 Good morning everyone. Welcome to the envisioning the future of theater for young audiences convening. Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you to our hosts at Young Arts for having us in this incredible building where we're surrounded by art all day and we're talking about art for the next generation. I'm just going to do a brief welcome and then we have a couple other folks doing some welcomes of some of our partners here and then we're going to jump right in and do a really exciting day of talk about the future of theater for young audiences. So one of my amandras in approaching my work at the National Endowment for the Arts comes from a poem by Mary Oliver, Instructions for Living and its pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. In my paying attention to the work happening around the country with theater and musical theater, the work of theater for young audiences consistently has come to the fore. You are inspiring and empowering our next generation of theater artist audiences and citizens and so I find it my duty to take my astonishment and indeed tell about it. The surprise I repeatedly encounter when talking about the excellence of TYA, the field with colleagues both in the theater field and in the funding community, is a continual reminder of why it's so important for us at the National Endowment for the Arts to do what we can through hosting convening such as the one today to lift up this very important field. Before we dive into the great work of today, I want to single out a couple of leaders in the field who are instrumental in making this program happen. There's a full list of our incredible steering committee who's first started this planning process. They're all on your program, but today I just want to focus our attention on two of those individuals. One is Jonathan Smith Chapman, the head of theater for young audiences USA. His fearless leadership has been incredibly inspiring to me and a reminder again continually of why this work is so important and it's been thrilling to have such a great partner in making this convening happen. And the second is and we can say this is sort of a swan song farewell to the amazing Michael Bobbitt. Thank you so much. When we first, these conversations first began with Michael and I. Michael presented with his group the Adventure Theater at the National Council on the Arts. I think it was two years ago and out of that sprained conversations going up, you know with me saying I really want to do something in this field. I don't know how or what we can do and that sprung to him making these introductions to Jonathan, to the other leaders on the steering committee in the field about a year ago and from that came this. So thank you so much Michael for your leadership. We're going to miss you in the TYA field, but we wish you well and everything amazing you're going to do and I know you're going to keep lifting up all of us together. So thank you Michael. So with that I will, before we go on to the rest of our introductions, I will just leave you with again Mary Oliver's instructions for living and participating in a convening which is my denim to it. Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. And now it's my pleasure to introduce Susan Zeder from the Children's Theater Foundation of America. Thank you. Thank you Susan. My pleasure. First of all CTFA, Children's Theater Foundation of America is thrilled to be a co-sponsor of this event. I think it is an important event and perhaps it's a historic event because we bring together at this convening the component parts of both the present and the future of theater for young audiences in this field. It is the perfect kind of petri dish to provide those elements that change artistic growth, change artistic innovation in a field that is often underestimated, understated, underfunded and misunderstood. And I believe that this is the perfect place where the alchemy of now can become a flashpoint for the future. Now some of you may or may not know about what CTFA does. We were founded in 1958 by the then leaders of the field. They were publishers, they were educators, they were administrators, a group kind of like this in many ways. We at that point there was virtually no funding available on a regular and consistent basis for serious theater artists who are doing TYA work. I believe that CTFA, and I could be wrong about this so those of you guys who are funders and you know correct me if I'm wrong, I believe we are still the only major foundation that exclusively and only funds professional theater artists engaged in TYA work. And so if I'm wrong, that's possible. Now we're a tiny foundation, we're small. We have a volunteer board of artists, educators, all practicing artists in the field within that. And we have a number of grant programs that provide small grants for innovation and for experimentation and then larger grants for programs that are coming to their completion within that. We also bestow awards and we are increasingly involved now in this kind of creative partnership which is where we can partner with an organization like TYA, USA, like the NEA, etc and provide just a bit of funding that will help with way exponentially larger audiences, etc. Now to that end CTFA has embarked on an aggressive program of advocacy and activism and we are focusing our grant programs, our awards and our partnership work on funding projects that creatively work to deal with dismantling structure and organizational racism. Now we're doing this not because it's politically correct and not because it's the flavor of the month, but we're doing this because we know at CTFA that funding social change and the arts are inextricably bound up together and where this starts is with kids and where this starts is with young audiences. The young people who are flocking to performances in theaters and community centers all over this country are probably the most racially economically diverse age and gender fluid audience you're ever going to find. They are here, they are with us now. And so I really, really ask you in order to serve them effectively with live performance we must speak to their experience and we must be willing to interrogate our own assumptions as artists and as educators about power, about privilege, and about we must pursue artistic excellence in all aspects. If we're going to serve this audience we have to speak with them not our truth, but we have to listen to their truth. Now it's really easy I think and I know a lot of you have been here all week. It's really easy to feel that TYA is somehow marginalized. We've all been in those situations where we introduce ourselves and I say I work with theater for young audiences and we watch the eyes blaze over. Now the only way the margins are going to get shifted is if we shift them. The only way is through the artistic excellence of our work and our commitment to this. Now much has been said about how TYA might actually build audiences of the future but we at CTFA are much more interested in the audience of the present of the kids that we actually have in our audiences. So I'm just going to encourage all of us who as we go through this day let's not look at TYA as a hope for the sustainability of theater as a profession. Let us look to this as a force that can serve as a beacon for our adult theater counterparts and it will serve as a beacon for a light that is fueled by courage in the face of complacency, risk in a climate of economic difficulty and peril and an insistence on artistic excellence that only comes when we invest our best artists our best our most serious our most complicated subjects. Now not later now. Now remember this we at CTFA are partners with you in this. We are here for you. I'm going to ask the members of the board that are here just to raise your hand so if you want to know a little bit more about CTFA please come talk to us and we are here for you. We can give a spark but it's up to you to light the watch fires. So thank you for having us and thank you for allowing us to participate in this. Teresa Eyring. Good morning everyone. Hi I'm Teresa Eyring executive director of TCG theater communications group and a huge lover of theater for young audiences. How many of you are here after being at the TCG conference for all right thank you. Thank you so much for that. So we just finished yesterday our 29th national conference here in Miami and we were so excited to have such an education through line. We started we had two pre-conferences. One was for education directors. We had about 40 education directors who came together. They talked about empowerment of youth voices. They talked about trauma informed care and they talked about safety of youth in our theaters. So that was a very exciting session and we hope to do more possibly next year when our conference is in Phoenix. Additionally we had a theater and higher education pre-conference so now that we're gathering as a theater for young audiences convening that makes it kind of a trifecta so we're excited. Really want to thank Greg and the National Endowment for the Arts for supporting this. This is a really great start to hopefully what will be a continuing discussion and additionally thank you to young arts and howl around. Howl around for live streaming. Susan mentioned a couple of things that I wanted to just lift up again and repeat. One is just I do think in this big beautiful arts ecology that we all are part of that theater for young audiences has been and young people in general are one of the most marginalized groups. When you think about the funding and the fact that many funders just automatically exclude programming for young audiences when you think about criticism criticism is on the decline for all arts but it's been on the decline for young people and theater for young people for quite a while and that's wrong. Arts education in schools on the decline or non-existent so I think we do have to activate and continue to activate and I know that you all already have been activated around expanding the margins as was just said but I think this is so urgent and especially now because I think the generation this next generation coming up in particular is really eager to engage to engage with live art forms to have their voices heard to express their creativity so really looking forward to today and to be able to be able to continue this discussion. I also wanted to mention a few things that TCG is doing. We have a program that's called audience revolution which is really about and it's funded by the Doris Duke charitable foundation and it's really about trying to encourage the development of new ways of engaging audiences and developing it's we call it community building and and audience engagement. The most recent round we focused in on programs that are meant to engage young and multi-generational audiences so there are several cohorts of theaters that are working together on this and when you look at the list of projects it will blow your mind I mean it's just absolutely they're innovative they are engaging communities in ways that that I just haven't seen much of before so I'm very excited about those programs. Also American theater magazine we've been we have a special column that's dedicated for theater for young multi-generational audiences and Allison Considine who's here where are you Allison is going to be covering this gathering today so thank you for that Allison. So thank you very much and I'm going to introduce Jonathan Chapman. Hi everybody welcome it's amazing to look out and see such a range from our field in the room I'm so excited about today's conversation. My name is Jonathan Chapman I'm the Executive Director of Theater for Young Audiences USA which is a national service organization like our friends at TCG but focuses specifically on supporting developing and advocating on behalf of the field of theater for young audiences and I first just want to thank Greg at the NEA for creating this space for us for being such an incredible partner over the last year and really listening and taking the time to think about how we focus on this field and amplify our voice and our impact and also our friends at TCG specifically Teresa and Kevin and Lori for being amazing partners as well this just the fact that this is happening is a landmark moment the fact that these three organizations are partnering together to have this conversation about young audiences in the field of TYA is a turning point and I'm excited to think as a group today about how we use this moment as a turning point how we think back to today hopefully in a few years and say that was the moment when things started to really shift so I want us to get into that headspace now and it's a way of welcoming you're going to hear a lot of information from the stage today hopefully to provoke conversation at those tables back there what this event is about is getting all of you to talk to each other because we actually have in the room a real nice cross section and representation of TYA field leadership from across the country regional theater mainstream theater adult theater whatever you want to call it representation from theaters across the country funders journalists and service organizations and this space those people speaking to each other doesn't happen as frequently as we'd like so let's really utilize that opportunity and use what we're presenting at the stage to provoke conversations in your groups later we'll talk a bit more about that structure in a little bit to get us started though because you're going to be hearing a lot of information in the next chunk of time I'm going to ask you to turn to the person next to you and try to find someone near you who you don't know and maybe share just one thing that you're looking forward to discussing today what are you bringing in if you've been a TCG all week and things that you're thinking about or if you're coming in fresh and providing the energy that's needed for the people who've been here since Tuesday what are you bringing into the space that you're excited to explore today just share with someone next to you I'm going to ask you to take just one more moment to wrap up your conversation all right thank you that's great energy in the room I'm going to ask you to do that one more time and we're going to share with somebody else but this time I want you to take a moment to think about for yourself an impactful moment of the of the earliest memory you have of seeing live performance so for you what was that moment the earliest you can remember that really sticks with you that brings back vivid sensory memory try to paint that picture as clear as you can and I'm going to ask you to turn to somebody and share that memory the earliest time you can remember of engaging with live performance as an audience member and take just one more moment to wrap up your conversations all right I'm going to bring you all back now I'm you know I'm just going to let you talk all day this is great thanks for coming it's already happening um great that's the headspace that we want to go into today thinking about we're going to be looking a lot today at the impact of theater for young audiences on young people today and who they're going to be in the future so it's important for us to think about that impact on ourselves and I would argue probably that most of you are in this room because of those memories that you were just sharing in some way that led you to where we are right now so my goal in then in my short presentation here before I introduce our next speakers is to just provide some framing for the day to walk you through where we're headed and to give you that arc and to offer some kind of baseline information about the theater for young audiences field given that we as a TYA community are used to being insular in these professional conversations we use a lot of shorthand and acronyms and assume our colleagues know the things that we're struggling with or the things that we talk about so while some of the information I offer might be a baseline and the building blocks to the TYA folks in the room it's important that we get that into the space so that we're all starting from the same place all right my slides are back now so okay so our goals of the day we have three goals that we're focusing on today one being to examine the current state of the TYA field across the country where are we now to explore the relationship between the TYA field and mainstream theater I'm using mainstream theater because there's no great term just to talk about theater we obviously the theater for young audiences world is you know it's specified by audience in the title of the kind of work we make the rest of you just call it you do theater but just for our purposes today and the distinctions we'll talk about it as TYA and mainstream