Shifting ground

Let me start by painting the context of the arts in the US through recent events. One of America’s five big orchestras discussed possible bankruptcy in the press. I worked with an elite private school, two public school districts and two major performing arts centres on adopting a creativity-centred school reform model, ‘Twenty-first Century Learning Skills’. Carnegie Hall’s education programme completed a strategic plan including a commitment to working in community settings and exploring how music transforms lives. Admitting that California’s arts sector was at a dead end, a state-wide conference launched a year-long inquiry into conversations and events in every community, in order to learn what the Californian people (very few of whom feel they belong in the ‘arts club’) want and need. I worked with five US cities, and with delegations from two foreign countries, that wanted to learn about ‘teaching artist’ training and practice in the US.

KEY TRENDS
• ‘High’ arts organisations are experimenting to rediscover their relevance to more Americans – this is not about new marketing plans, but exploring what they do and how they relate to their public. It is about really listening, usually for the first time, to the voices unheard in long-range thinking about the arts.
• The line between arts and education is blurring, with a push toward arts organisations thinking of themselves as learning organisations and expanding the definition and purpose of education. The buzzwords ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ are seeping into the thinking of arts organisations. This is partly as a result of a ‘change or die’ reality facing them, and partly because of a shift of direction in the country as a whole, and they want to get on board.
• The arts are redefining what participation means: we might call it a heating up of the various ways people can engage in the arts. The importance of the visceral impact of an arts experience rather than mere production excellence is rising. Key agents in this process are teaching artists – artists who have developed the skills of engagement, and tools to expand active participation.

GROUNDSWELL
In the summer of 2008, the National Performing Arts Conference, sponsored by all the major arts service organisations (which include the League of American Orchestras, Opera America, Chorus America, Theatre Communications Group, DanceUSA, Association of Performing Arts Presenters, and a dozen more), brought together 5,000 professionals in Denver, the largest group ever assembled, to agree on common actions that everyone could take to advance the cause and place of the arts. The keynote speech by business guru Jim Collins (leader of ‘Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t’, research that illuminates how organisations excel and how they thrive in turbulent times) challenged the assembly bluntly. Collins’s research asserts that in tough times an organisation (corporate or non-profit) must pull back to core essential beliefs and experiment boldly from there about new ways to embody and fulfil them. His challenge was that the artworks, old and new, that organisations love to present, and through which they define themselves, are not their core beliefs – they are the means by which they have expressed their beliefs, and that is exactly where we must experiment boldly. The core beliefs are the reasons the arts have been around since day two in human history, and the arts must re-engage around that essential, universal human yearning to rediscover its relevance to more than the 4 or 5% of the population.

THE BUILD UP
Don’t get me wrong – this is not a cheerful time in the American arts. Arts organisations are struggling, both in the economic climate and in the peripheral cultural position of high arts institutions, which is much less true of smaller and community arts organisations. There is a trend growing in the US arts community, with widespread local tremors of experimentation, and pressure building toward earth-shaking potentials such as the disappearance of significant arts organisations and/or the future appearance of a whole new arts landscape. The immediacy of death focuses the mind wonderfully, and I see a reduction of head-in-sand denial, an increase in innovative thinking and projects, a surprising slight reduction of fear around issues of change (because I think the inevitability is being embraced), and a growing boldness. The ‘can do’ American business attitude has been historically absent from the arts sector, and I am seeing it begin to sprout. The Memphis Symphony just launched its successful new conductorless series; 16 cities are launching El Sistema-related orchestra programmes for at-risk youth; four cities are piloting a MusicianCorps; Carnegie Hall leads Community Sings around the city in which the audience joins in as part of a stirring choral evening. The landscape, not just the buildings, is changing over here.