A CONVERSATION WITH BEN CAMERON

By Kevin Long

On Monday, May 22, I traveled to Victory Gardens Theater to hear the deeply inspiring Ben Cameron, (For Ben Cameron's Bio:  click here )  current president of the Jerome Foundation and former executive  director of Theatre Communication Group, speak about some of the issues that affect our work in the theatre and ways to address them in a time when our cultural environment in the United States is in constant flux.  As Victory Gardens promoted, "Ben is an inspirational thought leader in our field and is a frequent speaker on theatre and the arts throughout the country."  The League of Chicago Theatres sponsored the event.  

 

Ben shared with the audience his deep passion for the live professional performing arts reiterating that our theatres will continue to have importance to our communities and provide opportunities for artists to ply their craft and earn a living with dignity.  However, Ben then addressed the fact audiences are dwindling.  He boldly stated that people today are making active choices to stay away from the live performing arts.  What is causing this to happen?

 

The cost of a theatre ticket has become outrageously expensive.  Theatre is becoming something for only the privileged few.  In 1953, a Broadway ticket to see The King and I cost $2.00 for balcony seating and $5.20 for orchestra seating.  Today, a Broadway ticket to see Hamilton cost over $500.00 for balcony seating and over $1,000.00 for orchestra seating.  Ticket prices are mindboggling.  We all know how valuable it is for our students to see the high quality live professional theatre here in Chicago; yet again, it is simply out of the financial reach of my students to do so.  I work hard to find avenues of revenue to help offset the ticket price so that my students can afford our Chicago professional theatre ticket prices. 

 

Technology has affected and changed our assumptions of cultural consumption.  We now can get anything we want, when we want it, delivered directly to our homes.  We can shop at home, at work, on our phones while on the train going to work, sitting in a Starbucks sipping coffee, etc.  Moreover, online purchases can be personalized and customized to meet our specific wants and needs.  This type of personalization and customization cannot be met in the theatre where curtain times are set, in a set venue, coupled with the inconvenience of traveling to the theatre and finding parking.  With this in mind, what is our future when we ask a perspective audience member to pay an outrageous amount for a ticket to see one of our professional theatre productions when they are used to downloading movies, songs, and more on the Internet for $0.99 to $7.00?  Not to mention what technology has done to the average person's attention span.  New plays have gone from two to three acts to 80 minutes with no intermission.  Ben then joked, "Aren't you glad you invited me speak to brighten your day today?" We laughed, but realized the depth and seriousness of what he was laying out for us. 

 

Ben stressed that even though many who work in the arena of live professional performing arts feel the performing arts are threatened, endangered by technology, that we actually should choose to believe that we are engaged in an arts reformation that is caused, in part, by technology.  Technology cannot replace the live professional performing arts because the very nature of live performing arts causes us to gather as a community and breathe the same air together - to conspire together: in the theatre this means actor to actor, actor to audience member, and audience member to audience member.  In the time of our 45th president, where the level of character attacks is shocking, the endorsement of violence is appalling, where ideas are reduced to tweets, and there is a blatant violation of our American principles, the live performing arts provide intelligent dialogue, deep listening, empathy, inclusion, civic discourse and the creation of true community.  A community and home for every race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious affinity that celebrates the things that bind us rather than divide us.

 

How can we bring our audiences back to the enriching experiences that we provide?  Ben provided us with some excellent advice.

 

Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor in chief of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, minicams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Brothers or RKO, because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring, and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie?

 

All you have to do is turn on the television, walk into a coffee house, attend a film festival, witness a religious service, or perform a search on YouTube, and you will see that people are participating in creative activities.  Some of these amateur artists are actually presenting work that is of high professional quality.  This presents a challenge to what we consider our traditional venues of live performing arts.  Ben stated, "We now live in a world defined by participation."  We can capitalize on this.

 

With this in mind, a professional orchestra created what they called the "Rusty Musicians Program."  Audience members, who play an instrument, audition to perform with the orchestra.  For one concert, the size of the orchestra is doubled.  The selected "rusty musicians" play the concert sitting next to the professionals.  The audience members are co-creators of the art.  Needless to say, these concerts sell out.

 

Many productions of The Music Man incorporate local high school marching bands to participate in the "76 Trombones" finale.  The examples are many.

 

In the same TED Talk mentioned above, Ben also stated:

Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange - a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strandand with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles - a collective of artists that after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities - the Baha'i, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with youth gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are poised on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.

 

While Ben's talk was only an hour long, I left feeling inspired to rethink how I can begin include members of the community into my work at Harper College.  I am challenged to think beyond my "Coffee with the Director and Dramaturg" events to find ways for my audiences to become co-creators with me.  I hope I was able to adequately capture what Ben did for us in attendance that day.  It was an inspirational call to action.  I encourage you to view his TED talk.   Click here. You won't be disappointed.  In the end Ben praised us for our work, asked us to join him in his call to action, and to continue to hold high the value of our work in the live professional performing arts.