theater what is our relationship as an ecosystem and how are we working as a continuum on a spectrum across all audiences that we serve and finally to envision ways to strengthen the impact of the TYA field in the future how do we work together and make these connections of the stakeholders who are in this room to think about the ways we push the field forward when I talk about impact I just want to clarify so Susan mentioned this a bit earlier we as a TYA community often talk about that top bucket the intrinsic impact of live performance now we advocate strongly about the fact that we serve children today and young people today and that impact is important enough to talk about without thinking about what it's going to do to future theater going or where they'll be as adults that children today need the work that we're offering but we're also going to engage today with the other buckets that we don't rarely don't often talk about as much the connection between theater for young audiences impact in terms of lifelong connection to the arts and how we work together with our colleagues in the mainstream theater in terms of that lifelong connection and kids growing up and becoming patrons at the theaters that you work at and also the other the other strand the socio-social emotional development how we impact all sectors because we work with young people who become the next generation of leaders and citizens who will shape the future and we take that as a field that responsibility very seriously so how are we going to get there if you open your agenda I'm just going to walk you through the frame of the day so our goal with the structure for today is to provide you with with a bunch of information and chunks that then you go take to table groups and discuss so the morning before lunch we're focusing on the present and after lunch we're focusing on the future so this morning you'll hear a few presentations of data from our colleagues in the field around providing some tangible research to support a lot of the things that we just intrinsically know or believe and then you'll hear a panel around the current business model of the TYA field when we polled our community about what they wanted to discuss today often we focus solely on the art and not around the structures that provide a space for that art to happen so we're going to dig deep into the business model of TYA what is the same what is different from our mainstream colleagues and how does that impact all of the other how does that ripple out in terms of the the challenges we face and the divide in our community that information will guide you to your first table discussions and the way that we've structured this we have curated tables hopefully with a mix of people at each table from different backgrounds and different organizations you will you received a label when you came in with your table groups and you have two different table groups today so you'll be engaging with a group of eight uh two different groups over the course of the day you'll have a morning group and so when we go to that space you'll find your table in the back and you'll have a table facilitator who will guide these conversations taking what we talk about from the stage here in the morning and propelling us into conversation and then in the afternoon you'll have the same after lunch we'll hear presentations from six different leaders in TYA offering visions for the future uh provocations um we could have asked many people in this room to offer that and that that's what our table discussions are for so as those six present think about what you would add where what are you excited about what are you thinking about for the future of the field and we'll use those six presentations to guide our conversations in the afternoon where we'll hopefully go from dreaming to action steps and thinking about how we move forward tangibly uh from what we talk about today make sense with me great okay so the current state of the TYA field i'm going to yeah i'm going to offer just some general information to get us started and then i'm going to turn it over to um matto masta who will provide some more detail to what i'm what i'm sharing so just thought it was important to share just the ecosystem of our industry what are we talking about when we talk about the TYA field because we all have very different definitions of what that means so obviously that one of the big buckets is the TYA professional producing theaters and that's what TYA USA primarily serves although we have presenter presenting organizations in our community universities it's wider but um we our main focus are the TYA producing theaters so venues across the country that are full time producing theaters focused on young audiences specifically in their work many of the largest theaters in the country are represented in the room their artistic leadership and executive leadership is here today TYA presenting theaters so those theaters who don't produce their own work but present work that tours in from abroad or from within the US and create curate a season that's another component of our industry represented here today small to mid-sized itinerant TYA companies this is a really growing demographic in our in our field uh we have a large number of new small ensembles that are not anchored to a specific theater space uh but create work that that moves around in partnership with large organizations or self-produced in spaces and focused on changing models around physical space being the thing that anchors them to their community TYA programming at mainstream institutions so organizations that serve multi generational audiences but prioritize having a component of TYA programming as part of what they do so our friends from the Kennedy Center and the Alliance Theater here today that those are examples of organizations that include young audiences as part of the the overall ecosystem of the what the organization presents to audiences and finally Broadway and commercial theater which we don't often include in when we talk about the TYA field but it's important to recognize that the number of kids and teens under 18 attending a Broadway show is dramatically growing this is information from the Broadway League 2017-18 report that 2.1 million from that year representing the highest total ever of young people attending a Broadway show and you see that reflected in the content that's being produced if you look now at what is on Broadway as opposed to what was on Broadway 20 years ago there's a huge shift in the amount of family shows that are represented those shows don't classify themselves as TYA and we'll get into that and what that means by putting ourselves in that classification versus putting out a show that just serves multi-generational audiences and the difference is there but for the purposes of this I just wanted to throw out that these are all of the different stakeholders who are serving young young audiences around the country and even though we don't always act as a community we are all part of a field serving young people in in some way so the conversation today the conversation that happens at the TCG conference often that we've all had in various ways that Susan references are we different why are we siloed why do we exist as a separate community obviously I'm not going to get into the long stigma that is associated with theater for young audiences even the fact that we call it Peter for young audiences and not children's theater is an indicator of our continued struggle to be seen as legitimate by our colleagues by artists by funders by journalists to see the work that we are making as professional theater alongside our colleagues just focused on young people we could argue that some of the most innovative and exciting new work being created around the country is being created for kids for an audience that has no preconceived notion of what theater is and we are getting to reinvent it for a new audience and yet we often feel as a community as seen as separate in terms of opportunities in terms of the perception of quality I think now that stigma is starting to fade away but it's still sort of in the DNA of our origin story and it's hard to sort of to shake that off but hopefully convenings like this will begin to break down those barriers and we can have conversations about how we operate as a full community and we are different and there are ways that make us distinct from our mainstream theater colleagues and I think that is always the struggle with the TYA field that we straddle both sides of that conversation we don't want to be seen as different we want to be at the table with our colleagues just as part of the theater ecosystem and also there are things that are very different about our business model about the way we program that we can't ignore that change the way we exist in the theater space so I'm just gonna offer a few of those you all will have a lot more to add to this list and I hope we discuss those and break them down at our tables later so obviously our audience the specificity of our audience makes us different we are often programming shows that break down to age groups brackets of maybe two years you know this show is for six to eight year olds we're engaging with child development to think about how we're reaching specific age groups of kids which is very different than our mainstream colleagues who put out a show and don't necessarily think some do but so don't necessarily think about the specific ages of the people they're serving first exposure to live performance so all of our venues are often exposing young people to their first ever live event which is a huge response live performance event huge responsibility those memories you all shared are because of people like who are in this room thinking about how to engage young people for the first time what that means to introduce them to the theater school versus family audiences you'll see as we share data in a little bit that our audiences are made up of public audiences so families that come to our theaters and school audiences so children who are brought with their schools to see our shows and that is a huge part of the audience we serve and and affects the kind of programming we decisions we make affects the ways we can curate a season and has a lot of impact on our our model and then ticket buyers versus primary audience it may seem obvious but the primary audience we are serving is not deciding to come to our theater usually someone else is making that decision for them i've been hearing stories more recently of you know theaters now putting out content online creating videos about their shows and young people telling their parents or their parents showing them do you want to see the show and the young person engaging in that way at least with the family audiences but largely we're serving young people who arrive at our space not having made that decision which is very different because we're engaging not only with our primary audience but thinking about the stakeholders who bring them there the teachers the parents the family members who make the decision to come to the theater sometimes who are not arts goers themselves who find the arts because they they've become parents or find themselves in our theater because they're a teacher that is at a school that supports the arts but they don't necessarily go to the theater on the weekend as an adult so that's really interesting because we're reaching an audience that we're trying to bring to the theater that may not already be a theater goer for a different population that is our primary audience it's complicated but some funding challenges so there are many that many of people in this room will will happily share but a couple of the interesting ones so audience retention our audience cycles out every 10 years if if a TYA theater is serving young people let's say 12 and under we're always in a state of of bringing new audiences in and losing audience members as they age out of our programs whereas if you are a regional mainstream theater you may hold on to an audience member for much much much longer once they're hooked on on your programming it deeply affects our model and the way that we're able to engage and the way they're able to build revenue or subscriptions or a baseline of support parents as donors so a lot of our theaters our theaters across the country rely on individual donors it is much harder in the TYA industry to rely on that individual support from the people who are directly engaging in your work so ideally with fund fundraising models you're bringing people in who are already are excited about the work you're doing and want want to give back to be able to support the organization that they love already even if a parent is excited about your organization and even if they have means often if they have a young child they're not philanthropic yet at the level that we really need to support our industry or the way that our mainstream colleagues are able to rely on that support so it makes our job in fundraising much much harder because the people we're directly serving who are our strongest advocates are not in a place to be as philanthropic as maybe our mainstream colleagues and their donor base and finally this art versus education labeling so when we apply for grants we are often playing both sides of this coin and failing on both sides so funders saying well actually your project is too focused or reading our work as education and not as art so we're so kind of excluding us from grants that are focused on art making and on the other side education grants looking at us and saying well actually what you're doing is not education you're making art and we are at this intersection where we want to talk about the high quality art that we're creating at the same level as our mainstream colleagues with the same level of professionalism and also it's having education benefits that we can explain in a different way than our mainstream colleagues around the adults they serve and yet we struggle with that relationship with the funding community and figuring out where and how to articulate our work so that it's understood in both of those buckets and finally some of these funding challenges lead to leadership development pathway issues so TCG does an incredible job of training and thinking about how to engage a new generation of leadership in the theater community it's something that I hope we can emulate with TYA USA because it's severely lacking in the TYA industry the leadership pipelines don't exist our theaters can't typically can't afford to have an associate artistic director or an associate managing director most of our theaters don't if they can afford to have a leader that leader is the person and maybe we can offer internships maybe we can think about fellowship programs but we don't as a field have real training models to bring in a new generation of leadership our university programs while folk there are many focused on TYA they're often focused on practice and art making and not focused on organizational management and because the organizational management programs are broad and the we'll get into it in a bit um because of all the funding issues we've talked about the salaries are typically larger in our mainstream theaters we lose talented people to that industry and so it's harder to cultivate people who are passionate about TYA and also have the skill sets and also want to devote their time to our space and our funding models are such that we can't create the leadership development pathways that are necessary to introduce and widen who's at the table in our industry obviously we alongside our TCG colleagues are actively confronting the challenge of who is in our leadership across the country and who's not represented and breaking down some structural issues that prevent us from reflecting the diversity that is in our audiences and all of this is related the fact that we don't necessarily have structures in place to train up another generation of leadership coming into the field as shifts happen so I raise that just because I am seeing those dynamics happening right now as positions open up as the field begins to think about how we grow and not necessarily having the programs to support the next generation of leadership which is a huge issue for us okay I'm going to share some current trends that we're seeing across the field just as a way to think about where our theaters are going in terms of programming so this is not a new one but connection to children's literature is a huge component of our industry some can call that a strength some can call it a challenge largely the vast majority of programming on our stages is based in some way on stories developed through children's literature you could argue that it's because of our audience demand whether it's