From TCG
Posted by Martha Lavey on 6/14/2006Several of us at Steppenwolf just returned from Atlanta where we were attending the TCG conference. TGC is the Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for not-for-profit theaters. TCG provides grants, networking and advocacy for its constituent theaters. It’s a widely diverse constituency, embracing theaters of all budget sizes and varying missions as well as individual artists. Surprisingly given the diversity, the membership shares enough common concerns to conduct a valuable conversation.
The theme of this year’s conference was “Building Future Audience.” The forces in play when considering our audiences are the forces alive throughout our culture: the explosion of communication media; the generational, cultural, and political differences that generate our expectations and shape our desires for the forms and content of an artistic experience.
In regard to the communication media, the wide proliferation of access to content – and the technologies that create an interactive relationship to that content – have revised the theater-goers relationship to theaters. Theater, as a live event, depends upon an audience willing to commit to a day of the week, to a curtain time, to participation in a group experience. For the subscriber, theater requires that commitment over a season – a willingness to schedule one’s time over the course of the coming year.
In regard to the growing diversity of our audiences – a diversity of age, of cultural identity, of political/social disposition – theater asks its audience to find commonality, even among that diversity. Theater posits that there is a human story, a story that we can share, that is worth the interpretive leap across those differences toward common ground.
For me, these forces – the forces of technology that produce an increasing proliferation of the virtual experience, the experience tailor-made to one’s preferences of time and place, and the forces of identity politics – are not a cause for despair for us, the makers of theater. For me, those very forces which might suggest a turn from the value and attractiveness of theater-going, are, in fact, the forces that intensify the value and uniqueness of theater-going. These are the forces that make what we have on offer even more needful and urgent. We are social beings, we are searchers for meaning. We have thirsted after stories to illuminate our experience since we performed around the campfire. Theater preceded the advent of general literacy, I know that it will succeed the literacy of the web. Will it be informed by an audience conversant with a much wider information base? Yes. Will it be informed by an audience accustomed to bringing experience into the home (as opposed to leaving home for experience)? Yes.
Is that to the detriment of the theater? I don’t think it has to be. Trying to compete with the specific capabilities of those technologies would be, in my estimation, a mistake.
In our lead-off plenary session of the conference, director Ann Bogart talked about the way in which coming to the theater produced a shift in the time signature of our days. Theater asks for a different present and a different presence. The present of the theater requires a concentration, an abandonment of our multi-tasking, diffuse attention. The presence of the theater requires a being-with, a sitting in community, a time specific here with the other.
To me, these demands are deeply enhancing to our human experience. They offer the possibility of solace – of feeling not-alone in the world. Of feeling confirmed in the search for meaning. I don’t know about you, but I find a lot in the world that can make me feel puny and alone. I don’t feel that in the theater. I feel spoken to. I feel a part of something big.