 So part of our conversation will look at inter-institutional collaboration as it's assisted, but most of it, in the direction of our president making a strike. We will look at filling the future, things we are putting in place to save inter-institutional collaboration in the next year or the next five years. I'll also sort of bring beginning of this with a lot of conversation at the conference about partnerships that primarily center around audience engagement. That's not primarily what we're talking about today. Certainly, I think there will be time in the audience question portion of that, and I think most of us can speak to that. So all of these interviews are first panels. Sean will count. He's the director of Company One. Just to make a sound, if you're a part of Sean's policy, there are so many of them here. Okay. Sean, of course, is the director and has directed visual careers of countless places, including Mk. Kirsten Cliff, Mk. Kirsten Cliff is the only one. The world premiere of Kirsten Cliff is for there. And would you like that? No. You want to tell you about my experience? Or do you want to do some interviews? Already in inter-institutional collaboration. Yeah. Okay. So, hi everyone. I'm Ryan McKincher. I'm the director of artistic programs in the Veronica ART. Sean, Charles, thank you for introducing Sean. We just wanted to introduce our other two panelists. And on a far right, I am for her, who, since 2009, has been a producer at the ART. Before that, she worked in London for 30 years, where she was general manager of the Royal Court. She produced our production with the fitness shows, including transfers to New York, including the Seagull and Rocky Wall. Before that, she was deputy head of the National Theatre Studio for two years. And to my right, Mara Isitz, who is a creative producer and a founder of octopus theatricals. She's dedicated to fostering an extensive range of theatrical works for local, national, and international audiences. And she's produced over 100 productions that have been seen in theatres around the country, on and off Broadway, and internationally. She was producing director of the Department of Theatre for 18 years, where she oversaw the theatre series and play development programs. And prior to that, she produced new play development programs and productions for the Mara Theatre Forum. So, I think Charles is going to ask us one question for the entire panel that both of us will answer. So, the first thing we wanted to do was just to introduce the panel by talking about an independent institutional collaboration very briefly in just three or four minutes that can then be a launch of work between the questions we wanted to explore today. I see the question of collaboration benefit. That's a really hard question for me. And I know you asked me a long time ago, so I should be prepared. But, can you involve one of them? I'm so much more sure than you. Do you have to say anything? That's pretty awesome. I would say that there are two that strike me as really the most impactful for a company like this. One is totally un-traditional and informal and not really solidified. And that is a collaboration we have with Boston Arts Academy, a local high school here, kind of like paying the difference. In our city, a lot of schools don't know about this kind. They helped us diversify everything we did from our core many years ago. And the other is we did a strange little thing in our hotel room at the Inn's Hotel where we did a nice little experiment with a group called Timelessness to totally help the actual collaboration with these people here. But those I think are on either side. That was a financial success, a really kind collaboration. But we have a ton of collaborations with incredible institutions like the Lime Center, San Francisco, and so forth to do this. Could you talk a little bit about what it was like to work with that hotel and what this challenge was about? Sure. So we went to the Inn's Hotel, and it was a working hotel. And they are a tea hotel that has a history of doing strange, sexy things and lures. We didn't know that, but we found out that they had private little concerts with weird little bands that were really big, actually, that were strange that they had to know these kind of hotel rooms. So they had all these kind of strange artistic relationships. The hotel apparently had chambers all over the company that are invested in this. So the truth is, they did it really easy. Basically, we went to the suite there for a very long time and ran this really strange little play. We ran it a couple times a day. They had all kinds of characters coming in. And all they wanted to do was to make it right. So we ran into... And any time there was a problem with the guests next door to the room, they were like, what's going on? And they were like, you know, they solved the problem by offering them free tickets. And then just deciding that they would never open for us instead. You know, we were also smart about it, because we made sure that we were going to show them a lot of time for that and put a lot of value to them. And we made sure that we, you know, our people loved them. And so it felt like a very good thing. And so it was the right piece of the right, but it was the right time, which I learned doesn't always happen. You have the wife. I find that... I've done a lot of collaborations as well, and surely the question was what's the most successful and what's the most exciting. But I found that the one that really would be the most interesting, or here is the show that caught the United States, it was in America, but it mostly worked overseas. And that was the collaboration that ART did with a British theater company called Punch Room. And maybe some people lived here at the time, or maybe some people have subsequently seen the show, or maybe more, it's still running, which is fantastic. So it was really successful, as far as being excited. One of the reasons I took on the show personally was that I always worked in text-based theater, very relevant to you guys. A theater that I ran a long time only did new writing. So this is my world, this is what's very comfortable for me. So to work with a performance of theater where there's no language, that it's all about movement and real experience and things like that, was very fascinating. And I think it was a successful production. But the challenges were partially that it was a British theater company working outside Britain for the first time. Lots of other people tried to get them, but nobody even pleased enough to take them out, because it was such a massive project. And so sometimes I think my job becomes successful in between two countries that the American speakers say no to. And I think that they were up for it, and they were up for it, but it was one of the shows that maybe if you know what was going to be involved, you would never have got to do it. I know that it's a chronic approach to this question, because I sometimes feel like I am my own institutional collaborator. I've spent more than 20 years working in large opera music theaters, and now for the last year I've been an operator. So I'm really seeing what collaboration it means for me, and it's effective. And I have been engaged, I would add, to share, because I have international collaborations, like regional theater collaborations, regional theater and commercial. But I think the one I'm going to tell is, one of my last meetings at the quarter, a police director was invited, yes, to a theater company, an ensemble-based company, to comment, creating a complete class from the middle and by means of these I don't need to play, I need to be productive. And he asked, if you're not familiar with this work, it was an ensemble, where the actors were going to be ensemble, have evolved into directors. Today, in this case, it was no one, but I mean, but it's time to go through the work, both actors were ensemble and co-directors, and together decided that what they really wanted to do was go back and look at some kind of a client into the woods. Prior to that point, we asked them to really focus on classical material, really from the shapes here. They're all actors who were directors from home or another, from BFA, I don't think, from the ground, because I don't want to tell you. And working tentatively, I had heard from so many that they wanted to do this son-time collaboration, a son-time exploration, and so we invited them to come out of the Carter office, with the idea that together, we could create something far greater