Why we need to let new species of theatre bloom in the age of ‘With’

 

Of all the arts and creative industries, theatre is the most challenged by the digital age and the wave of collaborative activity in which we are all involved.  Social media and digital technology support new creative experiences where individuals can connect and collaborate with or without professional artists. These experiences can be spontaneous, unpredictable and take place indoors, outdoors, in public spaces or private places. The participant can choose the time, place and platform to watch television, listen to or make music, read or write a novel.

Business models for the creative sector have been disrupted in the churn created by the digital revolution, the current economic crisis and the impending impacts of climate change.

But the business of theatre seems hardly to have changed at all. Is this because theatre is a sustainable, 21st century model?  The big hitters of tragedy and comedy produce some great theatre and people flock to participate in the creative experience by being in the audience, in the West End, Broadway, at international festivals and in various spaces to see work by our national theatres and our top flight theatrical regimes.

But there are many theatres across the country, subsidised at varying levels, which face several challenges to their business models now:

1. There is less public money and private sector philanthropy around and the diminution of funds is not likely to reverse in the next few years. Making up the gap by earning more income from tickets and bar sales is not a realistic solution.

2. It is difficult to demonstrate the public value of the increased investment in theatres over the last 10 years if measured by audiences. Numbers remain static overall and have not diversified socially overall.  

The vast majority of English adults have no encounters with theatre, street arts or circus; and those who do attend tend to do so relatively infrequently. Also those taking part in amateur theatre represent a very small minority .. there are many persisting socio-demographic inequalities in the levels of engagement.

Arts Council of England Taking Part Survey findings

We can surely point to some exceptions and we can applaud some great theatrical experiences and buildings created by all the additional investment of course but the bald facts remain. The market for theatre is finite.  Supply in itself will not increase demand for the well-made play.

3. Theatres are more and more expensive to run.  The creative costs, the most important you might say, often are at the bottom of the list.  Theatres first of all have to pay their rent and bills, then their staff, production and administrative overheads, then the cost of the show and attracting an audience. While other arts and creative industries benefit from digital technology to do things differently and cheaper, theatre hardly can in the current model.  It depends on people being in the room at the same time, a room which is safe for the public and where productions can be created.  Astonishingly, many theatres hardly even use digital technology to create the scene.

This feels counter-intuitive in the age of ‘with’.

At the other end of the spectrum there are some green shoots around collaborative theatre projects where audience engagement is more important than the auteurs creating a spell.   That work includes that of companies like Pilot Theatre, Hide and Seek and also a mass of projects and programmes run by the community, education and learning teams under the umbrella of most of our major subsidised theatre companies and certainly all of our building based producing theatres. But these umbrellas sometimes cause too big a shadow.  In many of our theatres, the community and education activity is seen as a lesser activity, although there are notable exceptions like Dundee Rep.

Community and education teams often have to fight for resources from the marketing and production teams and frequently pursue agendas which are different from those of the theatre with whom they are warehoused.  This is not surprising, since their priority is engagement and the priority of the theatre will be art.

We are arriving in the Age of With bent on preservation of our theatre buildings and our modus operandi which is not economically sustainable.  We make choices about our theatre programmes ‘to’ audiences, not ‘with’.  Our public bodies tend to fund theatre buildings and reward quantity of activity over quality.

We need to loosen the log jam we have in theatre by redefining the varieties of the theatre species that are evolving in the Age of With.

1. Big hitters of tragedy and comedy – our leading theatre artists creating great work, sometimes in theatres but often site specific, where the vision of the theatre maestro is paramount                                                                                                            
2. Collaborative and participative theatre, where the participation  and maybe play is paramount
3. Developmental work, which is protected in its presentation, mostly in studio conditions
4. The mass of local and civic ‘theatres’, which were 20^th century cultural venues for communities should gradually be transformed into creative hubs where theatre might include 3d screenings

 We should celebrate and support our great theatre and encourage the green shoots we have in theatre which is collaborative and without walls can blossom.  We just need to clear away the ground so we can allow the shoots to grow.

John McGrath, Director of the National Theatre of Wales has stated that the company’s projects like Theatre of Debate and Sandpit

“ IS how we are making work. We want to avoid any sense that there are real top-down projects, and interactive programmes on the side. While the work will include more traditional plays, everything is being developed from the starting point of building an interactive community that inputs into the decsioons we make, and lets us know what they think of what we do. The interactivity will differ in each project – in some cases it may be the core aesthetic, in others it might help determine the subject matter, in others in might be an interactive critique of what is staged. But it will always be core. Exciting times!”

 

Theatres are tortoises in encouraging collaboration from consumers on the what, how and where.

