Notes from the 2019 TYA Conference (Part One)
At Baltimore Center Stage, Adena Varner is about to have a new title, starting July 1: Director of Learning and Social Accountability.
Adena Varner, Baltimore Center Stage
As someone who is deeply invested in the power of both words and community, I was immediately struck by this new title when I met Adena at the 2019 TYA Conference in Atlanta earlier this month. It is a title that has the potential to powerfully re-frame Baltimore Center Stages’ work in its community. It strikes me that there is much that our industries can learn from this new alignment.
Words matter. When you are thoughtful about which words you use, you are telling anyone you address that you respect them. You respect them enough to find the right way to say what you mean, to understand all the shades of meaning behind a word, and to find the right nuance to be sure that your words are aligned with your intentions. You are making your very best effort to ensure that there is no room for misappropriation of your intent or for misconstruing a meaning that isn’t there.
Words also evolve. With the idea of social accountability, an ever-evolving idea in the arts is evolving again – and right now Baltimore seems to be a place on the leading edge of that curve.
The Evolution of the Language We Use
Once upon a time (not too long ago), many organizations talked about their community outreach. Today, the term is cringe-worthy. Implicit in the idea of “community outreach” is that we, the arts, have something that is of unquestioned value. That value comes from the simple fact that we, the art makers, have made it. We, the art makers, have studied the arts for a long time. We know what good art is. We see that others are lacking in this knowledge. Rather than interrogate ourselves or our create a dialogue with our community to understand what knowledge it has that could help us (the art maker) grow, we instead engage in a practice that we (at one time) dubbed outreach.
We (the haves) will bring art to you (the have nots). And through that outreach – that presenting of this rare jewel to those we have defined are deprived for being without it – we are making their lives better. The idea of outreach is not iterative or repetitive. It implies a “reaching out” on our terms, and therefore a retreat or disengagement on our terms as well. It is the very definition of colonialism. The Jesuits brought religion; we were bringing Mozart.
In time, we in the arts began to see the error in our ways. As our understanding of our communities grew, our understanding of our language grew as well. Outreach evolved into engagement. Major national service organizations made it a practice to eliminate the word “outreach” from their vocabulary*. Unlike “outreach,” engagement implied that learning was a two-way street, on-going, and deeper than an occasional helicopter-ed touch. Our art and our cultural experience was no longer a priori. Through successful engagement one imagines a world in which the art itself is no longer only the domain of we the art makers. Rather, if art is to transform community, we are to engage in it collectively. We are to accept that we too are transformed through the act of community partnership.
*As recently as last year, I proudly bore witness when Opera America refused to promulgate a lengthy study by a journalist to the field when their leadership saw a draft of the article which used the term “outreach” consistently. Opera America demanded that the language be changed. It was.
This idea of community engagement has recently been given a new sibling: civic practice. Through civic practice, we no longer see the art itself as the exclusive medium through which mutually beneficial outcomes can be achieved. Rather, we begin to see the practice that informs the art to itself be a source of public good. We see the wisdom of artists and the perspective of artists as having power to transform civic life – because representing the voice of the artist alongside the voice of other civic leaders brings us all together on equal footing. It is not the art itself that can transform, it is also the people who make the art. Through civic practice, we as art makers and art institutions take ownership of our own responsibility to more than just the community that currently is (or one day could be) in our audience. We instead take responsibility to be leaders of our communities. And to be leaders, our actions in each step of our work must reflect the values that will make our communities stronger – whether those values directly benefit us today or not.
The Path from Diversity to Inclusion to Equity
Another series of concepts tied to community impact evolved in tandem as well over the last 20 years. That conversation began with the idea of diversity. We may now look back and see it as a simplistic starting point. (Diversity after all comes down to counting the amount of difference in the room. It can be about little more than superficial optics if there isn’t intention behind it.)
So, the diversity conversation evolved into one about inclusion. We were getting beyond counting as a measure of success. In addition to extending an invitation to create a diverse room, we were trying to create an environment in that room in which people who were different than the dominant us felt wanted, valued, and respected. However, here again, inclusion carried the subconscious awareness of exclusion. And again, there is a perceived dominance. Those in the majority were deigning to include those who wouldn’t otherwise be in the room, but for the largess of those making the invitation.
So, that evolved into a dialogue about equity. Equity eliminates the idea that any one person or any one group has (or should have) power over another. Equity creates the environment through which we can each experience equality. Building a culture of equity means valuing the voice of those who are different exactly as we would value the voice of those who are the same. Here, at last, we reach something of the open and equal exchange of ideas, values, and learning that we might hope for within engagement or civic practice.
