On February 22nd, I was invited to attend a meeting with NEA Chair Rocco Landesman and about a dozen leaders of arts service organizations to discuss the #supplydemand conversation that he had started in late January at the From Scarcity to Abundance convening at Arena Stage. He broached this topic in front of over a hundred arts professionals with complete knowledge that the proceedings were being tweeted and blogged as part of the proceedings. He wanted to start a national conversation, and he knew this was the way to do it. If we had any doubts as to whether he was aware of what he was doing, they were dispelled on January 31st, a single day after Arena’s convening was over, when he wrote a follow-up blog post on the NEA blog that was entitled #supplydemand, which, of course, is a Twitter hashtag. Clearly, he wanted this conversation to take off, and he had learned from David Dower’s web savvy how to do it.
It seems pretty clear that he didn’t want to confine the discussion to the Usual Suspects. In fact, he said as much in his post (the underlining is mine): “Last week, as part of a new work convening at Arena Stage, I was able to finally spark a conversation that I have been wanting to have for over a year now.” He goes on, “When we released the SPPA results at a meeting of more than 40 national service organizations in December 2009, I said that anyone who hears these two numbers has to ask about balancing the equation, which means either increasing demand or, yes, maybe decreasing supply. I have made this same observation to a number of audiences, but at Arena, the conversation finally took off. So I decided to write this blog post—not to retract or walk back the observation (as some hope I will do)—but to encourage us to keep having the conversation.” At the time, I gave Landesman kudos for doing so; I still do today.
No sooner had “supply and demand” left Landesman’s lips at Arena than, thanks to Trisha Mead’s tweet heard ‘round the world, the on-line theater community was abuzz. Blog posts and tweets came hot and heavy, there were links and comments, ideas floated and condemned. Gee whiz, it was almost like being part of a community!
On February 9, I received an email from the NEA, saying (again, underlining is mine): “There has been a great deal of interest in the ongoing #supplydemand conversation that was kicked off at Arena Stage when Diane Ragsdale interviewed Rocco Landesman as part of their From Scarcity to Abundance convening about the new work sector. A number of leaders from the theater community have asked about continuing this conversation in person, and Rocco would love to organize a small meeting of leaders for an informal discussion.”
What happened in between January 31 and February 9? While I can’t say for certain, I suspect that one thing was a February 4 letter from Teresa Eyring of TCG written to Landesman, a letter that she released online. Eyring asks that Landesman meet “with TCG and a small group of leaders from the theater field” to “personally… discuss the issues you’ve raised….. I understand from your remarks that you want to create a comprehensive dialogue on this issue, so I hope this will add to the discussion.” Why not, right? Right.
But here’s the problem. Those “leaders from the theater field”? They really didn’t want to talk about supply-and-demand. If you read further in Eyring’s letter, she starts guiding the conversation to other areas through a laundry list of “topics our field could be exploring” if we weren’t being distracted by all this annoying supply-and-demand talk. Among the topics she suggests: how can we increase job opportunities? How can we cultivate new audiences? How can we increase arts education? How can we increase partnerships? How can theaters access on-line resources? And what is the role of the arts in communities? She concluded her letter: “I hope that we will not squander the chance to locate our national conversation about the arts, in the context of accomplishment, investment and opportunity.” And, presumably, not waste our time talking about whether there are too many theaters. Which is, you know, what the meeting is supposed to be about.
And that’s exactly what happened. When I arrived at the meeting ten minutes late (Google doesn’t include time spent parking in its calculations), that process was already well underway. Furthermore, the arts leaders were doing their best to dismiss the on-line conversation which had been happening. A good example of this, but not the only one by far, came from the National New Play Network’s Jason Loewith, who said to Landesman something like, “You want to start a conversation about oversupply in the arts sector, and sent us 250 pages of blog posts to confirm you’d started that conversation. I read about half of them, and saw very little ‘conversation’. Instead I saw a lot of one-sided, misinformed hysteria about ‘NEA death panels’ masquerading as conversation. I don’t see that as productive.”
Productive. If you ask me, these arts leaders had had a year to have a “productive” conversation about this topic, but chose not to. Instead, they contented themselves with repeating the usual talking points so common and so ineffective when talking about the arts. Furthermore, they were focused on the perceptions of the general public and the legislators, whereas Landesman had addressed the field. He trusted members of the field to kick the topic back and forth and bring to bear their creativity and intelligence, and the on-line world had responded with alacrity.
Read the rest.
Auditions for Honky Tonk Angels at Asheville Community Theatre
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