Not everyone wants to be a Spect-actor, collaborating in making Forum Theatre and other wholly democratic formats where participation is more important than art.

Most of us want to be activity engaged in great theatrical art through being an active audience willingly manipulated by maestros directing actors in plays.

So how would the theatrical experience best benefit from our increasing enthusiasm for, and ability to, collaborate?

We can already fully interact with theatres in terms of the sales experience of course, with some of yesterday’s, and all of today’s  web technology and systems comfortably enabling select a seat, ticketless sales, and advance sales of programmes, meals, drinks, merchandising, membership and donations.

The fact that many theatres have been slow to individually or collectively adopt this technology is simply a symptom of the prevalent attritionist  management style.

We blog and twitter and increasingly collaborate on reviewing productions.

So what is beyond this baseline and before collaboration in the theatre-making?

Like almost everything in theatre, the Greeks were on to this.  The first dramas by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles were staged competitively, with the audience voting for the winner.

Our television producers are well ahead of theatre and arts organisations in this, with audiences enthusiastically voting for talent,  in Britain’s Got Talent.  And Channel 4’s Big Art project took this concept and mashed it up with commissioning public art.

Theatres should collaborate with audiences on what, how and where theatre is produced.

The very best theatrical regimes are run by maestros who lead taste by taking risks, whose choice of programme is spot on and who work with playwrights who spookily write about the great issues of the day before we have even identified them.

But these theatrical regimes are few and far between and may be outdated.  Our national theatres must lead the national conversation and must lead taste.  But what about our building based producing and coproducing theatres, playing an essential role in presenting theatre for a city/region?  The programme is crafted from the repertoire of classics, contemporary classics, Shakespeare, international classics, new plays, pantomimes, family shows etc. These rich seams include plays about almost every thing in life, love and politics, about morality, corruption, infidelity, aging, being a woman, being a man, war etc etc.

So why not collaborate with the audiences on the choice of repertoire? What about passionately pitching the ideas to the audience for them to chose.  Does the story of Solness in Ibsen’s The Master Builder, in its indictment of a community’s hypocrisy resonate more than that of Mother Courage?  The debates which go in a an Artistic Director’s head or round the senior management table can be held publicly.

Being a tortoise isn’t always bad of course. Aesop’s Tortoise was the winner in the fable with the Hare.  Theatres can have the advantage of the last-mover, picking up successful ideas from others and avoiding pitfalls.

As long as we avoid the fate of Aeschylus who was killed by a  tortoise being dropped on his head by an eagle mistaking the bald pate of the playwright for a rock.

Why political theatre in the ‘With’ age challenges our theatrical traditions

Participation in drama is one of the most successful means of engaging people in communal and collaborative exploration and engagement. But the amount of influence in both the story and the enactment of it has always been controlled by the director, the playwright or the auteur, although this can be heavily disguised by those magicians of theatre.   Unless the art is to be second fiddle to the act of engagement for instrumental purposes.

Even if we go right back to the roots of drama, in Athens, before Thespis broke the ranks of the chorus to become the first protagonist and before we had dialogue, the theatre was used as a tool for communal engagement.  The amount of influence afforded to the spectators was limited to voting for the winner of the drama competitions and the participation was that core and all absorbing communal activity of being an audience where we are willingly taken on a journey of discovery.

Through the centuries, the degree of influence and participation has been determined according to the desires of those setting the agenda and according to whether the motives of the powers that be have been primarily artistic or primarily political. And what those particular political ideologies have been.  The political theatre of the 20^th century was largely led by self-appointed left wing magii, like John McGrath, whose brilliant work with the original 7.84 theatre company captured the hearts and minds of audiences who shared the political idealogy the company promoted. 

But if the politics of the Age of With are about community collaboration, 21^st century political theatre will need to be of a different kind.  A theatre of genuine and wholesale collaboration is counter-intuitive to Tragedy, to our great theatre as auteured by our playwrights and directors. Theatre gurus from Brecht to Boal, Brook to Barker, have vented their spleen on their predecessors, attacking their styles of audience manipulation, chiding them for too much, or too little sentiment, naturalism and emotion. But all of this is beside the point.  Every theatre guru is a director and/or playwright who is also a magus committed to the mastery of theatre to tell a story or to make a point.  The arguments the gurus have amongst themselves are about two things.  One, the tools those magicians can use, or the theatrical techniques, to manipulate us.  From the Theatre of Cruelty to the Theatre of Ideas, its all about technique.  The other is around the interrelated issue of political ideology.   So Brecht argues that theatre must be didactic and engage the brain and not the emotion – to engage and understand his political ideology. All of these theatrical masters have used all the tricks of the trade in  performers, rehearsed the atmosphere of timing, set, costumes, sound and stage effects to create a spell in the theatre.  The best use of the ‘song sheet’ I ever saw was in the original production of 7:84’s The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil when we joined in a panto-style chorus to the tune of a traditional Scottish song where the characters were substituted by oil companies (Morag for Mobil etc).