What many of us in the field intended to mean when we used any one of these earlier words five, ten, or fifteen years ago may actually have been what we come to mean now as equity. We just weren’t nuanced enough in our own understanding to match the right word with the right instincts.
Access and Anti-Racism
“You cannot have diversity, you cannot have inclusion, and you certainly cannot have equity unless you battle the root problem first: racism.”
However, today, a new framework for thinking is being raised, particularly in the LORT theater community. Stephanie Ybarra articulated it best recently at the TYA Conference in Atlanta: “You cannot have diversity, you cannot have inclusion, and you certainly cannot have equity unless you battle the root problem first: racism.” Therefore, we must center the work first from the place of anti-racism and address the systems that create and uphold racism – not to mention both visible and invisible bias. (I would contend that implicit in this idea is another root problem, sexism, and that we are therefore called to center work around both anti-racism and anti-sexism.) It is thanks to Stephanie Ybarra (who is conveniently also the new Artistic Director at Baltimore Center Stage helping to create titles like Director of Social Accountability) and many of her rising peers within the national LORT theater community that these questions of anti-racism and anti-sexism are being talked about freely.
The data supports the central idea that structures exist that empower white, cisgender men and disempower non-white men and women loud and clear. In the TYA field, a survey conducted by the University of Utah showed that at 59 of the field’s leading companies, a whopping 91% of top leadership was white, with 4% Latinx and 2% African America.
Percent of TYA Leadership at Top 59 Companies By Ethnicity
But it isn’t just numbers themselves, it’s what people of color (once engaged to work) are given access to do in the field. In the course of an analysis of Off-Broadway theaters (also shared at the TYA Conference), the correlation between the ethnicity of directors vs. the ethnicity of the playwrights whose work they were staging was examined. The study looked at the ten largest Off-Broadway theaters over ten years of work. In that time, not a single African-American, Asian-American, or Latinx director was contracted to direct a play by a white playwright. However, white stage directors throughout that ten year period consistently were given the opportunity to direct work by African-American, Asian-American, and Latinx playwrights. The implications of that data are crystal clear: artists of color are expected to “stay in their lanes” from an unstated assumption that their experiences can only inform story telling about other people who look like them. White artists, however, can be entrusted to tell literally anyone’s story.
The Annenberg Institute’s study Inequality in 1,200 Popular Films tells much the same story in the film industry, at a higher level of analysis than than has been explored anywhere in the performing arts.
Stephanie Ybarra and Jacob G. Padrón during a keynote at the 2019 TYA Conference in Atlanta
So, our language may be evolving to create a more equitable environment. But our actions now (quickly) need to begin to match our intent. Thankfully, in the case of the Off-Broadway model, Stephanie Ybarra and her colleague Jacob G. Padrón (newly appointed Artistic Director at Long Wharf Theatre) shared at the TYA Conference that after the Artists Anti-Racism Collective presented this data to their colleagues running Off-Broadway houses, changes have begun. Sometimes, it takes hard data to prove to well-intentioned leaders that their thoughts and their actions aren’t aligned. And thanks to data, we can measure progress.
So, Where Do We Go From Here?
Different fields, different communities, and different organizations are all on different places in this continuum of learning. While doing this work, we must recognize that we all are learning. And to continue to learn, we must always find ways to lift each other up.
Shaming a person or a company who is still using late 1990s vocabulary and is talking about “outreach” and “diversity” doesn’t bring them further along the continuum any faster. The natural defensiveness it elicits will likely slow their growth rather than expedite it. So, we must all be open to being teachers at the same time as we are learners. That’s something that great professionals who actually are teachers know better than anyone – which may be one reason why this conversation at the TYA Conference was the least contentious set of conversations of its kind that I’ve ever participated in.
One way to teach is to teach by example – which brings me back to where this essay started. We teach by example best when we find words that guide our peers, our community, and our audience towards an understanding that is deeper, richer, and more nuanced than we ourselves had previously.
That is why it is so exciting to me that a major regional theater has created a leadership position in the area of “Learning and Social Accountability.” It is a title that explicitly broadcasts priorities at Baltimore Center Stage. They are aren’t just trying to welcoming people with diverse background to theater. They want to be held accountable for their success. And they want to be accountable not just to themselves, but to society as a whole. Plus, by coupling this idea with the idea of learning, they make explicit that they too are learning through the work. The playing field between who is teaching and who is learning has been equalized: the expectation of equity has been made explicit.
These are priorities that have likely existed for a long time, but perhaps now have a slightly different tilt. But it’s small tilts that can make all the difference. By creating this new role, Baltimore Center Stages is also leading by example in a highly visible way.
Wherever you and your organization is on this continuum, what Baltimore Center Stages has done provides us each a great reminder: that it’s possible for us to lead others elsewhere on their continuums through our own similar examples as well.