than we could possibly create independently. And it was, for me, one of the most successful collaborations, because it wasn't just about resource sharing, or, you know, kind of an opportunistic collaboration, but really it was about how do we each end to that side of each other. And I have to say, I'm really quite proud of the artistic result, which was a new way of looking at a sort of canonical, contemporary musical, that many people thought like, they finally understood the show for the first time, because there was so much more spent on examining the text, and really understanding each part of it. And then I was raising the aspect of the game in terms of how they could make their intellectual work and transform it into a really practical experience. I think Charles and I went through this question as well. One of my jobs at the ANRT as from the inter-institutional programs is to think about the relationship between the ANRT and Harvard University. And I think as Charles and I started thinking about this panel, we started thinking about institutional collaborations as between theater and theater, between theaters and universities, between theaters and commercial entities as well. So I just wanted to give it a bit to talk about what, I think for me, is one of the most successful inter-institutional collaborations that I've been involved with, which is the relationship between the ANRT and Harvard. And I'll go back a little bit and just say that when Diane Paulus became the artistic director of the ANRT five years ago, she was really focused on thinking about the relationship, the ANRT is part of Harvard University, but thinking more deeply about the ways that the ANRT could take full advantage of the resources of the of the university, I mean the financial resources, I mean more intellectual resources. And so a lot of my time over the last four years has been spent engaging artists with professors around the university and vice versa. And I think that's taken two forms. One is probably something that's really familiar to us, which is involving professors in pre-performance events and post-performance events that we do at the ANRT. And just to give an example of that, we recently did a collection of a new musical called Widens Around the Earth where we built in a post-performance discussion into the performances that was called Act 3. And we were able to draw from Harvard sort of vast network of experts from the medical school from the Canadian-African studies to come speak in with the two creators of the show of the show, Matt Gould and Matt News. And I think a year ago Diana said something that really made sense to me, which is that the ANRT could be a catalyst for discussion all around the university, not just in a couple of departments. And I think for many years we had been, you know, focusing on a couple of departments around the university and what's been great over the last couple of years is that we really widened our approach and thought about how we could work with the recent institute for biologically inspired engineering in the paramedic center for Chinese studies on the very simple projects that were staging. And I think the other thing that's been a sort of breakthrough for us is the idea of developing work over a longer period of time and thinking about the ways that professors from the university could be involved in the generation of creation of work before the show is staged. So not just coming to the end of the show, but in the post-performance discussion. And to give an example, we did a series of roundtable discussions over the last two and a half seasons related to the Civil War. And we brought artists to the table. We brought professors to the table. And usually there was just a theme. The first theme was on Thomas Cattern. The second theme was the soldier's body and weaponry. And the third theme was how we captured and remembered the Civil War with the focus on painting, memoir, and how we collaborated with the Harvard Art Museum on that. And that's been a three-year process. And what we see happen is that professors at the university felt like they had some kind of voice in the development of the project and something at stake in the development of the project. So much so that one professor actually decided that instead of writing a book he wanted to write a play. They were curious from the 19th century that we're collaborating on this new project with a professor from the department. So I just wanted to raise that as another kind of institutional collaboration. When I think about an institutional collaboration that's really impacted or changed my home institution in Huntington about the work we did with a company called The Goldist Performance. They are the brainchild of Matt Junius, Brian Mildry. I don't know if people are familiar with Brian's work. He got the start of his career working with Charles LeLum's Ridiculous Theatre Company in New York and then moved to Boston and Provincetown and produces two or three shows a year mainly in the basement of a leather bar over in the Fenway, which he has lovingly re-christened the Grand Pond Center for Performing Arts. All right, so these are great people who do want to work with them. They really want to work with them. She invited him to be part of our thanks and clearing of those programs and the program was not a great effort for him and we then did a stage reading of a play that he was working on at the time and the stage reading program was a really bad fit for his work. And so then we decided we were going to do this one day only performance of actually a part of the virtual America an inter-institutional collaboration between the Green Times and the I.C. and the I.C. the Institute of Disciplinary Theatre in Boston. This show gave a very false site which was a parody of the Mitch Cox site go through the lens of Norman Bates' mother which was a drag role played by a little black girl in playwright Larry Cromwell and but it was really them sort of tormenting each other and we all sort of like no exit. And it was fantastic. It was hilarious. It was disturbing. At least 40% of my job as a dramaturg was supporting the audience with water chemistry in the shower scene but it also led us to program him in our main stage season in the following years of Plutterhead. So I could really change the way we thought about our own work in terms of working to our aesthetic and it changed our working processes in terms of the way we interface with writers and the way we look at our relations with them. So that Mara used the word schizophrenic in the panel is a little bit schizophrenic in the sense that we all come at it from intensely different angles and we all have 18 more examples of inter-institutional collaborations but I think we want to sort of shift the conversation now a bit more towards the how and the why. The why we choose to partner with other people and how we enter into that conversation. So I'll ask the panel and whoever wants to jump in When do you know you need a partner? When do you know you have projects that you can't do by yourself? And what how do you start thinking about finding that person that can unlock something new for your organization or make a new opportunity? I'm going to give two answers one with my independent head on and the other with my institutional head on with my independent head on because I always work with a partner. So now I have many things without thinking about what's the partnership model for this particular piece of work for this artist with this idea and the partners might be a variety of presenting institutions like the Lorda Peters commercial producers what I'm trying to do and one of the reasons why this might be kind of independent is because I wanted to find an alternative model for making work that wasn't necessarily a single institution making a show of which only that institution is much more interested in finding work that can be used and lives in a much larger institution. With my institutional head on because that's actually a majority of my career I would say that the most successful by and large our most successful production have been partnerships in some way that the work that you're imagining whether it's something that you see it as conditions of start or whether it's something that you're sharing with the artist of the country or whether you need his economic reasons or whether he's a producer whatever that the moment you start to think outside of your institution as you're creating work I think the more likeated that piece is going to