What If We All Owned a Part of The Theatre’s Future?

Patrick Berger is Theatre Development Fund’s Education Associate and an active member of New York City’s arts education community. Last month, he made a presentation on the future of the theatre at  Theatre Communications Group’s annual conference. Here is  what he learned and experienced there.

And don’t miss playwright Valina Hasu Houston’s complementary essay on what it means to make something “new” for the stage.

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The future can be a scary thing. New technology, especially social media, is shifting the way people interact with each other and even with art. From June 16-18, I was able to join the mighty many of the U.S. theatre elite for the Theatre Communications Group’s (TCG) annual conference. The theme this year, which is also the 50^th birthday of TCG, was inspired by the theatre’s increasing interest in its future: What if?

As one of the younger employees of TDF, I am pretty lucky.  I am able to work with people who are living Broadway encyclopedias: Their knowledge of NYC theatre legacy is astounding, and even as I think about theatre’s future, I get a strong sense of its past and present. It’s much less intimidating, however, to be exposed to theatre experts in the small community of Theatre Development Fund than to be immersed in TCG’s thousand-person gathering of theatre’s great thinkers and planners.

However, I wasn’t at the TCG conference just to absorb ideas. A colleague (Christina) and I had been invited to present a “Whatifesto” (What if + manifesto), a term TCG coined to describe a series of presentations to encourage conversation, debate, and new ideas. (I was beyond nervous.)

The heart of that Whatifesto—participation inspires ownership—was not a new idea for me. All of the arts education work I’ve engaged both in and outside TDF is grounded in this belief, so I knew it was a solid foundation. In fact, it even guided the development of our Whatifesto. Rather than write a document by ourselves, my colleague and I created a public Google document, meaning anyone who read it also had the power to edit it, from anywhere in the world. Guided by a few questions about the future of the theatre, a community of artists created a massive, living text of over 15,000 words. Christina and I then edited that document to 500 words and submitted it as our official Whatifesto.

From that creative event, a main idea emerged: What if theatre were a product not just of the artistic prowess of a small creative team, but of the efforts of the community at large, triggering a universal sense of ownership over the piece?

Much of the theatre community’s conversation surrounding the conference was about the future of our precious art, especially theatre’s relationship with younger generations. I was not surprised to hear about Millennials (current 20-somethings) and digital natives (teens), and how theatre should and could better engage them. An invigorating session was held with the teen councils from Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Steppenwolf: These students were not afraid to dispel myths and share how they encourage their friends to engage in theatre. I was excited to hear from David Houle, a futurist, who vividly illustrated how fast our world is shifting towards socially-engaged media and art.

With distance, time, and place fading as barriers, the message of TCG was alarming and surprisingly hopeful. Theatre has a great advantage because its core is about human connection. And connectivity is the core of social media technology. David Houle told the crowd to watch for those young ones, the Millennials and digital natives, not because they are going to destroy the theatre but because they are going to marry new technology with tradition.

As Christina and I (both Millennials) took the stage and presented our Whatifesto, I could feel the energy of possibility. We were armed with a big idea, full of idealism and passion for this art. The TCG greats were armed with legacy, knowledge, and a nurturing instinct for the theatre. And TCG’s message was clear: We need to come together (the new and the traditional), marry our strengths and move forward into a new era of theatre.