schools or public but that dominates the conversation in terms of the programming on our stages and we're often in conversation about how we increase new stories that are being told in addition to working with our colleagues and finding inspiration from children's literature theater for the very young is on the rise in the united states this is a trend that's been going on for at least 20 years abroad but now in the last decade really growing in the united states so theater created specifically for zero to five-year-olds and breaking that down even further zero to two or three to five these performances tend to be much smaller more intimate more interaction between performer and audience member and our theaters are thinking about how to challenge their models of physical spaces that have 500 plus seats to think about how to serve the youngest in our community which doesn't necessarily work in that environment more and more theaters are thinking about programming all the way from infants to high school so I'm noticing some unique partnerships and commissioning ways that our theaters are working together creatively within our industry and outside of our industry to expand the canon of tya and think about models for developing new work I'll just offer a few examples here so there was a commission spearheaded by michael bobbitt of judy moody and stink and the mad mad mad treasure hunt that was developed by seven theaters across the country who partnered together to commission one play that had a rolling premiere across the country so the model itself is really interesting to think about how theaters that many theaters can come together to support a new work the world inside me which is a co-production between spellbound theater and chicago children's theater a work for the very young merging many of the stakeholders in the bucket to the ecosystem I shared so a producing theater a presenting theater and itinerant small to mid-sized company all working together together to think about how to develop new work that challenges their models so for an audience of how many a time 50 yeah max so that the work was developed through new victory lab works which is a new new work development program that you'll hear a bit about later then produced by a small company working in partnership with with a larger tya producing theater and then touring to miami theater center as part of a tour so just thinking about ways to challenge the models around how we work together and collaborate to create new work children's theater of charlotte and actors theater of charlotte joined together to commission interlocking plays by steven deed so the idea that you're creating a play that or a story a world that exists in one house with the kid characters and the adult characters experiencing something and those two plays happening in sister organizations in the same city serving adults and young people many of you who are at tcg might have heard this session that was presented about it but just a fascinating model of how mainstream theater and tya theaters can work together and then finally the kennedy center with their new education artists in residence program the first being mo willams the celebrated children's author who is working multidisciplinary across the kennedy center over the course of two years to develop all kinds of projects in different mediums so it's just a really interesting model to take someone outside of our community who's been working with the kennedy center on adapting work and thinking more expansively about how to just create experiences for young people across a venue in residence artists crossover between mainstream theater and tya so we're seeing more and more artists who are engaging more fluidly in artistic practice not seeing the theater community as a silo that i can only create for young people or i can only create for adults but starting to work more fluidly this is just a picture of an washburn and dave moly's little bunny foo foo that was at your theater of louisville and it's exciting to see artists that you don't typically associate with tya starting to think about what it would be to create for a young audience theater created specifically for neurodiverse audiences so more and more companies focused on creating experiences that take audiences with special needs and think about how to serve those needs as baked into the dramaturgy of a piece and what that means it's exciting to see that work serving populations that previously didn't feel welcome in our spaces or in the work we create and finally exploring current political issues on stage so companies that are thinking now about how to address issues like gun violence like the relationship between police and young people about gender issues about just being part of the national dialogue in a way that's really bringing young people into conversations that we as adults are having but that we need to have their voice in and thinking about how we use tya as a vehicle for that we're seeing more and more projects in the last two years that are really trying to engage with right now and what what's happening what we're all talking about and bringing that to the tya stage so that was a lot of information I'm going to ask you before we move to the next presentation just take a moment turn someone near you and share one thing that either surprised you or a question that was raised for you from everything I shared and I hope you see what I shared as a starting point there's a lot of expertise in this room that I hope we add to this information that we share today so take a moment to do that and then we'll move on all right I'm going to call you back together now thank you and we're going to get to continue these conversations as we move through the day you're now about to get even more information thrown at you okay so I shared some overview statistics and information about the field but we realized when I came into my role as executive director of tya us a two years ago that we as a tya field don't have data about our industry to support the claims that we believe about our business model about who we're serving about where we are succeeding and where we need to focus in terms of growth and our friends at tcg collect data every year on their theaters and it's a huge resource for the industry within and externally and that's something that we wanted to try to bring to the tya field so we commissioned research in partnership with Utah State University and Maddo Masta to create the first survey of theaters nationally around tya not the first ever but the most comprehensive that's happened in a long time and this research that he'll be sharing is specifically focused on that those first two buckets that we shared in the ecosystem so thinking about venues that serve young people specifically or organizations that have such a robust tya program that they would have enough data to contribute focusing on the tya us a membership so he's going to provide some of that information for you now we're really excited to be able to have some of this baseline information to figure out how we communicate some of the things about our industry that we know to be true but now we have some responses directly from the field to support it so thank you jonathan all right um thank you all for being here and before I start I want to say thank you to tya us a tcg the nea and us you all who contributed to this project so thank you all for your support um some of you have seen some of this information before if you were at the tya us a conference a few weeks ago but some of it is new and there's a greater emphasis on finance in this in the uh work today and uh when possible i draw comparisons between tcg theaters through the information available in theater facts and the information that we were able to gather from our theaters um two things one i'm going to share some pretty complicated slides at time you don't need to write them all down uh we will be publishing a piece in tya today and then after that there will be an even more comprehensive technical report that i'll share with tya us a uh so the the data is out there so uh it will take a little bit of time but we will get all of the information out to everyone uh i'm going to be sharing with you like 10 to 15 percent of the data that we have uh today the next thing is that uh there are descriptive and inferential statistics and i'm not going to get into that beyond saying these are descriptive meaning the information i show you is true about the theaters who took the survey so if i say 74 percent of the tya theaters serve ice cream at their opening nights that does not mean uh 74 percent of tya theaters all over the world do that uh this is not based on a random sample uh and some other statistical things that we need we would need for that but it is a diverse uh group of theaters and i think that a lot of what we see here will be useful so i really like this i really do i only use it once but so uh where did the questions come from for this survey uh the earliest survey i can find was conducted back in 1968 um and some of the questions were posed in or were posed on another survey that Courtney Blackwell conducted in 2007 uh both of these came from various uh constituents most of them came from them reaching out to their personal networks as opposed to using a more systematic uh method that we did uh this time around uh almost all of the data i'm going to share comes directly from the survey um but sometimes uh folks weren't able to answer some of the questions so uh jonathan and i and his staff dug through irs records to to get your information uh when when it was not provided um so uh we also looked at other publicly available uh in addition to the questions posed on earlier surveys the tya usa board of directors shared a wide variety of topics that they were interested in and jonathan and i worked to get that down to a more reasonable number um so who took this survey um the theaters that participated uh were tya usa affiliated theaters meaning either the theater was a member an organizational member of tya usa or with some of the smaller companies the leadership of that company were individual members of tya usa uh and we also defined the scope of this to be theaters that prevent public work uh a full season of work for the public as opposed to youth theaters that are primarily more focused on education and development of uh artistic skills with young people so that included a total of 61 theaters and 97 percent of them actually participated in the survey to some degree the average organizational survey response rate is 40 percent in the country so that's really quite impressive and thank you to everybody who took the time to take that survey uh down in the bottom there you'll see a little thing this is n equals 59 100 percent not everybody answered every question and so in order to be as transparent as possible that right there will show you how many people or how many theaters responded to each particular question some of the times it's all of them other times it's lower and that way and and that's sort of a gauge on how accurate is this information uh when we all right so uh just some background thank you uh demographics on the theaters they came from they came from chairs uh the theaters we surveyed came from 90 sorry 28 states plus the district of columbia you can see that there's sort of a gap in the less populated northwestern area um but i think it's really interesting and and note i would say there's a lot of growth potential in Connecticut pennsylvania uh some of those states it's really interesting to me that we didn't have theaters in those areas uh we asked what best describes the theater you primarily work for in terms of presenting versus producing uh the majority produced work and never presented but another third both produced and presented um two percent were only uh sorry primarily presented but sometimes produced and five percent only produced so that's the information there in terms of what should the best describes the theater's audiences we give four options and everybody said that our theater's audience is primarily dedicating to serving young audiences and their families we asked which described the actors that performed in their 2017-18 season and 42 percent the majority uh with the largest group was all adult actors a little under a third was mostly adult actors with some child or adolescent actors 19 percent a roughly even mix and only eight percent um primarily child or adolescent actors with a few adults uh in terms of turning towards finance we asked if they were a 501c3 theater almost our were but not all um we asked what year the theater was founded and this is a really cool chart i think because it's you have to once you start to think about it so 14 percent were prior to 1950 which suggests that uh there weren't a whole ton um this is tricky because obviously some theaters that were open then have now closed but if we look at 1950 to 1999 52 percent of the theaters that took our survey were founded in that 50 year gap about one a year in the 2000 to the present which were only 19 years into 34 percent of the theaters were founded in that time which means it's more than double the rate of what was being founded in 1950 to 1999 again with the caveat if you opened in 1950 enclosed in 1960 you didn't take my survey so i don't have your information um we asked if you were institutional members of any of these organizations 89 percent uh were organizational members of tya usa 42 a te 15 i pay 42 tcg and uh zero percent the league of resident theaters and for those who have seen this presentation and noticed that it was exactly the same up until then now we start to go in a new direction so uh we asked about total operating budgets for these theaters and either got that information from the survey or from the irs and um this is what things looked like so 56 percent of the theaters in our survey we were able to get that information on so 95 percent and we're comparing them to the 129 trend theaters in the 2017 theater facts so that is theaters that participated in the fiscal survey that tcg administered that year so we're looking at two different years they are looking at 2016 17 uh i am looking at 2017 18 but because we're talking about percentages and not dollar amounts uh i think it's fairly safe to assume that this is a roughly accurate portrayal and when the next theater facts comes out we will then compare the two years to each other um something that we're so a little over third of the tya theaters had budgets under half a million dollars and three percent of tcg theaters were in that case and as you can see tcg is a pretty direct line up to the majority of their theaters having budgets of three million dollars a year or greater um the majority of the tya theaters are under three million dollars um so that gives you an idea of kind of the variety of theaters that are out there um and that's also going to be important to think about later that in general tya theaters had smaller budgets than the tcg trend next i'm going to go through artistic education and business matters so we asked a number of questions of artistic directors are those that are in similar roles and this is the first complicated chart uh we asked them how important are these factors to you very important important somewhat important not important and you can see the trend going across the first thing to note is that almost in fact that all of these things that over 50 percent said they were either very or somewhat important and then as we go down the line some said they were less important the for transparency i ranked these by the means of the people who responded uh statistics you cannot make them say whatever you want but you can change them had i for example said i'm going to rank these by the percent of people who ranked it very or somewhat agree the for top few would flip around and including stories that tell them plays that tell the stories of marginalized people would actually become the first uh item on the agenda so again we will get to see a graph like this in writing so no need to we also asked our txt directors who if anyone they consulted when they were selecting their seasons theaters season um a little over three quarters said other artistic staff um two thirds school teachers and administrators and potential collaborators such as directors uh and colleagues other theaters and institution staff and then slowly declining until we get down to the bottom with the board of directors at 26 uh percent so uh what what what's not shown in this but is true is that everyone consults someone uh so all of the theaters picked some of these boxes even though none of these are at 100 percent uh we were interested in self-censorship and asked if there were any plays uh artistic directors wanted