resonate the art of your institution I forget that but what part is the success of all of it? I actually feel very similarly there's not I don't program anything without you know we're a small company so any help helps is part of it the other part of it is that we intentionally try to one of our core values of the program things are too impossible for us so then any help really helps and the other piece is we do reach more audience we do have more resources that way but we also have more ideas that way so kind of bottom line is it's why I do theater and I'm not a actor I guess this is why we do to connect so it's a great relationship I'm trying to know what's next because of those questions that's quite a defining act because I can let me go on it's quite a different than where I was a long time before that so that's why I think I'm being a little bit of an actual chancellor there's nothing that we do at the ART that doesn't have Harvard as a partner so there's an automatic partnership built into everything so that's part of that answer but if I reflect on the shows in the past five years each instance that we had a partner is sort of a different story or a different very true I don't know that we actively look for them in the way that Sean and Mara are talking about not not in any attempt not to have a partner but sometimes we just have some whack-a-doodle idea that we think about let's see if we can do this and then sort of take it the other way and then if it works people will want to see it or have a wider audience or might attract commercial interest which obviously was done on occasion so it's I don't know if that makes a sound like on a classic example so I don't know so I don't think that we think about it so much that way sometimes it's an opportunity that presents itself when you know I wanted to do a play called Marie Antoinette which they had commissioned they ran us and said would you read it and see what we think and use it in Harvard and Yale and so I thought that was fun you know so each one as I say has a slightly different story you know about how we got to work I would just add that I think the different story part is there isn't a particular path or a particular model but there is each piece of itself requires a set of partners and as partners might go producers, as partners might be the university for us across the street so I just want to say one more thing sorry but we have a building and Sean doesn't so if you want to know if they have just worked it makes a difference if you're a 20-member company or a buildingless company that's the first thing you do is where we can be whether it's at a show or another theater so I think that's a different story or in an open space Diane and Mark will and I think this is a topic for a lot of people Diane and Mark talk a little bit about how those relationships work yeah they again a little bit to repeat myself each of the shows that we worked on set of commercial life has a slightly different route approach by somebody who has the rights to something and they might be interested in that and Paul is directing it and they need to see if there's a way you can work together sometimes shows that we've done a vast imagery you know, what a bird I was wanting to see that play again and so there was definitely no commercial interest in that show until it worked out and then there was a lot of commercial interest in it so I think that I know it's it's something that worries some people I haven't found it as worrying as other people do and I think that's because of my experience in London this subject where it's perceived that the relationship between commercial theater, subsidized theater and fringe theater which would be defined by where people don't mostly get paid is that's a multi ecology and that people feed each other and they work off of it it's you know equity is a different sort of institution you don't have there's no such thing as equity or non-equity there's just shows and so you don't have you know actors are able to decide that they want to work on the fringe and not get a salary and not be able to you know happily work with the general and the court and they get lucky and work on the last end and make loads of money in order to subsidize all that other work so I think that it's just perceived that we all need each other and I know that there's more of an anxiety about it or I've met that in my experience here in the past few years and you know I understand there's some of it but you know because of the stuff we've done in the past few years lots of stuff gets sent to the ART and I'm sure they're great projects but they're just the better projects we would do and the magic word isn't I have all the money it's not the magic word is the best piece of work you can do right now so I think that's how it's worked similarly I think that I mean when you talk about relations between commercial producers and not the profit I feel like there's two strands there's the strand of Diane's talking about it in my experience where the relations are really driven by the work itself and when a piece seems to be whether by plan or luck once we have a future life that is more commercial than off the profit fantastic and that was always the same we never met a partner going into a life a partnership always came out and not a lot of time my favorite example was when we were doing that as a tropics and had announced we were going to open our new theater with this new play that nobody had heard of everybody to read and look at and then about a month before we opened it when the pool was a prize and suddenly everybody was calling me and saying how can I get a look at that plan a month ago so you know but for all of the shows that transferred they all have it after the fact and again because people just call it the world on stage I think where the relationship gets in trouble is when it gets built into the economic model of an institution that they have to have a certain number of enhanced production in any given year in order to make this budget and that I think is where the tension arises and why when people are kind of after these not-for-profit commercial transfers which made it that there are two very diverse sets of examples one driven by budget balancing and one driven by the needs of a particular work we've been sort of talking around the concept of dramaturgy or talking about it and not naming it as such but I think all of you are trying to use dramaturgs building on the keys leadership analysis point and B I think we all we ask each of you because we think there is a dramaturgical piece at the heart of how you look at the concept of institutional collaboration I'm wondering if you can speak to that and how you see both the role of dramaturgs and the people who wear that hat every day and where you see yourself putting on the dramaturg hat when you're looking at these and their institutional collaboration questioning their fit for your institution and how you're going to approach them John Newton's so we are lucky to be a small company that is about chocolate and that's really by design we used to be included in the ranks but I had part of the reason why I think we have some interviews on stock it's a skill set that I really value but I would say that in terms of the collaboration I mean I think we my job is to look to connect a lot of times when I program to connect people to people, ideas to ideas institutions and petitions and I think a lot of my conversations with the folks at company one have to do with connecting so I don't know and we also, we're here, we operate as a collective too so it's everybody is involved in that process you know we're doing a we did the lab credentials for chat deity and you know one of our partners was the Killer Kowalski School of Wrestling that's a weird thing that's a weird thing and then we do a deity to feel as a loved person and part of the definition of what it is so it's we think about it like at the beginning you know like in drama stars they're kind of half of my program in committee so it really is just the base of everything and so therefore when it happens it's actually now that's weird and it doesn't happen now I feel like I don't have a project coming up I don't have a major project on it I don't have a community partner on it I don't have a lucky enough to work at a sub-university or a a Huntington on it and it's like how are we going to frame this to make it either look great or how are we going to find a resource or community around this so does that answer your question? Yeah