we see, in the theater at least, is an unbelievable explosion right now of technological possibilities. We see scene designers designing in fantastic new ways. We see playwrights writing in bursts of new rhythm almost, as somebody said, like they are channel-surfing on TV watching five shows at once. But scene rhythms have gone to short, pop, simultaneous storytelling, interweaving narrative. It's a fantastic new burst of creative energy among writers. And we talk about this means to convene, and this for me is the most profound, this way we socialize differently. I'm most compelled by a survey done in Philadelphia by a real estate developer who was afraid he was going to lose his tenants to cheaper buildings with an explosion of buildings. He surveyed his local tenants four times because he couldn't believe what he was hearing. He was saying, "What's the thing you want most in life that you don't have?" thinking people would say, "I don't get enough exercise and so let's put free gyms in all the buildings so nobody will get fat." The number one answer that came back every time was, "We want the opportunity to socialize with people other than the ones we work with," very profound, very specific. For those of us in the south, you've probably heard the joke "air conditioning was the death of the Southern neighborhood," and it's not really a joke. When I grew up in the south, it was too hot to stay indoors in July. Every adult put their chairs up on the porch, every kid rode their bicycles up and down the street. You knew all your neighbors because you could not stay inside. Now in the south people go, "I'm in the summer months," slam the doors, crank up the AC, and they don't know people two doors away. That pales by the current pressures people feel by work schedules, rigor and technology, and people want to socialize with people they don't know. For that reason, we are saying smart theaters are asking the question, "Our mission is no longer to produce performances. Our mission is the orchestration of social interaction, in which the performance is a piece, but only a piece, of what we're called to do." And smart artistic directors and managing directors around the country are saying, "I just realized I have a main stage, an upper stage, a cabaret maybe, my lobby is my fourth stage and my lobby needs the same degree of curating and programming as my other official stages meet." That's a profound shift in the sensibility of how we think about our work.
Clearly we can't do all this alone. And even so, in the middle of this I am optimistic about our future, and I'm optimistic for three reasons. Number one, I'm optimistic in a sense because in those numbers I mentioned initially, 51% down here, 60% down there, on each of those questions roughly 30-35% of theaters said to us, "We're not sure we understand why, but we're having a better year than we've ever had." And beginning to poke at that a little more and say, "OK, so you had a great year. What was that about?" We are hearing three things. Number one, some theaters are saying, "We have to admit we had big reserves, we had good investments," and we even had one theater say, "We made money on our investments in the last year," which was pretty amazing, but in some rare cases we leaned more heavily on reserves than we needed to but we made it through.
The second group of theaters said, "Well, we had a hit, you know pure and simple, we had a hit." Milwaukee Repertory's Shear Madness ran for four months. They kept it open and managed to make the box office. In many theaters, they weren't expected, for example, Berkeley Repertory had a big hit with Homebody/Kabul, the four-hour Tony Kushner play about Afghanistan. So it's not necessarily just palatable fare, but it was a hit and it mattered.
But the third thing we heard was it's the board. If there's anything that is most critical to how we think about these times, in addition to refashioning our thinking in new frameworks, it's about how we think of our board of directors and that partnership. We're being very aggressive in telling our board members, it used to be enough to be a supporter of an arts organization to sit on its board: you wrote a check, you came to a dinner and were honored, you came to a few meetings a year, that was enough. It's no longer enough. To warrant a place on the board of directors now, to be charged with the steering of the destiny of a collective of artists and managers, to sit on that board you can no longer be a supporter of that organization. You must be an activist on behalf of that organization and that's a different shift of energy. Activists write letters to the editor and go to Albany or whatever state capital arts cuts are threatened because, as we all know, in this moment the voice of the artist is heard as too self-interested and it's the lawyer, it's the doctor, it's the banker, it's the housewife, it's the constituent who can be heard when art professionals cannot be. An activist board member takes a kid every time he goes to a theater or dance concert, in part because we know that everyone with a significant relation to the art had it before they were 18. If you get beyond 18, you're never going to be convinced, and in our long-term health getting kids to experience art at a young age is pivotal. Even better, they take a kid and a kid's friend because we know the two most powerful impacts on the investment in the arts are parental example and peer reinforcement – if you watched your parents go to the arts or they took you and if you had a friend who thought it was cool. I would bet all of you in this room could relate to those two things. That ensures arts investment. An activist board member leverages their social contacts. Steppenwolf [Theatre] has a big auction every year, which I love going to. It's their charity fundraiser. They've taken over a million dollars a year on this auction, and they auction things from pots and pans to dinner with Gary Sinise, which last year went for $75,000, and they sold two of them – unbelievable. One of the things they always auction off, which is my favorite, is a walk-on on Frasier because if you watch Frasier you may not realize John Mahoney, who plays Martin Crane the father, is a founding member of Steppenwolf. (The walk-on is, if this is the camera that was the walk-on. They sort of play it back so people can see what they did. They even sort of play it in slow motion because otherwise you'd have to say, "What, oh I thought – run it again.") It comes with first-class airline tickets, a suite at the Beverly Hilton, et cetera. The same corporate CEO has bought the walk-on for the last three years running at $35,000 a pop. He has never done the walk-on. He holds an essay contest in his corporation about why the arts are important, and the employee who writes the best essay gets the walk-on trip.
Activist board behavior, leveraging social contact, empowering and charging our boards to behave in this new fashion is absolutely critical to our success. Activism implies partnership, support implies delegation, and we cannot delegate the solutions to our financial problems.