But the line can be crossed when the priority is engagement and not the magic of performance. Augusto Boal crosses the line and goes further in his Theatre of the Oppressed and Forum Theatre, so that the participants  become spectator- actors and also control the story , characters and how it is enacted. For Boal the participation and collaboration is more important than the story he wants to tell and theatre is an instrument for revolution.

This ethos also guides community and education plays and programmes where the engagement is the most important aspect for a community which is celebrating its history, learning about bullying or other issues.  It is not surprising that there is often a tension when these projects are set up within a traditional theatre organisation.

So if this is the Theatre of With, does it need theatres at all? The all important aspect for Forum Theatre is the collaboration with the role of the theatre professional being to support the spectator –actor.  Best not in proscenium arch theatres then and best not dependent on a 730 start arranged months in advance with drinks at the interval.  Best not within the 20^th century business model then. Given the cost of our 20^th century business model, this could be an opportunity.

Why theatres need expert artists but not guardians of taste

A commercial theatre production stands or falls on its success with audiences, measured not only by the applause but by the hard cash at the box office.  But subsidised theatres are heavily dependent on the state and the state rewards theatres for achieving a range of cultural, social and economic objectives.  Sometimes audience satisfaction is low on the list of desired outcomes – if the theatre and the state believe that the production’ success meet other objectives – like providing a platform for a new playwright or extending opportunity to see a classic.   But we have created a situation where the public (as opposed to that part of the public which identifies as the theatre audience) is disengaged.  We know that subsidised theatre will take place in our cities and towns regardless of what we think or want because the guardians of taste, the state and the art, will decide.  So no wonder theatre is not inclusive.  But it wasnt always the case. The great Greek tragedians, Aristophanes, Euryides and Sophocles competed for audience votes, so the forces of state and finance were balanced by public approval.

Two television shows this weekend-  Channel 4′ Big Art and ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent - both involve the public in selecting art, artists and entertainers.   

The Big Art show does not dilute the artistic integrity of the public art- on the contrary, artists have to compete for selection by the community and then that community works with the artist.  Selection of artists in a subsidised environment is usually by expert curators, guardians of taste, but Big Art demonstrates that the public are wholly able to select artists for the better.

Why cant subsidised theatres involve the public – and not just committed audiences – in selecting the work, the play, the repertoire?  And why do theatre managers and directors think they shouldnt ask?

Is Theatre intrinsically inclusive or inherently exclusive?

Theatre, in contrast to the visual arts, is wholly dependent on interaction between all the participants and primarily between the audience and the actors. Theatre, in contrast even to drama broadcast on television or other platforms, depends on the live experience as uniquely concocted during a particular performance. The play can exist without an audience but theatre is when the play is enacted in the presence of an audience.

Some of the challenges which are posed in the Art of With could be brushed off with this observation.  Charles Leadbetter’s challenge to Art is that modern arts institutions embody the world of To and For as opposed to the more collaborative With.  And that contemporary arts generally embody the world of To and From, control by the artists of the art work, the product, the creative experience.  In the world of To and From, the artist provokes, challenges and entertains in order to create an artistic and/or political, moral or spiritual revelation selected by the artists.  The artist is the “self styled resistance fighter”.

Theatre people in general dispute that theatre is exclusive because, they argue, theatre exists only with the audience and is therefore With.  And in the subsidised theatre, the arguments are further developed.  Theatre artists, theatre companies and theatre institutions ALL have as an integral part of their mission the aim to engage diverse audiences as widely and deeply as possible.  This is a sort of sacred cow of subsidised theatre in the UK stemming from the central value put on public subsidy of the arts from government.  This core value is reinforced through intermediary cultural agencies and forms part of the contract with arts organisations.  It is not only a sacred cow but a sacred cow wearing emperor’s new clothes, as the achievement of this aim is rarely measured or achieved.

The fact that theatre companies aim to engage broad and diverse audiences is enough for many and its existence provides an aura of inclusion. That aim will never be the primary aim though. If it were, theatre companies would produce and programme work that would attract the broadest population.  The largest and most diverse theatre audiences are those at pantomimes and musicals.   And if that were the case, there might not be the ‘market failure’ that creates the need for subsidy. The primary reason though is that theatre artists believe that it is their role to create theatrical experiences which will challenge, stimulate, entertain and inspire audiences and that the nature of these experiences, through choice of story, means of producing and enactment must be controlled by the artists. 