to produce but did not produce because they thought it might have a negative response from schools parents and community members and um it's not a majority but it's a strong majority minority at 44 percent saying yes we we chose not to do a play because we feared that it would not be received well by the community what played in continuing that vein going on to well what was produced uh collectively the theater served all ages zero through 18 plus and the productions fell out this way uh 22 percent of the productions that were done by theaters were tv y theater for the very young ages 0 to 4 the majority not surprisingly uh for children ages 5 to 10 tweens 11 to 13 14 percent more than i thought it would be uh teens 13 to 17 it's 6 percent and 1 percent of the companies did produce some shows primarily for adults again sorry there were 400 of the 59 theaters they produced 475 shows collectively in their main stage seasons so when you go back to look at that 475 shows that's how they were distributed we also looked at if they were adaptations musicals and world premieres uh adaptations again not a majority but a very strong minority uh about a third of the productions were musicals and 21 percent were world premieres um tempering that is the fact that some of the companies only produce world premieres uh so so that's something to keep in mind it's not that 20 percent of all the theaters did 20 world premieres it's some did many world premieres and some zero or one yes susan it was counted in both of those categories yes um capacity utilization uh the average percent of the house that was uh sold um for public performances uh the theaters in our study um sold 73 percent of their house for public performances and that compares to 62 percent of the trend theaters in tcg uh tcg's theater facts um we don't know about school performances though many regional theaters do do them i don't have any data on them so i can only tell you that for school shows the tya theaters tended to sell about 84 percent of their house young audience members serve um those of you familiar with theater facts know that they use extrapolation to project this is the total number of americans served uh by the the theater movement here in the us uh we do not have the data we need to fully do that but i can tell you that based solely on the raw numbers of the people who participated it is many millions of young people uh who were served by these companies how were they served um primarily in school performances that's also going to be very important later on so we'll come back to that uh new work development was an area that many people were interested in and we asked if theaters commissioned or produced new work and just under 70 percent said yes my theater sometimes produces new work add to that the 24 percent that say they only produce new work and 93 percent of the tya theaters are engaged in new work creation with seven percent saying no we only license existing material we asked for those companies that didn't work how many workshops they tended to hold for the shows they developed in that season uh the mean or average was three the median and for those of us that don't like math again the reminder is the median is you stack all the numbers up and you pick the number in the middle that was two in the mode or most common answer was two we also then asked how many of the new works they developed went on to be eventually mounted as full productions the mean was 2.6 uh median or two and mode the most common answer was one switching gears now to talk about education for a little bit as jonathan uh suggested I didn't mean to show you that slide yet um there is a complex relationship between tya companies and schools uh we asked about the types of education classes and programs they offered 100 percent of the people who took the survey offered creative drama courses skill bill based courses improv courses and play production courses um so all of those are at 100 percent uh dipping down oh but still over two thirds did school residencies uh that did not have to do with productions we split that out so they went and did education programs in schools that did not have to do with the shows that were on their main stage 62 offered internships or apprenticeships 58 did teacher professional development 50 to workshops and classes families and then we dropped very far down to 10 percent other education programs and only six percent offering any type of courses related to the performances on their main stage uh students served in the education programs uh the majority were served in programs directly related to productions which is tricky because i just told you that only three percent of them did that so we do have some conflicting data in the way that people respond to the things um but uh about 40 percent indicated that they served the people in programs directly related to their productions about a little over a third at their schools not related to productions and 23 at the theater not related to productions i also asked education directors what they did and i had a really fun slide last time this one's a little more boring um but this is what education directors do and you see the two red lines there everything above the first line at least two thirds of the education directors responding did it and so i'm only going to read through those which are overseeing education staff overseeing curriculum development overseeing budgets developing marketing uh education materials developing marketing materials personally teaching uh courses um and then one at least one third scheduled classes were primary contacts for schools directed to a and then less than a third but some uh carried out the responsibilities listed uh down further down the list we were interested in teaching artists and asked did you hire any teaching artists during the 2017-18 season they did um uh the teaching artists that were employed we asked a little bit more to kind of get a sense of the stability of that uh the field um 10 percent of the teaching artists were 12 month employees or regular employees of the theater uh 48 percent independent contractors brought in for a period of time 41 seasonal employees and one percent were volunteers and of the 33 theaters they answered that question they employed 1295 teaching artists jonathan mentioned before the questions of pipeline and getting people into leadership programs so we asked theaters what do you do in order to develop the next generation of tya leaders and there's a few things 85 percent of the theaters indicated that they had internship and art and or art apprenticeship programs 73 percent indicated that they hired assistant directors assistant designers assistant stage managers equity members and candidates uh and 63 percent indicated that they offered training programs for courses the line after that means those first three were things that you could pick on the survey then there was an other option and these are the things that were filled in in other had they been on the survey more people might have realized oh i'd do that and so these might have been a bit higher but because they were right in answers uh they included things like supporting professional development for their staff paying for them to attend pd events partnerships with universities uh the leaders of the company mentoring people at conferences and other ware elsewhere and having some programs for k-12 and the last category that we're going to look at today is finances and i'm going to look at expenses first uh we have a very detailed breakdown of the salary expenses from some of our theaters but i'm actually only going to look at two categories because i was able to get the information on the the majority of theaters and compare it to tcg and you'll see that 56 and 54 percent of sal of theater budgets went to salaries um tcg uh theaters responded with 56 percent to a usa very similar around 54 percent and then all the other will be broken out in the technical report that will be available next we asked about uh average ticket prices and as you can see for a single adult single ticket the price is about double for the tcg theaters uh than for the to a theaters um buying tickets is part of a subscription um interestingly it's actually for this particular tcg theaters that responded it was more expensive to buy your ticket as part of a season than to buy a single ticket and the price went down a bit for the to a theaters and then i only have data from the to a theaters on child tickets 16 dollars uh subscription tickets for children 12 37 and the very reasonable price of seven dollars and 31 cents on average for attending a school performance the next slide is going to be the only time i offer in no no i've offered opinions but i have an opinion about this next slide so we're going to compare two hypothetical theaters uh one who and based the the average tya theater and won the average tcg theater recognizing there is no such thing as an average so this is just to get a general idea so uh we're going to be looking at these two columns so for the shows i'm assuming that half of the that they sell out every single show at their 100 seat theater with 50 percent single ticket holders and 50 percent subscribers and 50 percent adults and 50 percent children so this is for one performance the money that the the to a theater would bring in the tcg theater again we don't have information on child tickets um but they would bring in a bit more uh so the gross per performance would be $1,541 for tya theaters and $3,893 for the tcg trend theaters which looks like a little bit but let's keep going um the tya theaters total gross would be 39 percent of the tcg theater so let's assume that these shows runs for six weeks eight shows a week the tya show would gross $74,000 and the tcg mainstream theater uh $187,000 which is $112,000 more than the let's then say that these theaters put those into seasons that they both offer a six show season the season gross for the tya theater is $443,000 and the season gross for the tcg theater is above a million dollars so a bit of a discrepancy there but we forgot about those school tickets and as you remember about 80 percent of the tickets sold went to school performances at that that price of 700 and sorry seven dollars and uh 13 cents have 30 seven dollars and 31 cents if a theater only produced school shows a season of six shows six weeks eight shows a week it would gross $210,000 which is under 19 percent of what income would come from a tcg theater doing the exact same quality that's really interesting to me because we we see so much wonderful tya and it's being done at a fraction of the price that regional theaters and others are doing it and you might think but tya people like kids they probably there's probably more contributed income going to these these tya theaters right because people like the arts and they like children no um they are they like it one percent more uh so the income for tcg theaters 43 contributed 44 percent uh for tya theaters but this doesn't mean they brought in the same dollar value because those are percents of the what we just talked about so uh tya does amazing work uh with few resources and that's the thought that i'm going to leave you with so thank you very much i appreciate it thank you matt um and now we have one more presentation for you before we take a break so you can process all this information um i'm really excited to welcome lindsay belur maliegel from the new victory theater the director of education of public engagement um the new victory is just finishing a five-year study they conducted with wolf brown on the intrinsic impact of live performance on young audiences i'm so delighted that we get to present some of this research here um as part of the wave of the first time this information is reaching the field it's not published yet but they have some really remarkable data talking about the impact of performance today on young people and the future so really providing detail around what we talked about earlier so lindsay um here we go so i am lindsay and i'm the director of education and public engagement we made up that title um basically it means that i am focused on everything that is to do with our family audiences our youth development programs and most importantly for today our research um that's me right over there um and when jonathan asked what uh impactful theater moment was when i was a kid around that age my dad took me to see lay miss um at the fifth avenue theater in seattle and i cried for an hour and a half and he kept trying to get me to leave the theater because he thought that i was really upset or like something had gone vastly wrong and i wouldn't leave the theater but i was just bawling and um lights came up in the bow's and he said lindsay you know are you okay and i said just so beautiful i just loved it so much um so i just want you to think of that little girl sitting and doing that and we'll come back to that sort of emotional response a little bit later as well um okay so today i've got about 25 minutes and i'm going to give you a little bit of context so you understand how this data was collected and in what context it was uh and then i'm going to talk to you a lot about the research that we did over the last five years uh and then for the first time ever i'm actually pairing that with some other research we did which we have as we've um investigated it realized has all these really um interesting synchronicities so context research then some different research here we go um so the context first the new victory for those of you who are not aware we are presenting house not a producing house so in the percentages you'll see is over all the way on the presenting side um and the main fun part about working at the new victory is that we serve multiple age groups everything from the zero to eighteen that jonathan was talking about earlier uh multiple art forms so everything from theater to opera to circus to puppetry uh and uh multiple cultures so it's really important to us that we're also bringing shows from all around the world to new york city um for the kids to see and for us our school programs are about 40 000 kids per year um our family audiences are about 60 000 so that we're big um there's a lot of kids who come to the new victory uh and then the other thing to know about the new victory is that we don't just do performances we also have uh youth development programs we have new work programs uh we have a whole bunch of engagement um and the education work that goes around to those performances um so okay we have been at the new vic keen observers just like everyone that i can make eye contact with here that works in this field um of what the impact is of theater and live performing arts on kids and families you have as well um and so we already knew a couple of things about why theater for young audiences is is impactful we knew that um it was a unique experience we knew that it was creating it was people were telling us about the memories that were being created for their family um and that it was these these experiences that kids and um parents or kids and adults could do together and have this really amazing time so we knew all of this just from sort of like living in this world seeing all those people come through but we also knew that the those experiences are made all the more impactful because they're if you surround them with a whole bunch of education and engagement work and i'm gonna got some data about that coming later um but one of the things that has been true for us is that over the course of the time that the new victory has been around we've gone more and more and more toward this idea that the art is amazing and that if we can create experiences around it for the school audiences and around it for the public audiences that we actually are they're having a more impactful experience so at this point about 70 percent of any given school audience has had a workshop um before and after and or after the show and it has of this year we've just reached that uh most shows for our families 60 percent of our family audiences are actually engaging in our lobbies or in family workshops in addition to going and being an audience member so this is a huge push that we've done over the last few years if you want to talk more about how and why we did that let me know okay so this research came about because um basically we talked a lot about why we were all in the arts a couple years ago and I would invite you in this moment to take a second and think about why do you work in the arts what do you think the impact of the arts has been on your life and I would like you if as you're thinking about that to raise your hand if your answer was it raised your social study test scores um I'm making light of it a little bit but a