both and yeah so we Charles talked about we were part of the any Baker Shirley Vermont Play Festival here in Boston was that in 2010? years ago and so about when Peter came to town and everybody wanted to see things with his piece and I was looking at the pure token and so I said hey how about we partner with a couple of companies and we can tie it off in the Korean with brother sister children and he kindly smiled and that didn't work out so that's an example of a project that we produced by ourselves that we had no idea it was a lot of a project for us and it was a great project for us but his credit he called back and said I have no idea I'd rather talk about that and so that was also a strange collaboration three companies are very different sizes trying to make sense of one another I don't know if it was up to you all and we had the benefit actually of Charles kind of being really thought to me like the one of the core connected pieces drama surgery quick I really relied on Charles we had another drama surgery in our room we had a company one drama surgery at a time but Charles became someone who I relied upon who was one of the other groups and to know that we shared costume designer set designer and Charles I believe and in these plays that were all supposed to take place in the same fictional town that became a really rich detail plays a really rich and important role and then we were moving forward with another project that we get to announce that's a very similar model in the kind of bend diagram that is drama surgery and creasing the area of overlapping the overlapping area for me is very fluid and I have several things to tell one is I have avoided something I don't know I have avoided labeling myself with a drama chair because I find it too limited because I feel that drama chairs for better or worse get pigeon-holed and I'm not interested in being pigeon-holed in any way and how I will probably interact with artists that work and produce the institutions they collaborate with so I have avoided that terminal though because I had an M of R who was an accessibility director who called me from Archer and that I care about however I feel like one's role drama surgery really should shift the project depending on the relationship level who the collaborators are and it should be very clear what those roles are when I look at myself as a producer with a drama chair with a sensibility I also work with some really great drama chairs who have a wonderful producing sensibility and I think they have the same bed diagram over that I also think about myself and my approach to producing which I think is true for a lot of drama chairs in a much more anthropological framework for how I think about the work I was trained in anthropology as a graduate and the participant observer paradigm is one that I find very applicable to as a cultural anthropologist you're trained to go into a culture to immerse yourself in that culture you learn the language, you learn the customs you learn the rituals but you always have to maintain enough objectivity that you can analyze, that you can study that you can write about, that you can figure out what people are saying they do what they really do and to me that's producing and it's also drama chairs and so when I look at a play is a culture a production is a culture, an institution is a culture a collaboration is a culture, a community is a culture those skills I apply and we apply every single one of those kind of very much in the way I approach what I do I think that I sort of mostly would echo what Sean and Laura had said because the play report is such a a theater that's immersed in the writer as the primary artist that I feel like most of my working life was about the literary manager because I'm not a culture manager as any of them you know as this other collaborator with the artistic director and me and it was a key most of the time but maybe she did it very well and she would have the most intense relationship with the writer but certainly we were all at the table so I do feel that it's sort of how I get myself because if somebody could produce what would the drama church have a sensibility? because a lot of students in the drama church are going to show interest in producing as well in our graduate program the ART so it's very much on my mind I believe actually quite strongly that those practices should be integrated I think producers will be stronger I understand the drama church and drama church will be stronger so I understand the producing I think that the future readers know that the reader is a body and those skills are working together and the readers will be able to have that spectrum of producing ability and artistic creation ability so what do you think drama church performers need in terms of creating them that would be a hard question what do they need I think they need I think that you know when I think about producing and artistic producing I think about mission and vision and purpose understanding not just how to take a play apart or put it together but why you do what you do who you're doing it for what the connection is between a content and what you're producing for me I think it's just a really holistic approach so I have to think a little bit longer about how to think what they should learn about budget what they should learn about contract what they should learn about leadership and management how you direct the staff that's how we should be doing it okay so we'll ask one or two more questions and then we'll open it up to the audience and take questions from you all so I think we wanted to talk a little bit about collaborating with institutions that are not theaters or universities as well and that one way of asking this is sort of what's the organization that you both bring but haven't worked and you know got them all in terms of my idea to collaborate with the Museum of National History in New York and recently with another museum I'm curious in any of your experiences Shawn you did mention the hotel you know a great example what are organizations that you both that you dream of collaborating with or are there other examples of institutional collaborations that you haven't covered yet I'll take an exact I have an exact but I hope to think about the dreaming one longer a lot of times when I was in London institutions offered medical or researchy or okay anyway what I was going to say is they would come to us and they would say we will pay for a commission for a writer if you will find somebody who will write on this subject so gladly took their money for a writer so the London is sort of interesting that was unexpected was that about 10 years ago the Climate Change Center it's not quite called that at Oxford University decided that they would have a conference where 30 scientists would meet with 30 artists because they said climate change is happening, nobody believes us we have the evidence and we're not very good at communicating the message so we've looked around the world and we think arts are the way that messages can get out that's not working that well yet but it led to an organization that's called Tipping Point that is really fascinating but it definitely was a collaboration that was not artists originated but now is very much artists whatever and scientists together and that was extraordinary I hope something really great I hope something amazing will come out of it but I hope other things will come out of it as well because obviously it's the most oppressing issue of our time and that was something totally inattentive and now people routinely go to the art day and I've now explored many people that I've worked with and I think that that was great for projects that I've actually worked on that both I think address and also this idea of artists and scientists I'm working with a really interesting company they're a New York based company founded by a woman Jessica Breinstout who's a visual artist and designer and Eric Sanko who's a composer and puppet designer transformed through what they do they are in the midst of creating a trilogy of pieces that deal with climate change and humanity and the second piece of that trilogy is called Memory Rings and it's a really interesting challenge on a number of levels just to get into the climate change thing for a second I think this notion of inter-institutional collaboration between artists and scientists is really important because as artists and this is one of the things that we talk about a lot when we talk about developing these pieces this is a piece