Why there (probably) shouldn't be a Stormcrow Productions theatre company

Okay - lets go blog hopping for a sec.

This discussion starts here. Adam (I think rightly) takes a hard look at what the point of an artist driven theatre company is headed towards.

A highlight:

"Together you will form a company. You'll put together a mission statement. It will include words like "enlighten, challenge and inspire." The mission statement is a lie. The real mission statement of the company is:
To showcase us.
This is your fatal flaw. It will be the thing that causes much pain later if you don't realize this."

Then there is a rebuttal from Flux Theatre here.

To quote the rebuttal:

"But what really rubbed me the wrong way is the scorn he has for the idea that the 'real' mission statement of an artist-run organization is to showcase the artists involved (his word, definitely not mine). He describes this as the fatal flaw of a failed artist run organization."

"That's where the most insidious ideas of the post live. Court Theatre produces plays and so does Flux. The work of artists is 'showcased' in both examples. So why is it all right for an institution to produce the work of artists, but not artists to produce the work themselves?"

and finally...

"The mission of any real work of art is nothing more or less than the experience of it. If that experience could be put into a statement, you could just read the statement, and skip the play."

I think that Augusts rebuttal misses the key point of the initial criticism.

The artist driven theatre company is formed, Adam points out, because a group of like-minded artists get together to create a show. Things work out well enough that they do it again and soon enough there is a "company".

It is not that this "company" doesn't have intentions for how their art will engage and affect their audience/community but they exist rather nebulously, held together by their shared intentions, styles, ways of doing theatre, etc.

What is important, however, is that unlike an art-making institution style company, these artist-driven companies are steered by individual artists. These artists are frequently involved in the company in a as-long-as-it-suits-my-interests sort of way (not in the financial or even "learning experience" sense of interest, necessarily, but at least in the until-I'm-not-interested-in-making-this-kind-of-theatre sort of way). That is, the artists expect this "company" to continue to do what they want until they are done with it. An art-making institution by contrast retains artists until it is done with them.

So, when an artist driven company is forced to choose between, say producing a risky-but-important work and a more popularly known one (which will likely sell more tickets) the purpose of its existance (to make "our" kind of work) can trump financial considerations. This is a good thing, in its way, but Adam's point is that once an artist-driven "company" recruits a board and becomes an entity in its own right, it has to, at some point, be responsible for its own health, even when that stands at odds with what the artists who started it in the first place want to do.

At this point we might well say, so what? If artists want to drive the bus, and put their company in a more risky position then so be it. But the catch 22 quickly appears - these very artist-driven companies want to do more than eek out shoestring budget pieces in their spare time. And since they don't attract enough audience bucks to pay for more (better sets, salaries for actors, etc.) they look to government for money to supplement their budget. And the government peskily insists that money be handed out to an agency with a board that will control the finances to ensure the ongoing viability of the company. And this artist-driven agency is forced to quantify its mission and purpose in an ongoing way, and that's when all those mushy feely words about community engagement and educational opportunities and what not get written down. Because nobody could get government money for "We want to make our theatre, our way, please pay us and hope we don't have a falling out."

And I think at core the issue is that these artist-driven companies are most often birthed with no intention to create an independent institution that will last long past all of its founding members. This can happen naturally over time, but more often than not they either die out as people move on (c.f. the last theatre company I was a part of) or at some point get a board and then bemoan when that board hijacks or hamstrings the company in the interest of sustainability.

"But its not fair," complains an artist in an artist-driven company. "We are important in lots of ways and deserve funding without having to worry about doing popular shows."

I think these artist-driven organizations do deserve funding. I think they provide lots of run-off benefits to society that cannot be captured in ticket revenue. But I think they should stop pretending to be something they are not. They should be able to say, "me and my buddies want to do this particular show, in this way, and it's going to cost X (including real salaries for actors, directors, technicians, etc.), and our tickets will get us back Y. Please give us X-Y dollars, government body."

"But what if this specific play offends some people? The government won't want to fund it."

Okay. So there should be some kind of arms-length agency in charge of doling out funds to non-institutional artist clusters, that could provide the funding decisions well enough in advance to allow theatres to get booked etc., that would be on a totally different government ledger from the usual support for the arts institutions in town.

As a playwright, I'm reading the trends of institutional theatres and seeing that the opportunities for me to flourish there are limited - very limited if I'm not first a brand they can latch on to. So should I start my own tiny semi-professional theatre company (as a couple of my peers have recently, and very bravely, done)? If so, I'll have to pretend that I'm creating an agency that could well survive without me as Artistic/Executive Director. Otherwise I can't imagine getting enough money together to produce a few shows, develop a name, and get to the point where someone else would want to pay for my words.

I'll admit I'm in a surly place right now, but I think the thrust of Adam's argument is very telling - that the motivation for creating a theatre company is frequently at odds with the current mechanisms to finance it.