couple years ago we were reading a lot of I'm I love research I'm not a researcher I don't have a phd I'm not the amazing Maddo Mesta but I love it I love trying to like learn about what's going on um and I was I was reading all this research around live performing arts and kids that existed and a lot of it was working really hard to say that if you go and see a piece of live performance as a kid it might impact your test scores your attendance rates um for adults that was talking about like citizenship for a little while and these were all I don't know they were frameworks that that didn't resonate for me because I don't know anybody who works in the arts and I don't know anybody who would say the arts are important for society because as a number one reason that they would say that's because we really think it will impact people's test scores and that the best way to make sure that their test scores are higher is to take them to a show it just we started to realize that the story that the research was starting to tell about why you should bring your kids to the theater didn't match which why we thought the arts were important and when we sat down with a group of art teaching artists our numbers represented in the almost 1300 and we created this huge list of big post-it paper because I don't know how to think without using big post-it paper um and we said okay so why why why are you part of the arts what do you think it does for you what do you think it does for the kids that you work with and they were talking about these really wonderful things things like um it allows kids to learn about themselves but also learn about the world that is outside of themselves um it allows it allows them to um uh identify more with their own feelings or be able to recognize someone else's feelings it allows them to grow their imagination they were saying these things that I care a lot about but wasn't really present in any of the research that we were doing to talk about why the arts were important for kids um so that coincided with a large granting organization coming to us and saying like hey if you could do one thing for the next five years that you've never had the chance to do what would it be and so we basically pitched let's start a new program um and simultaneously let's see if we can develop tools and learn more about what the actual impact on kids is so we worked with wolf brown you guys familiar with wolf brown yeah some of you um and actually they were a great partner because a couple years before this whole thing started this this kind of crazy idea that has basically eaten the last five years of my life um they had started to work around the intrinsic impacts with adult audiences and allen brown had gone on that speaking tour and we had gone to it and we were like oh that's really cool the language that he's using is really cool it doesn't completely match up with what we think the youth development guidelines are around young people but like it was the first time that we had ever heard someone try to describe it in a way that was like oh yeah that gets close so we worked with allen brown denny pomer wolf steven holiquist and megan freel to basically take those intrinsic impact um structures for that they had done for adult theaters and use them as a jumping off point basically an inspiration point um for the work that we did so let's see here um um here is what we found i am also going to share about 10 percent of the data that we collected because we were insane it was great um the next sort of set of slides is going to be the data that's come out of this sort of um one year of tool development and then three to four years of um data collection um and it was all done in this brand new program that we called spark schools with performing arts reach kids and while i talk about it i want you to imagine that kourtney j body is up here with me because my she's the director of education at the new vic focused on schools and so the whole program that this was that we used to collect all this data was under her um sort of leadership um so pretend she's next to me uh she's in new york but there we go the program that we started it was a it was a great gift we were able to start a brand new program um to be able to use for data collection and in that program we specifically chose schools that had sort of no arts teachers no arts partners uh they were in sections of new york city that don't have high arts participation uh a pretty good guess is that most of these kids had never sat in a traditional theater in a traditional live performing arts experience so we we were we had a pretty good guess that um uh the effects that we would be able to chart were going to be attached to coming to shows at the new victory as opposed to something that they were doing with their families um the other thing is that they were seeing three shows per year and getting 15 workshops with teaching artists and then we were following them longitudinally as they grew older so we started in third grade and then we were still with them in fourth grade and then we were still with them in fifth grade so that by the time that they exited this program they would have seen nine live performing arts experiences and they would have had 45 workshops with teaching artists um we also embedded ourselves in the schools to help support the administrative staff um here is the basically the streams of data that were coming in i'm not going to spend too much time on this but it's just good to know that we had some data that was quantitative and that we have control groups for and this is the thing i think that has been sort of um uh we've been getting better at this as a field but was in some of the past things we've been really good at being like we talked to these kids who are part of this program and they told us all these amazing things that happened for them but we didn't have anyone to compare them against to say well that would have happened anyway or if you went to you know just because you're getting older that would be a set of skill sets that would grow so one of the things that was really great about this program is that we had in some of these data streams the treatment group so those are the kids taking part in our program and the choice we made for control group was the exact same school the exact same teachers principals environment everything exactly the same except they were a year older so that if you want to poke a hole in my data that's the hole and i'll tell you why i made that decision if you want at some point on another point but we really wanted the control group to be in the same school building because it we are just so aware of regardless of whether this you know the free and reduced lunch rate is the same between schools those schools those schools feel different so we wanted it to be nested inside the school we also had longitudinal data that followed specific kids over the course of time which was also pretty dope i will try to pepper in a few of these tools so that you can see some of them were tools that already existed in the research canon and other people have already said that they are effective research tools and some of them are ones that we actually used our teaching artists to create brand new research tools to try to dig at things that we were interested in which is pretty fun as well okay this is val ang and i on the last it's almost a year ago actually it was the end of may last year this is the last moment of collecting data after the five-year process one of the tools we had kids do is actually to read emotions on other people's faces we were curious about this can you please call out some emotions you see on either val or my face what do you what do you think we're feeling relief joy ecstasy yep pride does anyone see terror yeah maybe especially if you look over in my eyes a little bit over there um i think one of the things that has been um one of the most exhilarating aspects of my life over the last five years is that this this is a huge commitment that we have taken it's taken out i was in the Bronx and in east new york at like 7 30 a.m multiple times in the fall and the spring over the course of five years um and we were a little bit worried that we wouldn't find what we thought was true that we wouldn't have created the right tools that we wouldn't have asked the questions the right way or that maybe it just didn't exist um so let's start to figure it out here's one of those tools uh if you ever saw the intrinsic impact studies for the adults this is an adaptation so think of val ang and i you saw us um with tiny pencils and survey booklets and like the the kids are in the the theater and the curtain comes down and they've all taken bows and then val ang and i run down the aisles with hundreds of tiny pencils and for 150 kids and the entirety of orchestra orchestra right we're passing out pencils and surveys and they're filling out all their emotional and like um connective responses and then 10 minutes later we collect them all again and we send them on a bus so this happened uh for uh how many that happened for 5 000 kids over the course of five years um so we did it a lot um and here is an example of the kind of information we saw so these are two different shows that we both did post-show surveys for um generation nyz at the top is actually a ping chong and company um show that worked with new york city young people that had grown up in new york talking about how they um existed throughout their childhood um and then the show on the bottom is pedal punk which is this like steam punk circus really fun here is how the kids talked about the impact of those two different shows so let me let me sort of share how to look at this map think of it as a footprint an impact footprint um there are four different sort of intrinsic impacts that we were really interested in the first was personal relevance so questions like this were like how much did this show make you think of your own life of the people that you know um how much did it reflect on who you are social bridging is those questions about how much did you learn about someone whose life was different than your own how curious are you about someone whose life that is um in a different part of the world different experiences aesthetic growth that's the version you know when we all sit in theaters and we're like whoa i've never seen anything like that we're just like our heart opens and our brain explodes and you're having that experience in the seat aesthetic growth is our terminology to try to capture that experience and then motivation to action if you're really familiar with the adult um impacts you'll notice this one is is not on the adult impacts in our testing and that first year of tool testing we kept getting kids telling us i want to go do that they saw a show and they were like i want to roll on the floor like that circus artist i want to make a penguin puppet and manipulate it and we realized that one of the things that we needed to start tracking was how much this made the kids like want to engage their own imagination so the orange one is the generation nyz the ping chong show and you can see that the impact that the kids were identifying that the show had on them was way high on the personal relevance this was making them think about their own lives it was also pretty high over there on the social bridging this was making them think about people's lives who were different on their own versus pedal punk this amazing circus show is trending out toward motivation to action so it made it want to do things um we have 15 shows worth of data around this and we all as arts professionals in this room know that of course every single show has a different impact on kids and you would never expect pedal punk to have the same impact as generation nyz but i don't know about all of you sometimes it's hard for me to explain to teachers to parents to funders to our board why generation nyz is such an important show for kids to go see or why someone might want to go see pedal punk as opposed to um uh more narrative show um if you're a teacher so this kind of language has really been helpful in helping us communicate out to other stakeholders why you might want to go see this show for your kids and what impact it might have on them there's another of these maps um i just pulled this one this week i'm so excited about it i'm sure you are too um so this map i know it's the same colors but this map is actually just looking at pedal punk now so that blue is the exact same so that blue one is pedal punk um and it's the exact same shape because that's still pedal punk but this time the orange so the the orange the only difference between the blue one and the orange kids is whether they uh had a workshop with a teaching artist before going to see the show so these kids at same school came on the same bus saw the exact same performance on the same day the only difference is that the kids who answered who are represented in the blue triangle thing had teaching artists come to the room prior to coming to see the show and the kids that are the orange did not they came to the show without that experience so one of the things that this is telling us is you know we had been seeing for a long time that these pre-show workshops and this family engagement around a show was impactful we now have data to show us exactly how it is impactful and what that looks like and we have it in a lot of different ways which is also fun um and this is pretty much true only time that this one gets a little wiggly if i as i go through the different shows it gets a little wiggly down an aesthetic um growth because something happens to kids once they've seen about five shows where and i like to call it they become savvy theater goers um where they start to um it starts to be harder or that aesthetic growth one becomes more variable right so that you know if it's a show that they really loved and never seen before that's it's down and pointy but if like oh they're like oh another circus just like the one i saw last year oh well maybe that aesthetic growth comes up a little bit so that one plonks around a little bit okay um you would expect that if we bring kids to the theater and work with teaching artists that they will like theater more luckily that showed up to be completely true i know i got worried right before we got all this data i was like what if it's not true it is true um and it's actually really true which is another fun thing to note um which is so this uh d and again i'm a program person i do not have a phd in this but as far as i understand it the d um is basically number is a marker of how big the impact size is and the department of education i believe uses a 0.25 sort of like line in the sand that if you have a d number that's above that it then they say yes your program was impactful so in year one we were at twice the deal is threshold and in year two we're almost at three times so that's cool we would expect to see that but i actually want to draw your attention to a piece of information that is inside this graph that i think is what we all need to be talking about on the second graph that black line that goes precipitously downward are kids who are in the control group who never saw theater and that is the difference between about age eight and about age 10 it's great i mean it it's great that the kids who are coming to see theater like theater more good job us we're doing a good job um but i was not prepared for how stark that number would be for kids who were not seeing theater it is not as if we can now pretend that if kids don't see theater until they're 15 that it's just as good as them seeing it at age eight because it's not and if we really care about when we invite kids into the theatrical space if we want these kids to think that theater is for them that they are theatergoers that theater has a place in their life if we're not starting until age 15 we are starting in the basement and i know that in some ways this is the perfect crowd to say that to because you will firmly already know that but the data is way more stark than i thought it would be and in a minute we're actually come gonna come to a second piece of data that talks about that from a different point here's another version of another question that we love which is i can imagine what the life is like for other people and again our our kids are part of the treatment that red line is going up again our control kids declining slightly and then one of the impacts that actually was the biggest surprise so we have this we took this tool and um we wanted the set of questions at the beginning of this research tool that was talking about future theater going it was like a whole bunch of questions that were asking kids you know do you think you'll go to would you like to go to the