That agenda will also be influenced by the funders of the work.  From the time of the Athenians and Greek theatre right up until today, the story and the drama has been controlled by the artists, the state and the funders in varying measures.  Sometimes there has been a tight control and the influence has been obvious, as in times of censorship and sometimes much less so.  In any event theatre is by nature able to subvert through the powers of allegory, debate and the theatrical spell created in the theatre. Playwrights have an uncanny knack of writing plays about today’s political issues even before the issues have emerged, sub-consciously ahead of the zeitgeist.

In Theatre of the Oppressed Augusto Boal tracks the ‘coercive system of tragedy’ from the Greeks through to the didactic, but equally controlling, theatre of Brecht. Theatre is firmly in Leadbetter’s To and From world and the collaboration is amongst the creative team.  This is true of 21^st century theatres as much as 20^th century theatres, before the web revolution. 

Two examples of 21^st century theatre companies are the National Theatre of Scotland and the (launched but not yet fully operational) National Theatre of Wales. NToS operates without walls, without theatre buildings and working in partnership with the Scottish theatre community to produce work and NTW will be similar.  NToS and the theatre community is holding an Open Space event next week to collaborate on a vision for the future:

There is the certainty that passionate and creative individuals will want to make work that puts itself in front of an audience and that audiences always demand to be entertained.

The vision will be from the theatre community – not from the general population in the broadest sense or even the narrower part of the general population who self-identify as theatre goers. The collaboration is within the profession and amongst the creative team who make a piece of theatre.

This is one strand of theatre where there is always a vision, a story to be told, an agenda, author or auteur and where that vision will always be paramount.  Any collaboration with the audience will be designed as part of the production and the audience will willingly be manipulated .

So theatre is inherently undemocratic and collaboration will be restricted.

The National Theatre of Wales has launched itself through social networking with forums on Theatre and Debate and Sandpit events for the community but will this influence how it will make work?  Or would that be bonkers?

There is another rich seam in other strands of theatre which are inherently collaborative, ranging from the community play to the Forum Theatre of Augusto Boal and other forms of drama much more able to be With, particularly web drama.

To be continued……

Introduction to Theatre of With blog

Theatre of  With contains some thoughts about 21st century theatre in the context of the current revolution.  spawned by the internet and changes in the way we can communicate and organise ourselves. The ideas are connected with The Art of With, the essay produced by Charles Leadbetter for the Cornerhouse.

The big movements of that revolution which impact upon the arts and culture are:

• the convergence of content and technology, driving new creative experiences on digital platforms, opening up new creative experiences, new ways of generating creative content and accessing it
• the changes in how we communicate through social media, allowing us to collaborate, share and organise ourselves without organisations
• the ways in which we transact, operate and do business through systems enabled by digital technology

In the Art of With, Charles Leadbetter asks:

• What do the advent of the web, collaborative practice and open source ways of working mean for the arts and art organisations?
• How do artists, audiences and other stakeholders really get involved with programming and evaluating arts venues?
• What does it mean for curators, programmers and traditional structures of arts organisations?

Some of his questions and ideas resonate clearly within the world of theatre, in areas where theatres are broadly similar to other arts organisations, where theatre audiences are broadly similar to the audiences of arts centres for visual arts and cinema, and where theatre art has similarities with visual arts. 

But the differences between theatre and visual arts are also enormous and some of the questions are hard to consider let alone answer in  theatres. 

Theatre as a genre, and non-commercial theatre as a business model, is the cultural species most threatened by the cultural, social and economic implications of the digital age.  By its very nature, it is the least adaptive of the arts to the current opportunities in digital technology and social networking.  Its model is ancient.  It involves gathering people together in a place to participate in a performance where a drama in enacted.  It needs a story, actors,  and creative direction and setting, and it needs an audience, together, at the same time. 

Drama, on the the other hand,  which is produced for, on and with digital platforms, is already adapting through web drama.

 So the Art of With challenges theatre in three main areas:

1. In its fundamental model of creating and producing theatre and in how it can combine and connect with people.  How can theatre be collaborative and participative and also be great and engaging art?

 2. In how it is open with audiences and communities in ways which involve opening up resources, personalising programmes and experiences as well as creative collaboration

3. In its economic sustainability.   Subsidised theatre operates within a 20th century business model where the majority of the costs are tied to overheads, salaries and fees with little flexibility, and the costs of attracting income at the box office and from other sources are heavy. As other arts and creative industries are able to adapt to our new technology and develop new business models, will theatre be inevitably left behind?