that is created with visuals and movement and music and puppets all the storytelling is not available there's no text and part of that is strategic on that part because particularly when you're taking on an issue of climate change people get harangued about the time that's statistics and a reason clearly doesn't work in terms of trying to persuade entrepreneurs to change this behavior it just doesn't and if you guys have ever there's a book about this that talks about people's vision making for it by 90% emotional and 10% reasonable so reason doesn't work so how can we as artists somehow appeal to people subconscious and I think it's through beauty and poetry and imagery and music that we can hopefully stir them and awaken them enough that it changes their tuning and their sensitivity so they respond differently to things the next time they're confronted with them that's the hope and I think that's the place where collaborations between artists go to artists and scientists or artists and whatever artists and politicians artists and activists there's all kinds of examples of things that we're moving forward where I feel like those kinds of collaborations along with then getting the traditional producing or presenting infrastructure involved to get that work out of living through communities to me as my fantasy in the case of Phantom Lim it's been really challenging so I no longer have an institution behind me I'm an independent producer these are independent artists we're trying to make work outside the complex of the traditional institutional structure and yet we want the work to be presented in what will look like traditional institutional structures because it's a theater piece that's going to have lights and projections and stuff like that so it will look like it belongs in a building but it's being made by cobbling together the interest and support of many institutions each of them recognize the value of this work there's a high risk factor in this work it's kind of pushing the envelope aesthetically it's going to be for mainstream audiences it's going to be for people who are willing to supply as much of the narrative as the artists supply when they come to see the work and so we have you know a residency at the Rauschenberg Foundation in Florida where we did a preliminary workshop on our piece this is also a device piece so it's about creating it on bodies not in a room of pen and paper and now we're going to brand new contemporary performance of any international role because this coming July for a two-week residency to continue to build work and more discussion with two other actually university-based presenting organizations about finishing the development each of these little places nobody has ownership of it there's no claim there's no subsidiary rights these are all institutions who are each taking a little piece of the puzzle and hopefully some funders and then we'll tour to fans, L.A. and hopefully a lot of other bands because I'm done looking at it so that's my current and future. We're lucky that company one of our audience demographics are relatively in the nation with a lot like the city of Boston I think that's my dream and anything like that has to do with one day I don't know the city I say that because we might be new to town only because the city is changing we have new elected officials and new positions we are so I don't actually know what that's about with me yet but I feel like we appreciate theater for the people we appreciate theater that is lower shelf we have high shelf and I think working with the city might be a good thing for us not a theater collaboration not an educational collaboration but one that's really important and we are residents of the Boston Center for the Arts which has been really valuable for us it's not necessarily a resource that gives us any money it gives us discounts on space and things like that and that somehow took a long time I guess came through the city but having residents for small companies is a big deal I think we do have a home and that means a lot so that's an example of one thing I could talk further about one thing really quickly is operating programatically with Boston Center for the Arts to develop work by, you know, playwrights in the double X lab we've been doing that now for three years developing some really wonderful playwrights and brandy work there and that's something where a non-theatrical non-education institution stepped up and so this is important to us and we think that it would do that work and that was a meaningful and remain meaningful I'm not sure that my jury partner but it doesn't relate to drama trilogy it relates to audiences which I know we're not supposed to talk about one of the things we're talking about a lot of energy right now is how our audience is going to change over the next five to ten years and we have a lot of people who follow us who probably maybe will never get to Cambridge possibly will get to New York and one of our shows still happens to be running there but they affiliate with the ART and they try to smash letters and they like us on various things and so we're talking a lot about theater audiences in the future the line with that will always be the most primary experience but just as you can follow up with a band and have their poster and make your a fan or know their lyrics incorporate their work and once in a blue moon see a concert the world was changing so much so I don't know because I don't want it to be the devil but I just feel there's something in the way that audiences are changing right now look at I finally like the one copy and I feel when I first looked here nobody watched it and now you can see it everywhere and I just think that's interesting to us about what's happening with audiences so we'd love to open for questions from the audience thoughts about inter-execution collaborations applications, questions can you speak really loudly yes I can they have to be monican because it's from Freddie Mellon University and thank you I'd like to ask you all to talk a little bit about the process of an inter-institutional collaboration and particularly to talk about things you may have discovered it is wise to discuss and get fairly specific about off-front and what is equally wise to leave elasticity and space around so that as the process goes forward there's still room for discovery and even a little bit of welcome to history that's a really good question was everybody able to hear so you want to at first I want to talk about I think that following up the artistic parts if you want to be simplistic are the parts that are important to create elastic particularly easiest parts to keep elastic clear financial and I find that in young collaboration one part of the audience often maybe because they commissioned a script they wanted us to come in so in some ways they worked out to be partner on that they had the longer-standing relationship but the only things that have gone wrong I don't know what are you thinking hopefully, but you know making this work to do your best so everybody estimates what it's going to cost so we have clear context but I know it's obvious that we're definitely guilty of being optimistic about what they need to do usually in my experience when you're dealing with two institutions that are two large institutions that are collaborating together there's always an issue of ego and there's usually going to be an alpha institution somehow involved in the equation and I think it's really important to name it to be honest about it I don't have any illusions about who's the top dog and who's not because that's just the reality often and the other thing that I think is really important and this is true for any production relationship whether it's an institutional or an artificial institution but this notion of how do you build trust how do you build common language and understand each other is really really important and this is going to sound really cheesy and obvious I try to have as many early conversations as possible over food because it's just something different that happens when you break bread with people than when you sit in an office and the kind of openness to sharing and vulnerability that happens when you are human together is really really important this alpha conversation you are talking about is that always related to budget or is that you can have two institutions at the same time I think it has to do with in the American theater we created a kind of cult of personality the institutions of where their status on their