theater with your family would you like do you think you'll go to theater as a grown-up um and we really wanted those questions um and then the the that research tool went on to ask some really big old heavy questions things like do you think you'll graduate from high school uh do you think you'll get a job do you think you'll be happy they're like they were and we didn't want to use them we were like dear Stephen Holocaust our statisticians our like statistician can we please stop that tool right there just at the audience questions and not use the rest of it and he was like no if you want to be able to compare your data to the data that's already been collected you have to use the whole tool and we were like this is a real bummer but like okay so we collected this data that we kind of didn't mean to um and that the research terminology is future orientation data um and it told us something really interesting which is it turns out that according to the research that we've done for the last three to four years that going to see live performing arts and working with teaching artists actually impacts the amount of hope that young people have for their future and as a reminder about who the kids were that were filling out these surveys these were kids who were at schools with at least 90% free and reduced lunch though most of them were up to 95 or 97 percent they're kids who are experiencing housing instability food insecurity these are not kids that are living the life that you might wish for them they're kids that are really struggling with some aspects of their life that we would like to have them change in the future and it turns out that along all of these sets of questions kids who are getting to go see live performing arts and work with artists are actually more optimistic about what their future will be like than kids who are not i didn't expect this it's not what we built our programs for it's not what we built the workshops for it's not what we curate shows for we have some data that's qualitative that was able to follow individual kids over time in much more deep ways and we think what's going on is that as you raise kids ability to think about lives that are other than their own and simultaneously raise their ability to practice their own imaginative skill sets you raise their ability to be able to say what if what if this choice was different what if my life looked different and that that changes their own hopefulness for their future now this is one piece of data that in second and third year it kind of flattens a little bit and that partly for me is because i'm i'm aware i didn't help build a program toward that outcome and it's a big question for the new vic education department about what if we start to take this particular outcome as something that we intend to do and what how would that change our okay the last little bit of this i'm going to give you i'm going to switch gears you know how susan said today we're not going to talk about kids as a predictor future future audience but only because i actually think it's really it's an interesting comparison i clearly have spent five years of my life caring about why the arts for kids as kids but then my colleague loren who's right over there did all this research about like as uh adult audiences what were your theater going habits as a kid and it turns out there's like all this information that actually dovetails really amazingly with what i was learning when i was in terms of impact so let's jump into it caveats about this so loren worked with er m which is a market research different than wolf brown which is like research research um and this data all comes from new york city respondents so if you have this kind of data from other cities we would love to hear about it because i think it would be really interesting to do this more nationally um a couple of sort of uh fun uh fun statistics so about 70 percent of all theater goers who go as adults win as a kid right um 51 percent who do not go to theater now did not go as a kid uh another way to think about that particular statistic is all of my control kids those that black line that went down like those kids did not go as kids they are also most likely not going as adults um and if you're about twice as likely um if you attend pretty frequently now as a grown-up you are about twice as likely to attend pretty frequently as a kid so if you attended as a habit when you were a kid you are much more likely to attend as a habit when you were a grown-up but then two pieces of information that um i love so other regular theater attendees as adults um you were twice as likely if you were a regular theater attendee to have seen theater by the time you were in pre-k and um for adults who attend theater regularly about 80 percent of them had seen a show by the time they were 10 so this piece of information is the other side of that graph that i showed you which is if we do not start bringing kids to theater before the age of 10 we are starting from the basement and i'm not sure we have ever been quite as clear about that as the data that we now have currently indicates i've always thought like yeah we should totally bring young kids i have young kids they love the theater i didn't quite realize how much of an impact it would make on whether they were ever going to attend the theater and whether they felt like theater as an art form was meant for them at all so the recap we know that theater affects kids across a variety of impacts and it changes based on what shows you bring them to we know that it definitely changes whether they think theater is for them and it changes how they view their own world and the possibilities for their own future we also know it increases the likelihood that will continue going to theater as adults especially if they start before the age of 10 so as we go forward today this is my question this data that we collected over these five years has shown me all sorts of interesting things and we're getting down into like the minutiae of it for all sorts of things but one of the things that has left me with that i did not think before is that starting before the age of 10 is much more important than i had originally anticipated and i think that as an ecosystem that brings up some really interesting questions for all of us the responsibility that jonathan talked about about bringing young people to the theater i know i take it seriously i know so many of people in this room that this is their life work and i think that today it's a really good opportunity i'm so excited and thankful to be here to make some grand plans for what that can look like in the future especially knowing some of the things we know now my last caveat is uh we're not published yet so we're going through a peer review process apparently this takes a long time um so the way um if you are interested in getting the reports once they're finally published the way that we're collecting that now is we're basically collecting all anyone's email address if you would like to be um emailed that report once it finally goes out you can come to this email uh this website put in your email address and we'll keep you updated um but it might be a good six months or more that's it thank you lindsay and the new victory theater for um creating a study that impacts all of our work and that we can all use and also for racing to be able to present it here before it's even published i don't know about you but my head is really full we're running a couple minutes behind we're going to take a 10 minute break now come back at 11 40 for our next panel um and i encourage you to continue the conversation meet people you don't know and we'll see you in a few minutes yeah all right everybody we're going to get started in about two minutes two more minutes just find your way back to your seats hi friends let's gather back please let's gather back if i can have my panel come up to join us let's gather back if i can have the guests on the next panel come join us while they're joining us my name is michael bobbitt i'm the current artistic director at adventure theater for the next month and a half i am racked with grief and additionally emotional from hearing lindsay's report uh and so grateful because uh the reason why i do this is because some theater like the new victory came to my poor black elementary school when i was in first and second grade and gave me a theater experience and i became hooked and it saved my life literally saved my life so as i move on to what i call adult children's theater uh that's the new name that's the new name jonathan not mainstream adult children's theater uh just know that i will be a huge advocate huge advocate for um for incorporating tya into the full spectrum of the theater community in boston so i am i am with you i'm with you uh also uh you know um i i think this is the most important room in theater in this country today tomorrow will be the tonys but today it is this i think it's a monumental and a historic event um and we've heard lots of information that i think will inform some of the conversations we're gonna have later um i do want to point out two different reports that i read recently um there was an article from broadway league that said that there were eight shows last summer on broadway that were for children and families making a third of the income on broadway um also tcg in american theater magazine posted a um result of a survey that said there was a decline a little bit more than one percent of a decline in ticket sales to adult children's theater um and a 12 more than 12 increase in theater going to um children and family shows so even with that success we have strained business models we have underfunding we have stigmas we are marginalized uh and so this panel today will we'll talk about all those things so i will invite you guys to announce yourself in your organizations awesome hi my name is marita the settles and i am the director of development at theater works usa in new york my name is meghan babo schreuer and i'm the associate managing director at imagination stage just outside dc my name is kevin malgasini i'm the managing director at seattle children's theater and i'm steve martin the managing director at child's play on our panel we have uh i think most of our panelists have had experiences not in children's theater prior to being in children's theater so we thought they would be able to offer opinions that will support um the structures that we are the difficulties of the structures that we're facing um i want to um uh make sure we have time for questions so i'm going to jump right in uh we're going to ask steve to lead this first question um the question is the tya business model is built off of the same model as the region of non-profit theater company is that business model the right model for tya why or why not um i just want to preface a little bit i've been in um non-profit professional theater for about nearly 40 years um half of that time i worked in lord theaters um and half the time i've worked for child's play uh which is great spending 20 years with the company um a little bit of history really quickly um and i learned this i you know i didn't study theater business um at all i kind of fell into it um so i learned a lot of this from from peter zeisler and peter donnelly and edith love and vicki knowland and a lot of people that i was lucky enough to uh work with and um the regional theater business was really started by or funded and encouraged by the fort foundation um and and an organization called fed out um the foundation for the extension and development of professional theater and um and there was a model that was set up uh in in fed up and it was that there would be an artistic director a managing director and a board of directors and and that each of the of the of the professional leadership would report independently to the board of directors creating this kind of tension um and the tension was intended to um encourage um out of the box and innovative artistic programming um as well as responsible um financial management and administration of the organization you know i've been really lucky that i have um been in uh arranged marriages um uh as a managing director uh for most of my career and and i feel like those relationships have been um successful uh but i've seen dysfunctional relationships as well much to the detriment of organizations um where now uh do those kinds of relationships work well with um uh theater for young audiences it's hard for me to know because i believe that through my my experience is particularly at child's play the relationship has i think worked successfully um for us in creating great new work um in making sure that we can make payroll um and and that we're having a significant impact on our field and on our community so i i feel like it's been successful now let's look at to a companies how many of you work for a company that was founded by a junior league yeah so you know this was like you know this was a phenomena that during the 20s and 30s that junior leagues volunteers got together and created theater for young audiences um theater for kids and then those companies evolved over time uh and and in fact and in fact took up the mantle of of being um of organized like regional theater companies but they were really volunteer run organizations um and were really embedded in their community um so uh when we think about the history of how we were organized and what we do and why we do it's very uh uh different uh with with those companies i think that the alliance theater companies chris you can tell me their children's theater company started in the 20s or something uh and and is likely headed toward it's 100 it's 100th anniversary uh just kind of stunning so um so that's a little bit of history you know does it work i guess for some of us it does you know but i think that for some of us it doesn't that's why we need executive artistic directors um executive managing directors um uh so i'm just gonna pass this down and see how other people feel about this yeah you feel free to offer some some well i'll say um i was talking to our artistic director uh janet about this particular question i'm new to tya i've been with imagination stage for about six months but before that i was at the shakespeare theater company in dc as a fundraiser which is obviously a huge behemoth mainstream theater um and i so i'm new and there's a lot that i don't know about tya history um and she was telling me a bit about how tya is so important the model that exists um because we're so ingrained in our communities and that allows us to be really responsive to the needs of our communities in terms of what we program on stage and what we offer in our education programs and she was telling me a bit about how you know in europe the the model is very uh similar to like a dance company where you uh rehearse in the new tour and you're not rooted anywhere um and that has a lot of financial advantages but for your community it really misses out on on that being deeply rooted um to your community and so you know we're sort of grappling with imagination stage coming up with maybe some sort of hybrid model where we can do both um to to make sure that we can continue to serve our direct community but reach new audiences too you know and so some of the ideas that we're thinking about to explode the existing model are you know maybe there is a space for devised children's theater somewhere off-site you know um maybe that's something we need to look at maybe we need to look at more international collaborations so that we already do a lot of international collaborations but maybe we need to do more of that and that allows us to tap into funding overseas where they do support the arts quite a bit more than um we're able to in this country so um i agree i think that the model does work for some of us um to varying degrees the way that you know honestly the regional theater model works for regional theaters to varying degrees a lot of them are not in great financial shape either um and so you know so this is an opportunity in our history for us to think about ways that we can adapt and reflect on the existing model i would just add um as uh representative here from ThetaWorks USA who is a touring it does not have um so it's where it's very much opposite um so we we actually are looking for ways to be more deeply rooted in the communities that we serve and um you know some of the things that we're thinking about writer is um how can we approach the teaching artist model and and being in communities that really um you know we pride ourselves on being able to go to communities that really don't have any access to theater at all so we pop up there and bring a theater um you know whether or not you have a a base you know if not moving into a theater