New Play Theatre Commons

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See #NEWPLAY

Discussion

By Polly Carl and Vijay Mathew:

"Our theater economy, like much of the larger world, is based on the primary assertion of the “Me” in order to gain dominance, win funding, and social capital—a “Me” that usually asserts itself at the expense of someone or something else. This is all very ironic for theater folks, because we work in arguably the most collaborative and collective art form. Theater exists only in a shared and present tense exchange within an imaginative space that both artist and audience create simultaneously. This shared experience and community between artist and audience makes it a quintessential “We” cultural activity.

In the transformation from a “Me” to a “We” microcosm, there is potential for us to address the 99 percent problem in our field. It’s a matter of scaling our theater—making talents and practices in the way we design our institutions, infrastructures, and relationships with each other. In making theater we innovate and generate new ideas by riffing as a matter of basic artistic process. Our goal is to create a community where everyone participates and contributes, regardless of their station in the 20th century mono-cultural vision of the world. So, we promote and educate each other about each others’ work. We pool resources and become more efficient at using the resources to benefit the whole. The founding, older institutions of the regional theater movement (or the ”1 percent”) that have benefited from a disproportionate amount of resources over the years shift their behaviors to leverage their still-active 20th century social capital to benefit other institutions and artists outside their immediate circle.

The notion of the commons allows for a widely distributed 21st century “open sourcing” of the Institute’s mission to advance the field. Open sourcing assumes a “we” in its very structure. We seek to build an Institute where “we” is encoded in its DNA.



We seek the “we” potential in Internet technologies as we build our knowledge commons and we search for the idiosyncratic, alternative, or ”off-label” uses that serve the particular needs of our community. For example, we exclusively use Twitter’s hashtag ”searching” feature instead of the ”follow” feature in order to source and share our field’s news and information and to engage in conversation. #NEWPLAY is a tag that the Institute intentionally introduced a couple of years ago as a ”non-proprietary” tag for everyone and anyone to use for sharing information and conversation on new theater works. The act of choosing a tag that wasn’t only about our organization was a significant step away from the “me” to the “we.” The typical behavior in our field would have been to choose a tag that corresponded to the organization’s name in a conventional brand-promoting, empire-building gesture. The tag serves as a knowledge aggregation tool: our field’s ideas, information, conversations all under one tag that can belong to all of us. Currently, the hashtag is able to exist both autonomously from us and at the same time interdependently, using a true commons dynamic. The hashtag in addition to being a technical aggregation tool has also taken on a symbolic meaning representing our field’s aspirations to advance the field collectively. The word “#NEWPLAY” is often used in tweeted sentences as a noun as well as in language outside of the context of Twitter (see screen capture of the Playwrights’ Center). The fact that the tool has also become a symbol of a shared mission aptly describes the concept of a knowledge commons as not only being a resource but also a certain philosophical orientation and set of values.

The notion of the commons has helped us to think through and adopt “most efficient uses of resources” as a new value—a 21st century value for the theater field. #NEWPLAY TV is another Institute contribution to the knowledge commons. It’s a live-streaming web channel—an open-access, shared-resource for sharing work and ideas anytime and anywhere in the country. Having one channel for the entire community pools resources and aggregates audience. The more artists and organizations participate in this commons, the more developed and cross-pollinated the audiences become.

  1. NEWPLAY on Twitter is the advertising mechanism for building awareness of events on #NEWPLAY TV, and is also used to foster audience participation. For example, panels can take real-time questions from #NEWPLAY TV viewers. #NEWPLAY TV makes work and conversations accessible that were once only available to the privileged with travel budgets. This open-source or commons method of coordinating a resource is novel in the institutional theater field. This is another example of the irony of the once radical regional theater movement. The movement developed the institutions and its institutional culture, which has in turn repressed theater folks innate capacity for resource-efficient, collaborative, and collective enterprise.

Some of most exciting ways of engaging this technology come from ideas suggested by users, such as “watch parties.” We discovered that what we thought would be a potentially isolating experience doesn’t have to be. Watch parties have cropped up across the U.S., in conjunction with the live event being streamed. Those watch parties or satellite gatherings have then, in return, fed back into the central event being streamed. The first occurrence of this happened in February 2010 when we were hosting a convening in DC on “devised” or “ensemble” work processes and we livestreamed a demonstration from artists. A theater company in Los Angeles organized a “watch party” to collectively witness the demonstration and their real-time tweets were absorbed and became part of the conversation in the room in DC.

Our first commons project, the New Play Map, emerged as a result of numerous but unsubstantiated claims that it “took a village” to bring a new play to production. We decided to track exactly what resources made new plays possible by creating a map. We planned to display and map out the infrastructure for new work across the U.S. to visualize how projects and artists move and circulate within and between their supporting organizations. Initially, we thought our staff of three would collect and enter data in an old school, top-down model of information dissemination. But it didn’t take us long to realize the immense amount of work that would require. It left us wondering what the hell were we thinking. How could we presume to create a map or a global representation of the entire field all by ourselves? That map would by nature be limited to our particular scope of experience and point of view.

So then we looked to the self-reported, crowdsourcing models of the Ushahidi mapping project and Wikipedia to develop our own open-access system and author–generated collective map. Once the technical apparatus for collecting information and mapping knowledge for it was in place, the New Play Map designed itself. It is now the largest on-going collaborative Internet theater project in the U.S.

Its major impact in these early stages has to been to bring visibility to organizations and artists that were previously invisible. The real world and immediate consequence: new relationships and knowledge exchanges and a permanent breaking of the old geographic walls and professional silos. The mental map we all have of the field is forever changed. In a field that is historically segmented and seemingly mono-cultural, the first and easiest step toward unveiling a “map” that is more diverse than you could ever imagine is through the implementation of open-access knowledge commons projects that internet tools enable.

The commons notion of coordinating and sharing resources is so much more than just a different way to transform an economy. It is a catalyst for cultural change that implicates our emotions, relationships to each other, and our ways of thinking about our purpose in the world.

Our work is inspired by the founders of a movement that we are responsible for making relevant in the 21st century. We hope to use the very strengths of our industry—the sharing of the creative impulse in intensely collaborative rehearsal rooms—to reimagine a sustainable model for making art." (http://shareable.net/blog/the-theater-at-a-crossroads-seeking-a-sustainable-model-for-creativity)