sleeve and some are just more graceful than others about seeding as Diane said someone's usually believed and you just have to be really clear out front who's in the lead you can't have a situation and I probably have the most common inter-institutional collaboration which is about co-production where you've got two theaters and both of them are advising the creative team of the project I'll give you a perfect example that we were producing with the New York theater company and let me tell you the New York theater company assumed they were the alpha regardless of who's been who has the longest relationship with the artist if you're in a community or not who's commission it doesn't matter the New York theater company comes in they're just a fair charge so the first thing you have to do is establish whether or not there is actually a case what that relationship is in this one case we had a situation of co-production and the producer from the New York theater came to the dress rehearsal and said there was a meeting afterwards with the director the producer from the other theater and myself and the producer from the other theater said well, don't spend any time working with that actor because we'll just fire them with the New York production and I just said excuse me we're mounting a production for this theater for this audience and we're going to do everything we can to get that actor up to speed because we have four weeks to live with this performance and wouldn't you know the actor actually stated but those are just some of the very real things and you can't anticipate that that's going to happen so it's really important for the partners to understand when it's at your theater you're in charge and the other person gets to advise and then when it goes to their theater they get to be in charge and you get to advise and I think that's a really important and healthy thing to declare and say at the time so we've often in the small moments in relationship and I've come to learn from that I love that because one of the things we're listening to to be very transparent is that we've got a ton of vibrations where the institution's much lower than this and so if you know not that long ago we were having a meeting internally where we said maybe we should ask ourselves what our value is what is our value to these institutions instead of just doing incredibly lucky to be able to take the meetings and maybe pay for a lot of things and hang out at our parties like what's the value and that's it doesn't have to be very specific to our organization where we are at an age of 15 years old but defining our value helps us understand not just what we want but what have you wanted of us and helps us do things like brand and think about who we are and our mission where we're going and whether we're being true to that but all of that is to say that once we've defined our value it's easier to think about relationship so for us it's not I think we are most successful when thinking not as projects but as relationships so I don't think it's accidental that our project with the Huntington-Rodscher-Bermont plays became a relationship that we're having another conversation or that our project at Suffolk University last year will become another relationship project this year these happen because we made lots of mistakes other institutions have talked to talked really openly about those mistakes but we had great wrap-up meetings the project wasn't over until we talked about it and it was only when we talked about it that we realized that there was more to be had from this that it wasn't like that was good that was bad at anybody that didn't make money we were happy but what else could be done became a really valuable thing hopefully we're not done with that conversation but the other thing I would say is all of the things that are hard to do by yourself are also hard to do right, sorry yeah, it's always harder just because there's more resource in our minds doesn't mean it's easier so for us, our experience is that you know marketing is always hard it doesn't matter who we're working with for that, it's hard programming things that are challenging right challenging technical elements are hard even if you've got lots of money that's hard so I think not pretending that things are become easy simply because more people think they don't another question yes as I was wondering I'm going to just follow that I think that the ART's changed a lot from that for years because audiences sort of deserve it now we've done that so the number of people you want to come is it telling the story or should we want to always track it on the stage all of them figure about it of the conversations they have the letter we write them the follow-up that happens and the enthusiasm they have for coming back what does it show we do in the season is there an ART show that we certainly we wouldn't be talking about stores how do you describe as well as a really early stage that's three years old but we're describing a hate program so when we are collaborating with different institutions it's around the university it's also bringing more audience members to the productions that's obvious but then when we're co-producing we find out that it's going to go on to New York I have a lot of audience members come up to me who are very excited that they got to see it first and I think they feel like they have a stake in the future of the production as well sometimes I still didn't notice this is what I think needs to change now in the production but I think the co-production is a future life a production having a future life gives our audience an even stronger sense that they have something that they think is safe when investing in the production one thing I'll say about the audience thing which goes back to this show that we did a fair amount about the approach to this next collaboration is this sort of odd thing that happened in the critical responses to the festival where I guess it's not odd because people know that the humane festival often is treated as a kind of forced race in the reviews that happen but there was an odd tendency to compare the productions to one another in a way that was not helpful to the plays and not helpful to the art and yet even though that happened a lot in the critical community when talking about it I did not experience it on the audience side where there was actually a much deeper engagement with the work that was on stage because it was contextualized from seeing three plays that came from the same aesthetic in a very impressive period of time so all of this is about audience in the sense that the way they received it is something that we're thinking about as we head to this next one about how we're going to frame the way we're working together and what the goals are in hopes that we can transition that even just a little bit so I think about audience all the time and for me everything I do is totally connected to it's not completely when you talk about audience in the context of institutional collaboration I think a lot of it depends on if you're talking about shared audience among the institutions among the institutions the theater is local no matter what the larger framework where it might be and one of the challenges when you're dealing with institutional collaboration where you have separate audiences that the audiences are different and the way they look at the work is created very much by their own personal context and we certainly have situations where the work might have blended in one way in one community and then got into the other community and not say to that production so I think if you notice the track one can fall into which is saying oh my god we're going to have a track theater we're going to have no problem selling that show at our theater that's actually not how it worked out so there are real challenges and assumptions like that made that work possible Hi, Brian Quirk from Niteson and Theater in Toronto I wanted to ask a question about partnership versus collaboration and we tend to use the two in exactly the same way and I don't think they often they are not and we partner with other organizations all the time but none of those partnerships are collaborations by any means and in my other world I'm the director of the band at the band center and as an example we're just about to embark on a partnership with Kate Farewell speaking to the environmental partnerships that you mentioned again a similar organization that brings artists and scientists together has a lot of potential connection with