space we can come to you and bring the stage and do it for you um and so thinking of ways that we can engage that community around the art is something that yeah thank you so given the um the strains on the business model that you know as we heard in matt's um slides that the cost of of producing and administering tya is the same as adult theater right but uh we bring in less than half almost a third of the ticket price um that that adult theaters bring in our patron-based ages out when they're 10 right um and funders often give us as my friend nina mihan the bay areas children's theater says give us child-sized gifts right um so given that what are um some of the unique differences and challenges in organizational management um that the tya field can learn from this different in mainstream regional theater world and mega is going to help us with that yeah um i mean it really does i think come down to our audiences and the fact that they're aging out um we all know that acquisition of patrons and donors cost a fortune and it also takes so much so much of your resources in terms of your staff time and the success rate is limited and whereas a regional theater or mainstream theater expects their patrons to walk in the door and stay with them for 40 years if they stored that person right we've got 10 years that's it and they're going to age out and so that process is something that we have to work on all the time and that's a huge management challenge for our marketing team for our fundraising team um and it's something that we have to think about all the time with everything we do is we're creating our budgets and what's on stage um so that i think really is is the primary management challenge difference i think there are there are other things that are smaller that come from that too i know that um you know we're a small theater we're five and a half million uh there's another small theater in town that's a mainstream theater they don't have an hr department we do have an hr department we think that that's important if we're a theater dealing with children it's important that we have somebody that really knows the rules around that that's a liability issue but it's also our responsibility to the children walk through our doors um so that's a big difference i think that another way that we have to think about that also our budgets are small and you know we've talked a little bit about professional development and bringing people up through most of the people that work in our organization many of them are earlier career you know and so not only do they not have the the skills that are really important for that acquisition that has to happen all the time when they learn them then they leave and they go someplace else and then we have to train somebody else in three years to do the exact same thing so so those are those are definitely challenges that i think are very unique to us that really all stem from the fact that we're reaching children primarily i also think we are dealing with a more um a more diverse tent when we're talking about this than necessarily the lord theaters i mean saying you're small at 5.5 i know there's when we look at the budget size of tya theaters the diversity there is just extreme so everything from who works with which unions to budget sizes to really different work groups than many of our lord theaters have from teaching artists um that create a big chunk of the theater so i think um trying to talk about all of us as if we are um as if everything is the same is really challenging as well so when you look at applicable skills going from one company to another company when you look at um the way in which we are managing work groups being the same from one to another it's just uh the variety within our field within this tent that we've created of tya theater um creates a specific challenge to executive leadership i think i will add that um what's interesting to me is is uh when we look at our budget and we're talking to planners and consultants um it's a surprise to them to see that not more than 15 not more than one revenue source makes up 15 percent of our total revenue package so we have our academy programs we've got professional development programs for teachers we've got residency programs after school programs um even our donor pool um is is very very diverse that way um when we talk about earned revenue and ticket sales it's ticket sales to families ticket sales to schools um so everything is and we have to pay attention so if you're talking about one is one revenue source is no more than 15 percent we have a lot of programs that we are having to pay attention to um to make sure that we're reaching all of those various um different revenue goals as well um uh so it's a it's a very uh interesting dynamic um and yet exhausting um uh uh program to be able to manage i feel like it's been said um but i you know so snap so i support all of the things that you've already mentioned um i agree that there's really it's very nimble you know the how we operate in the capacity is very nimble and um from the artists that we're working with to the administrative staff that we're working with is primarily um you know emerging and primarily you know new and so the capacity to um re teach and you know it's it's a you know the trend is a short lived amount of time in the spaces that we're in and so um yeah it's it's a difficult model to survive in one of the things you learn about when you're doing working on subscription models is that it takes um 50 bucks to acquire a new subscriber and 50 cent stamp to renew a subscriber um so if you imagine in the tya world if our subscribers age out when they're 10 the amount of people we're trying to convert to become subscribers is very expensive it's very expensive and if um lindsay's report is right if we don't get them by the time they're 10 it makes it harder for adult audiences to have patrons right so where should the investment be should it be in the younger audiences i think so i think so right um so a question next question we have is what are the ways we see tya field leading the overall industry i'm just going to point out uh well beyond the creativity that we see like the puppetry and the movement that's now being used in all kinds of theater everywhere um we also in many ways um have solved the diversity problems because we're doing so much ticket free and reduced tickets to um schools that can't afford it our audiences if you come during the week it is probably mostly people of color um i know that's the case at adventure theater um the other thing i would say is on max slide of the 475 plays produced in tya last year 100 were new works 100 playwrights got money from us so that's a huge thing that's happening in the tya for the number of commissions that are happening in this market is is unbelievable do you guys have any other examples sure i do um tya is seem to be mostly led by women which is pretty awesome i know that at our organization our founders women are founding artistic director is a woman almost everyone on our senior leadership team is a woman our board is more than 50 percent female um that's pretty awesome so and that is certainly not the case at many mainstream theaters uh and so i absolutely think we're leading the way there we're making it a place where women really want to be engaged so i will say that we're just in our own and our community we're we're we're leading the way in equity diversity and inclusion training um in arts organizations no one is doing what we're doing i have to kind of credit tcg and tricia and the focus it's made a huge difference um for us being here and knowing and understanding the importance of that and that you know i don't know that other service organizations have that really intense focus it's it's made a big difference for us and when we talk to the symphony or the opera people they have no they have no clue what we're talking about they have no idea you know we spent nine hours in training with our staff anti oppression anti racist training you know so that you know so we're we're we're adventurous we we take the leap you know we're it's really cool yeah i think there's an added responsibility because teachers are bringing a whole classroom full of children and the importance of them seeing themselves reflected on the stage there's an added responsibility for tya theaters to be more reflective of the community at large because those young people aren't opting in themselves somebody is opting in for them versus mainstream adult child theater whatever you want to call it uh the ticket purchaser is the one that's actually opting into that so they are actually less diverse audiences often um the responsibility is greater for tya theaters and by and large they're stepping up it's one of the reasons so much new work is being developed so that we are telling stories that are representative of the young people in the audience and i would just add that in addition to right creating the stories and the audience being so diverse that also creating the environment in which those um individuals who come are comfortable and want to continue to engage with the art form because so often right if we um as mainstream or adult uh theater i also call it big kid theater um if you know they're having to go in and do the work of um making the new audience that they're trying to attract to come to the space feel comfortable and want to return um tya is do has been doing that like you know like that that's a real um we have we're ahead of the curve in that in that regard and that that's something that um a big kid theater can um take away from the ways in which we operate we we really do um find ways to make everyone feel comfortable in the space and that's and reflected on stage yes there's a lot of work happening in the accessibility of of theater um for differently abled people and differently learning people so just to point out that the sensory friendly and autism performances was founded at a tya theater and now it's crossing over into the dance world and the music world and so that's another way we have been leading the field um kevin uh what do you think the tya industry can learn from regional theater and vice versa and then the second part is how can we partner um i've been thinking about this question a lot today in terms of our strengths and our challenges and everything that we have talked about as a challenge for tya theater is also obviously our strength as in life the nimbleness you're talking about the um the variety of different theaters that all fall under the tya umbrella and i think that's a lot of what the lort theater or regional theater system can learn from tya theaters is that nimbleness that willingness to continue exploring continue um uh challenging their preconceptions about what it means to be producing work i think the other thing that is so key is the specificity of audience that um tya theater unlike regional theater thinks about audience at every step of the way we center that young person's experience um throughout the process and you will never hear a tya theater practitioner say i created the art i'm not going to explain it um you know we are and you will hear that from a regional theater professional um in tya theater yes we are awarded for a reward for creativity but we are also rewarded for clarity um and i think those are huge gifts as you think about opening the door and inviting more people into the art form um this is not an exclusionary art form that you have to have an mfa in order to be able to show up in the audience and enjoy it is intentionally something that we want to um make clear and accessible for the broadest audience possible and i think that is something the regional theater movement could definitely learn from tya theater i want to add that um the it's amazing that when you look at the what the playwrights are being produced this year it's karen zacarias and and jose cruz gonzalez um karen has been writing plays at the kennedy center and and for tya companies for a gazillion years um jose cruz gonzalez has been child's play's playwright in residents for more than 20 years um and so we're really happy to see that they're being discovered by big people theaters um as well and and and i also want to say partnerships are really important because we know we're artists we know we're creating art um we don't pretend that we're experts in doing anything else when we do a play about um of the impact of um suicide on a family we know we have to partner with the mental health association of arizona to make sure that we're telling the real story we're telling the truth about what's going on in families today um regarding that you know so we're we're we're really good at at finding those partnerships and putting the information together and getting it out there and being responsible to our communities i'll just piggyback on that to say telling the truth and also providing the wraparound resources because education is so centered as part of most of our missions um and the fact that we work so extensively going into classrooms and and um doing workshops and whatnot the the partnerships are there but then the follow-up resources and the connections beyond just the play are there and that's something that i think the regional theater field could learn a lot from tya theater as well um we also talk to them that if you do a family friendly play you sell four tickets instead of two right which is a huge revenue generator for those theaters um you know an interesting story uh a few years ago uh in dc um and janet and david and kim will remember this but the washington post decided unilaterally and arbitrarily to stop reviewing they said children's theaters productions but they really meant children's theater um or children a tya theaters because they still reviewed children's shows at adult theaters and they still review the touring shows that were coming in like the grinch and the lion king and in matilda um and when we met with them we gave them the numbers like the number of artists were hiring the size of our budget uh and the the size of the audiences and they were gobsmacked they had no idea that our numbers were as big as the other regional theater numbers in the city um and so one of the ways i think we can we can partner is that uh and this is again my my charge to adult theaters and now that i i'm in this position i can do this is to make sure that we're taking care of those people who are on the front line uh making audiences and making um artists um our last question is for meredith um in what ways do you think the relationship between philanthropy the philanthrop philanthropic world and tya world can be strengthened well you just i mean we just have to make tickets accessible to everyone under ten and fund us for that now that's that's it drop the mic that is it um you know i have again uh my primary experiences um in fundraising as in big kid theater uh so this is my first um opportunity to fundraise in um theater for young audiences and the difference that i see right is is that um we are given the children's menu of and i'm like well i know that no actually no i know that there's other things that you can we can eat from you know we want to see the full menu of opportunities um and also um i hear a lot of it's prescribed um kind of in terms of how in funding our artists who create work for um our stages and that uh because it's you know adaptive or you know we're licensing work from children's you know stories that we are prescribing the work to the artist and so it's not really about artist-centered work and i'm like well how's that the case so um i i just i think that um you know in ways that funders could support um is to one you know have better conversations with us about um the full scope of the work that we're doing and that um we are indeed um beyond the um beyond creating um a pipeline beyond creating a pipeline that the work that we're doing is comparable and um you know just as you know important and fundable as the theater for the big kids yeah i mean i absolutely agree um and coming from a fundraising background i have that similar perspective uh but thank you so much for your research i think that uh it will really prove anecdotally what we all know and feel um but any conversation that funders foundations government agencies individuals are having about audience building that doesn't include tya is missing a huge piece um and i agree we need to think about the people who are in our audiences today but if we want theater in the us to continue the way it's been continuing obviously we need to be making an investment in uh making sure that kids have access to really high quality theater before they're 10 preferably by preschool um and so that for me is the biggest way that we can work together we can be a little