Ultimately, activist board members additionally have shifted their orientation. In the theater field, we are quality-obsessed. We spend all our time in rehearsals saying, "How do I get a better performance? How do I get a better scene out of this? How do I get a better director?" It's better, better, better. If you're a manager you want more zeros on the budget because if you got more money you hire better talent, work gets better. Every grant application starts talking about artistic excellence, quality, better, better, better. As many of you may know, I left the NEA and went to Target stores (or Tar-jay as many of you may call it). At that point when I arrived there the people at Target taught me many incredible lessons, with the first and most pivotal being these: that while we were talking about quality, the rest of the country had moved on, and it is no longer quality that determines investment of time, money and energy; it's value. At Target, they always say, "You can have the best toilet paper in the world on the shelves. If people don't see the value of coming in the store in the first place, they never get to see you've got the good or the bad. And p.s., you better have the best on the shelf once they're inside the store." But value precedes quality as a source of investment. To that end, we ask each of our theaters to answer three clear questions that are hard. We say, "What is the value of your theater, or in your case, what is the value of your dance company?" Number two is harder – "What is the value that your dance company alone offers or offers better than anyone else?" – because duplicative or second-rate value in this economy will not stand. The hardest is "How will your community be damaged if your dance company closes its doors and goes away tomorrow?" If you can't answer those three questions, the only supporters you have are the people who are in your seats.
In the theater field we've become better about quantifying that value. Some of this crosses over. We already know that every dollar spent on an arts ticket leverages five to seven dollars for the local economy, between parking and restaurants and the fabric store where the fabric is built for the costumes. For the Chamber of Commerce, that's a fantastic argument of value that you need to have in your arsenal. We know that kids who participate in the arts do 80 points higher on SATs than kids who don't, and if you care about education in your community, you have got to care about the arts. We know that kids who study Shakespeare have greater verbal acuity, greater complexity of thought, greater tolerance of ambiguity. If you're concerned about mental development and intellectual development, you have to care about the arts. In race relations, there's a UCLA study that shows kids who have been active in theater are 42 percent less likely to tolerate racist behavior than kids who haven't. If you care about race relations, you have to care about the arts. Those are value arguments.
Indeed, when I was at Target, we used to go from community to community to introduce ourselves when we walked in the door. We would come to town and we'd say, "We're going to open a new store, we're going to give away a lot of money, and here's how you get a piece of that." And in every community people would begin by saying, "Excuse me, you don't know this because you're not from here, but we have AIDS exploding through the ceiling, we have welfare to work issues, we have a food bank without enough food to put on the plates, a homeless shelter without enough beds, we have a school system that can't put books in the kids' hands. Why the hell do you people give so much money to the arts?" And in every case, we'd say, "How many of you grew up singing in the church choir, acting in the school play, or whatever?" And almost every hand would go up and I'd say, "Tell me, what did you learn from this?" Somebody would say, "I learned exit stage left," or "I learned a musical scale," and then somebody else would say, "Well, I actually learned punctuality because I ditched class all the time, but you can't show up at 8:15 when the curtain goes up at 8." Somebody else would say, "I learned teamwork because when you sing in the church choir, it's not how well you sing, it's how well you listen and blend with others." There was a retired Marine in North Carolina who said to me, "I didn't learn discipline in the Marines; I learned discipline playing the French horn." Ultimately, when it came to value, the audiences we had were far more articulate about the value we offer than I ever could have been. If we don't know our value, all we have to do is ask our audience.
Now I want to share with you in closing two things, the first being on this value, a speech I ran across by McNeil Lowry from 1963, a visionary that many of you may know as the man who engineered the Ford giving program that led to the growth in the not-for-profit arts industry in this country. Lowry offered ten arguments for the importance of the arts, and I want you to hear both the beauty and the eloquence in the precision of the phrasing and also the double time that we're talking about his arguments in 2003 for arguments he wrote in 1963.
But here they are: the importance to the image of American society abroad; a means of communication, and consequently of understanding, between this country and others; an expression of national purpose; an important influence in the liberal education of the individual; I love this next one – an important key to an American's understanding of himself, his times and his destiny; a purposeful occupation for youth; in their institutional form, a vitality to the social, moral and educational resources of a community, and therefore, good for business, especially in new centers of population; as a component for strengthening moral and spiritual bastions in a people whose national security is threatened; and as an offset to the materialism of a new and affluent society. If we can't make this case, based on these things we know, then it's not going to matter about welfare-to-work or AIDS or homelessness or education. If we don't have these abilities, then we can't even have the conversations.
In closing, I want to share with you my favorite quote by Ann Bogart, an artist. We should always end and begin with artists, I think, and here's what Ann Bogart tells us in this time: "Do not assume that you have to have some prescribed conditions to do your best work, do not wait. Do not wait for enough time or money to accomplish what you have in mind. Work with what you have right now; work with the people around you right now; work with the architecture you see around you right now. Do not wait for what you assume is the appropriate, stress-free environment in which to generate expression. Do not wait for maturity or insight or wisdom. Do not wait until you are sure you know what you are doing. Do not wait until you have enough technique. What you do now, what you make of your present circumstance, will determine the quality and scope of your future endeavors. And at the same time be patient."
I've always said when I left Target that I did it for one reason – people, if anybody ever offers you the job of working at the Target charitable giving program, take that job, it is the best job in the whole world! and ultimately there's a joke about corporate philanthropy because, well, in corporate philanthropy you just had your last bad meal and your last sincere compliment – but I left it because I am convinced that when we give our lives to the arts, what we all do, regardless of discipline, is we honor the past, we commemorate the present, we shape and change the future in a way that does honor to all and violence to none. I don't care how much Jesse Helms may try to shame us from that path, it is God's work we do. In that light, I want to thank you for your part in doing God's work. I want to say to you TCG is here with its hands outstretched in friendship anytime we can be of help to you or Dance/USA. And I would like to thank you for your patience and kindness in listening to me today. Thank you very much."
posted by The Necessary Theatre at 12:43 PM
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