the band center which does some of the same things and we're working on a partnership around a new play by Brian and Avery who went on a Kate Farewell trip into the North Sea through Ruth Little which is my connection with her and with the project from drama tour to drama tour so we're at the beginning of that being a partnership whether it will be a collaboration between the institutions I don't know and will it be a collaboration between myself and Ruth and Brian probably yes and so as I embark on that adventure I'm curious how you whether you make a differentiation between those two things and when and how because Avery starts as a partner well it can start as either but one might become the other and sometimes having that conversation too late I assume is not so great I'd love to hear you speak to that moment or those moments I mean I think a lot of that actually comes back to drama tours in the respective institutions and how they talk to each other to sort of use a metaphor often when we're approaching a collaboration or a partnership the way that I once you define the words for me as being different there are some partnerships that feel like a baton pass and some collaborations that feel like a three-legged race based on how closely I'm working with that drama tour get that other theater and so that to me is the big difference between whether it's a financial partnership or an artistic collaboration that would be my experience I agree that it's really funny there's a project that we're working on now that's kind of a two or three-year project that the ART is definitely a collaborator on and I always say when we get stuff if we own them, we have to do a little because she was the she who was the leader when I directed the course so lucky you sometimes we learn from the things that don't work out and I had a recent experience that started out as a collaboration and it evolved it was clear to some but it's really just one of a version and so we actually had that parting way the impulse to actually create a collaboration with this theater this particular piece clearly shifted for some people at some point along the way and it's related back to Megan's initial question which is you have to be really beginning about what your intentions are and if collaboration is the goal then that needs to be stated up front it's not to say that you can't evolve into a collaboration it's much easier to evolve unintentionally in that direction than in the other direction but again I think it's about just naming what your expectations are and being honest with yourself about what your expectations are I think a lot of people don't are afraid to say the thing that is the more negative interpretation because they don't want to hurt anybody's feelings but sometimes you actually have to be brave and say it out loud otherwise you'll actually end up with more misunderstandings is there something you would have done differently in that example that might have alleviated that it's really complicated so I don't know I think that given the personalities of the people now that I know what I know if I were to do it over again I think I would want there was a key collaborator the director of this project who I think was not honest with herself about what she really wanted out of the project and it was actually clear to me before it was clear to her and I would want to send it out loud to her I think actually based on the things you're saying what you really want is to do it this way which is not actually how we're working so instead of all of us going in this direction and feeling and then being unhappy because nobody got what they wanted let's just stop and pause and you go ahead and you make the piece you want to make that goes that way and then I'll go make the piece I want to make that goes that way and maybe someday they'll come together and they'll be the festival where both the pieces will be there and that's what we're doing we had gone out to make separate pieces that started from the same kernel because we were working in very different ways thanks it's great I would just also add that one thing I've learned is institutions not willing to have the conversations for whatever reason they don't have the time they don't have the resource they don't have the capacity they don't need to do it usually it sells me a lot about how we're going to how much technology is going to be around the project so I think I this is great I love listening to this but I also just think it is what it looks like a lot of times and I think I've learned that just about always is what it looks and sounds like and that's okay as long as everybody's saying and forgive the cliché if you see something say something a couple more questions I'd like to ask about the form of collaboration which is not the form of collaboration at all but this is my country I don't know whether it is here in which an established brand of company absorbs or adopts production or a French theater in order to get new blood and do it and I don't think now I don't think now in the university we get always good so first of all yes it happens here all the time you know I think from a very kind of surface level there's lots of examples that pop to mind and then on the establishment of the garage series lots of things there's one place that locally is doing things like this is ArtsEmerson who recently so here's a small guy Peter Spurdy we were able to get a meeting with ArtsEmerson which felt like a big deal and we were going to pitch them the most sexy projects I could think of because they do international work and it's the world on stage and we wanted to do some risky stuff but we didn't think we had the resources to support and after the meeting with people like David Dower and Rob Orcher who are I think I've come to learn really generous and gracious and I think the ego thing is core to who you want to be and spend it on it was more about like hey we're interested in you what do you want to do we're going to make it possible for what Rob Orcher is doing and it was the from that standpoint we were kind of absorbed into that the negative part of it we lost a lot of our identity through that production and I say that in a positive way because we learned a lot about that an institution of that size how do you keep your identity and not harm the identity of the institution being gracious enough to be there that's my value question what are these folks value but there are examples of this this is one small I was thinking about when I worked with the National and we did it but maybe it's more of a European field in a while because when I was at the National we adopted a company called Composite which is very successful and chief by job and another company that didn't have such a glorious future we we only do five or six shows a year because we don't have a very big facility but we do have a club theater that has been an incubator for many local artists in the past five years and in the past year we did begin artists in residence programs, more companies in residence and so three local companies now have their home there and but I don't know that there were yet needs to work on our main stages more than we think it's exciting that we want to support them work with them a great knowledge of the roles vibrant second stage which is very important to us because we are an institution and we've got all of this become a chance to work with all this to ensure that we're on the stage of the energy but I was at the Carter the first anecdote that started with Piasco Theater is really my example to answer some of my questions was an ensemble company well-sustaining that we brought into our own company and I think what we got out of the Carter was a really exciting and innovative way of looking at it we would never have approached that way the challenges were because they were their own company you know they did they spoke their own language they had their own rituals and merging the two cultures of these organizations to have a successful collaboration we spent a lot of time on other meals and since it has always been a normal strategy to kind of break that down and figure out how we were going to do that without having lots of conflict with a large institution a small budget on trouble it would be very easy for the power dynamic to be out of bounds I would actually say anything what ended up happening was that the success of the production was so terrific it actually Piasco the little ensemble probably eclipsed MacArthur the big institution in terms of the success