bit more honest about about what we need um and about our financial situations always but really the bottom line comes down to uh supporting tya investing in tya is investing in the future of theater in the united states tya theater is marginalized it has been for a long time and like any marginalized community we need strong allies with power to stand next to us and say that tya theater is important and legitimate we know dollar for dollar it is a better investment than investing in big kids theater um we need the nea and tcg and big funders to stand with us whether that means committing an entire year to focus really on tya theater whether it means a funder highlighting you know when you're doing new audience programs really investing in tya theaters like it is a community that is constantly fighting this notion that um that it is auxiliary uh when really it is so fundamentally centered and important and we need strong powerful financially affluent audiences and allies to stand next to us um and like any marginalized uh field would i also a couple of things one is that you know when our work is being um assessed um and uh through a grant application or a work sample it's so important to have people from our field sitting at that table um assessing that work um when you know we ask people who don't have a clue about what theater for young audiences is to make decisions about funding theater for young audiences it's kind of crazy um because they don't they don't know and so you know we would ask funders to to uh encourage people in our field to be a part of that decision making process first um second you know our our donors age out as quickly as our um our attendees do um you know when a parent is finished when their kid is done they move on to their own kind of charity and or um arts organization to support and so we depend a lot on institutional and and governmental support it's really important and you know when we talk about um tax policy why aren't we encouraging and incentivizing corporations through tax policy to make donations and support our communities and we don't do that and so you know and we talk about you know cutting taxes for corporations well let's cut taxes for corporations that invest in their communities you know i think that that's a way for us to increase that institutional and corporate pool that makes it better for us because that's where we're going to get most of our money these days um they brought up a thought um that in the race equity world there's a term called radical universalism so basically all policies exist on a bell curve right to take care of most of the people but on the ends of that bell curve people are being screwed for lack of a better term right um and so what and but what often happens is that um the people that are being screwed the most marginalized people continue to be screwed so so policies don't work if they exist on a bell curve so radical universalism flips that and says that policies need to exist like this and so the people that are getting screwed the most are being taken care of the most and those that have the ability to get it another way are taken care of least by policies so what they're talking about is that funders need to look at all the policies they have in in how they make decisions about who gets funded and make sure they're taking care of the people that are being marginalized the most so and again in the race equity world there's money going to organizations white organizations that are doing diversity work but money's being taken taken away from organizations that do that work already that are that are people of color led or or serve those communities so I charge you to look at radical universalism as you're looking at your policies for your funding um and that's sort of what what Kevin and Steve were sort of talking about um I also because you maybe think of this is that um also in right thinking of funding and and working with the theaters or those those communities that um like partnering with those communities in in the spaces in which you are so that um there's uh you're showing the need in various ways in terms of racial um cultural ethnicity all of those different um other things that we all are that we come together in terms of um you know partnered in terms of funding opportunities so we're sharing showing the community impact and the work that we're doing within those communities through these those on the margin so we're we within our field are on the margin but then we're also serving those on the margin so how can we come together to um create and uplift and increase funding increase better policies for those communities my last idea is maybe the adult regional theaters can sponsor children shows at children's theaters why not it's a pipeline it's a pipeline I mean I hear all the time we have trouble getting those 25 euros into our theater well because we haven't been supported from the ground up so anyway uh I would love to open this up to we have 10 minutes I would like to open this up to yes I yell at them to stop it it doesn't work did you guys hear that on the side okay do you need to repeat the question how are we sort of dealing with sort of adult theaters moving into the children's theater world those theaters that are producing elf and ani and sound of music and matilda that is the same audience that we've been serving that we are serving first I want to say the more the merrier that's not necessarily true it's easy to say that in Seattle where our regional theaters aren't actually producing for young audiences for the most part some are but not all of them but not most of them I think the other thing is it's actually pushed us to to skew even younger than we have in the past so to really like specificity of audience becomes even even more specific so rather than doing multi-generational work which is a wonderful thing to do but at the same time is not actually centering the experience of the young person where every element of it is actually focused on that experience we're focusing more and more on you know three to eight years old and really centering the experience of the young person at that stage in their life um I don't know that that's the right answer um but that's what we're doing right now I agree the more the merrier please you know keep offering you know the more opportunities to bring families in the more opportunity we have to get to them as well so I'm a I'm a big fan of more hold on I would say what we're doing is partnering with them um and doing um co-productions and uh around around the work that's what we've been doing to say well sharing the cost here we all are yeah so the more the merrier but also then partnering in the work okay I have a question for the panel as someone who has been in this business longer than a lot of people in this room have been alive and has seen the growth of this profession go from colored jumpsuits and cubes playing to schools I think one of the most exciting things is to see the rise of the business model to see now multi-million dollar theaters to see theater for young audiences playing with the same size budgets on the scale of all the big guys now here's my question about the other side of the curve do you feel with this growth that we have seen in size in scale and in scope that theater for young audiences has become more conservative and more risk averse because of the commercial bottom line that exists I mean I know as a playwright who has written a great deal that is not adaptation I could say quite frankly I don't think I would have the career that I have had had I've been starting now so what do you think about really original work for young audiences and work that is riskier commercially I mean I'll say that at our organization it's about finding a balance we do commissions but there are only so many we can do they're more expensive and in terms of risky work you know we also have to balance the budget with these limited resources and so that does have to be taken into consideration to be to be smart financial managers to ensure the longevity of our theater so I do think you know just in creating our budget this past year we did have to make some difficult decisions about the degree of artistic risk we were able to financially take 100 percent I mean the reality of size like at some point you're bigger and you there is more risk there's more to lose there's further to fall it's one of the things I love about the diversity within the TYA field is there are still really small theaters producing really great work and when there aren't 80 people depending on you to make their mortgage payments it's much easier to take bigger risks so I do think one of the things that's going to help the field stay vital is the fact that there is more diversity in budget sizes and more opportunities kind of throughout the range and I think that's a really important element of the field what's interesting I think about our field is that we our audience is trust us I think more than than you know adult companies because you know they're making parents are making an investment in what we bring to them and so if they come to a work that they don't they don't know the title and they have a great time they're they're going to trust us the next time as well so you know we'd love sure we'd love to have five of our six plays being you know risk based titles and that you know the holiday show is what pays for the rest of I would love it but that's not the reality that we're in but we still like to hear new voices and negrif is an example for us you know and in fact her show is going out on national tour next year and you know it's not a well-known playwright but we're really excited about it and it those those are the things that we have to play more upon I would say our audience trusts us I don't know that the decision makers are always as trusting as our audience is the audience is like I mean how great to have an audience that doesn't have preconceived notions about what theater is or about what story is they will go on any journey with you you take them on it has been I'm a year into my position and it has been surprising how conservative the decision makers are in a lot of instances and young people in this country are ready and willing to step up to the plate and have important conversations to recognize an individual's intersectionality to dive into the world around them in ways that educators and parents I think are still very scared of and that has been an interesting thing to wrestle with we can be much more adventurous we do a summer season where young people are on stage we can be so much more adventurous in those titles because the young people are like yes sign me up I want to do that thing then our main stage titles where adults are making the decisions and I think that that's a good point and speaks to the the concern that some of us have when you know the adult theaters the mainstream theaters are doing something like elf because the primary consumers the person who's getting the emails for escape from poligro island verse elf are more likely to pick elf because they know what that is when the child would be more than happy to attend both almost certainly happier to be at escape from poligro island which is made for for people experiencing what they're experiencing at this point in their lives and so that's the concern you know that yes the more the merrier but also we need to make the table bigger than rather than taking from us and yeah um I was just saying that the worst and the best part about my job is picking the season there's so much pressure there's so many masters to answer and also kids are just smarter I mean they you know this this generation of kids will be the smartest human ever to exist on this planet um and when I was a kid back in the late 1900s um I learning learning was so slow we had to learn the Dewey Decimal System and all that stuff and so but they are learning so fast and I think that when when our friends at Disney went to New York in the 90s the the quality of of theater and children's theater went up and the expectation of the audiences went up too so in our small regional theater towns we have to produce something that looks like what they're used to seeing and so it's just more expensive and so picking the season is really really hard really hard um I we we use we call it mission moments that I get one or two mission moments a year and the others have to balance out that mission moment so two minutes one more question to go back to this idea about about risk taking it costs money you know we all agree to that and and in this corner cash is clay we had to raise an additional I don't know $40,000 we didn't reach our goal in in having to raise that additional money but that show the response are our intrinsic impact survey responses were that we that show impacted our audiences more than anything and I guarantee you that audience will come back more more times than the person who came to see ELF we didn't do ELF but you know if that was the case they will come back more and they will trust us more because of that so so you know the whole idea that we have to do blockbusters those people aren't they're not they're not making an investment in us the people that come to see cash is clay are making an investment and they're going to come back and they're going to be loyal audience members to us that's the kind of risks that we need to be taking I would also venture oh thank you I would also venture to say um right in the with the fundraising cap on that they also will remember that and while there is the lifespan of a donor in the immediate it's cyclical so you know when you go back to someone and they're like oh yeah I remember I thought cash is clay when I was there and they're bringing and you know so they're gonna that that sticks with them as well and so yes I mean I think managing expectations around it it's balance it's that's ultimately what it is so Daniel pink says that we are at the dawn of the creative age that we've gotten through the technological age and the information age and now all the world's problems will be solved via creativity and I think what's so important about this room is that you're all creatives and some of the questions we're going to have during our lunch are going to be about how do we really creatively incorporate TYA into the fabric of American theater and so I think Jonathan's going to come up and tell us about that but let's thank our panelists thank you guys so much for being here thank you Michael and all of our panelists so it may feel we're very full of information right now it may feel like that was the meal but I want you to envision that those were the ingredients that's your table the morning was our table of ingredients and what you're going to do now at your tables is make the meal okay so in just a moment you're going to find your first table group which is on your label your am table group that's where you're going to be for the next until two o'clock so you have an hour and a half there we're going to get lunch now grab lunch and then start conversation every table has a table facilitator who's got the same guiding questions that will all be following for the morning and for this morning part of the conversation as best you can try to focus on the present all the things that we looked at this morning we're where we are as a field right now because where we'll be in the afternoon is focusing on the future so focus these conversations as much as you can to dig deep on where we are as a community right now a note about lunch if you were somebody who needed a special dietary need for your lunch if you indicated that your lunch actually has your name on it so find your box lunch with your name if not you can just choose from the lunches that are there yeah yeah yes i yes the question was how do we best uh scribe and document what's happening at the tables to report back i'm gonna ask that every table elect to scribe you can rotate who is the scribe you can take handwritten notes which you can give to alivia from tya usa where's alivia there she is she will type up your notes or you can type your notes and email them to info at tyausa.org and we will be collecting everything not sure if greg mentioned it earlier but the NEA will be publishing a report based on today with all the information presented as well as information that's captured at tables so please document your conversations try as we get table facilitators i'm looking at you as we get closer to the 130 mark i'm trying to call the information and distill the conversations down so we have some tangible points that can report back and then we'll come back at two for our vision presentations on focusing on the future enjoy your lunch bathrooms around the corner and start conversations as soon as you're ready