Howard Sherman’s post “Clear” at his blog yesterday re-examines transparency in the arts and arts administration in the wake of the recent Arena Stage convening which was closed to the press. The discussion between Peter Marks and himself reminded me of Sir Humphrey Appleby’s one-time advice to Prime Minister James Hacker on government transparency, and I’m paraphrasing here: “There should be full and complete public disclosure of anything that anybody could easily find out for themselves.” Of course, transparency in the age of social media — in which theatres and other institutions frequently use these media to promote themselves rather than any substantive discussion of drama and theatre, and the rather unimaginative idea of putting things like rehearsal clips online — is rather fraught, and similarly what appears to count most is the appearance of transparency rather than transparency itself. But this is the Age of Publicity, and I suppose that is to be expected.
One should read Howard’s post for more, but I do want to point to one of his thoughts:
Perhaps rehearsal rooms will be fitted with the one-way mirrors employed by police dramas (and presumably the actual police), so that rehearsals can be observed, but with those rehearsing none the wiser. Perhaps every pre-show and post-show discussion, every panel and forum, will be streamed or recorded for public consumption. Perhaps the inspiration of first rehearsals and the very first table read of a script will be opened up either live or through technology. Perhaps we can demystify the process of theatre so that more people can appreciate its magic (and no, that’s not an oxymoron).
I’m not sure that the demystification of the theatrical process (or for that matter of the administrative process) through social media would necessarily draw more people to the theatre. First, anyone who has been in a high-school play is already rather aware of the process, and second, what general audience member has the time these days to watch this kind of inside-baseball information? After twenty years of the World Wide Web, theatre audiences are not growing at the rate at which this kind of publicity would be meaningful. As for myself, I imagine I’m with Peter Marks on this one — but it’s not like this was a meeting of the Trilateral Commission, and all the truly enlightening and “honest” conversations were likely to be had in the bars and restaurants surrounding the Arena Stage event after formal proceedings had closed, far from a journalist’s prying notebook.
All of which is also inside-baseball — except, perhaps, for those of us who are actually writing the new plays that all these folks are talking about behind closed doors. It’s the kind of inside-baseball that I, as a player, might have found instructive, especially if reported by an independent, knowledgeable, and disinterested observer.
Thanks George, both the original and your additional comments are really insightful. This is one of the tricky areas I deal with a lot and I’ve been meaning to write a related piece called “Insider Baseball.” To some degree, I do think that a lot of people feel comfortable coming into the theater, and particularly when the work is more challenging, they can sort of shut off since their very discomfort prevents them from engaging (akin to the experience of not enjoying an expensive restaurant).
In the name of demystifying work though, theaters, as you’re pointing out, do some ridiculous things to try to show potential audiences “how it’s made,” to invite them in, seemingly, to the process, as a function of marketing. They try to play it off as, here’s some “insider baseball” even though it’s often anything but truly enlightening. The real insider ball is that often these efforts are funded with money specifically allocated toward “audience development” efforts, and are often a matter of using bureaucracy and occasionally outright cynical efforts to cover costs. In other words, unless the entire process is being outsourced, often part of the reason these efforts even happen is that part of the marketing department’s or some other part of the organization’s salaries can be subsidized with the grant money, which in turn allows the institution to maintain a larger permanent staff than it could normally afford. In the end, a likely mediocre performance of these initiatives will be framed as a learning experience in new media outreach for audience development [insert a couple more buzzwords] and reported back to the granting institution in the hopes of receiving continuing funding for the project or, worse, to demonstrate the institution’s flexibility and willingness to “try new things” and “experiment,” which of course it did not actually do.
In short, there are a number of perverse financial incentives that help lead to these efforts which are buried beneath a pile of meaningless buzzwords.
It’s not only in this arena that this social media outreach should be considered suspect, if not ineffectual. (As well as, as you mention, only a means to keep grant money flowing in.) I just had a glance at the Knight/NEA Community Arts Journalism Challenge that Rocco Landesman’s been plugging at Michael Kaiser’s original HuffPost entry, and it is surprising how many of these projects, too, have social media components:
http://www.knightarts.org/community-arts-journalism-challenge
“A new app,” “iCritic Detroit,” “digital media training” — all of this is apparently an effort to provide similar NEA funding (and how sustainable all this would be without that funding is questionable, no matter what Landesman says) for similarly trendy projects. What’s ironic is that Landesman comments at the Kaiser post, “Bob [Brustein's] quaint notion was that a critic should have knowledge of the field in which he or she opined.” But none of these new projects guarantees that these new “citizen critics” will have any such deep knowledge.
Like Kaiser, Landesman says, “The future of the arts cannot be left only to the forces of the marketplace and the burgeoning blogosphere. I know what I don’t like.” Apparently it is to be left to the NEA and other large institutions. I’m wondering if this wouldn’t also lead to the same kind of academic/institutional complex — the echo of “military/industrial complex” is intentional — that now drives new play writing, development, and production, but this time for the criticism of that work itself. Anyway, its us bloggers who can’t be trusted — why, we’re nearly as bad as the forces of the marketplace.
By the way, for a look at Kaiser’s Kennedy Center theatre programming for the next season, go here:
http://www.kennedy-center.org/calendar/?fuseaction=searchGenre&genre=THT
Much to protect, it seems, from the amateur critic.
I know, I saw. Brilliant right? This is what I was saying–for all the high-minded talk, criticism for them is the same as marketing.