of the notoriety of that particular piece to the outside world but our audience is a legend for the collaboration and wondering what is this company going to come back to do you have time for maybe one more question anyone? Yes, last one right there Scott Worstein from Sonoma State just a follow up to tomorrow what you were saying before about the ground in the church is sort of the next generation of theater actors and so forth just a little further than anyone talked just in terms of training right you were saying well in addition to drama 30 courses you know why not be taking learning about budgets and management and so forth of course there are management programs as well and usually internships, apprenticeships and to pull it to a part I'm sure there are programs that have good dovetailing between the two disciplines I'm not aware of them myself but I just be curious to hear you talk a little bit more about how the intersection might work in terms of training both in schools and also people apprenticing professionally and comments from the other two panelists as well I feel like there's been this slow unspoken progression for this notion of creative producing taking a more dominant role on the field taking someone left hand myself, there are certainly other people out there who may label it different things but it is this notion that we've inherited a model in the American theater the management director or artistic director model that is really born out of a marital relationship between two people at a particular theater that became the model for the rest of us to follow and the dysfunction or function of that marriage is not necessarily the best thing for all of the theaters around the country so I'm getting people to dispel the notion that this is the only way that they're having this two-headed monster of the way that artistic organizations should run no other artistic field except for the theaters to me I don't think that would happen we have trained ourselves to patronize people who are creative and say that they are not capable of artists and the creative people have accepted that and I feel like the shift that needs to happen is to say that you can actually use your weapon and this isn't true of everybody not everybody is meant to do this it's not a one-size-fits-all model but the idea that it is possible to have a part of your brain that understands artistic process, that understands how to tell a story how to engage with an audience how to deliver a performance but that can also understand how to look at a balance sheet you don't have to be an accountant to understand when the financial model is working and when it's not and there are lots of people you can call in to support you to help you pick that apart and begin to maybe come up with other structures or other models for how to do things so in terms of training I feel like we've created these silos you can train to be a manager or you can train to be an artist and what I would love to do is train artistic leaders so that they can really move fluidly depending on who they are in that particular skill set and then to be able to understand and identify and feel comfortable saying here are the skills I lack and therefore these are the kinds of people I'm going to surround myself with and that's going to be my leadership model and over here is going to be this other person they're going to have strengths in this area and because they can train and understand the skills that are required they will understand what they lack and then support themselves in whatever way makes sense for who they are so that instead of having a model that gets replicated we have lots of institutions understanding that you build leadership or another individual the other challenge of this besides the training is training our boards and training our boards to understand that there is more than one way to structure an organization and the problem we also get is for a whole other topic this is Mike so lost is that again unique I think in the performing arts to other fields in which it's not the proper organization to have boards of directors who are responsible for their governance in our field generally speaking the people who are responsible for the governance of these institutions have no immediate knowledge of action in the run of the institution and so what do they do they look around to see what everybody else is doing because that's what you do you do research to see what's happening in the field and then you replicate what seems to be the best practices and so we just keep repeating the problems over and over and over again because we're building models instead of institutions that are based on that people who are out and about I think in a really small way in our small corner of the world we try to do just that so how can we just change the model I think that's the bottom line so our parenthesis programs for high school age people that are artistic parenthesis programs we partner with Citizens Bank on financial management which is like they were thrilled about they had no idea they wanted that we would be just in that sort of direction it's like young people they're very talented right I may not have any sense of what this actually means in a very different way similar to the more relevant our dramaturgs sit around our staff table and are responsible not to be there I say quite librarian types they're responsible to have an opinion on everything and everything and though I wouldn't say necessarily anyone is in line specifically to be a producer I think everyone when they come in I think everyone upon leaving our staff could certainly consider themselves a producer because your job is to be holistic in your approach I think of the thing and those are the people I want to work with like I want to work with people I want to work with people who understand like you tell you to create a problem solver on the money you know so this is like my very little secret okay this is one of them when I first started professional in this field I got an internship the internship was in management in that first internship I learned how to make budgets, how to negotiate contracts how to make people's problems and then at night I was the house manager and I saw all the shows I could see and I met all the artists and I cleaned the toilets and I did everything and then when I was over a position opened up to the artistic staff and it was one of the things that went quite suddenly and I looked around and I said hey you you're not doing anything you hired this job from I was able to make the leap from the management side to the artistic side and this was in 1990 and let me tell you in 1990 you couldn't cross over from management to artistic once you were in one you were pigeonholed for life and that training I found doing those budgets negotiating those contracts the person who was mentoring maybe memorize the actual equity again I had to tell you that is some of the best training I could ever have that those skills every day come into play and so when we talked about training I wasn't kidding, budget, contract so useful, even if it's not your duties every day you need to understand all of the elements of the business and wrapping up I would actually call out Julie Dover as an example of Mary Jess an effective institutional where she would frequently say because of her husband that she spoke sound and that inevitably had an effect on exactly that kind of collaboration thank you all so much thank you to our panel thank you to all of you for your smart questions thank you have a great day thank you for having me and hey everyone so our regional center for next speaking of conversation it's great for collaboration this is your chance to think locally and a chance to meet folks in your region and your biotech to discuss strong-looking LPA you used for the past year and think about what you want to see happen in your area over the next year so just a couple of quick things it will probably be easier since we're larger groups if you've got cash that would be awesome and you're going to follow your regional to dinner so I'm going to point you out to you right now and I might be where the dinners are before we get going if you do not register when you register for the conference or dinner that's okay see me we'll make sure you can still go to dinner that's not a thank you so I'm going to start in reverse because the folks in group 6 going to martin she's starting very soon so group 6 is the rockies area which is martin martin can you get up that's where