 gyda'n fywodog o'i wneud cyfyried o'r ffordd arwyr. Mae dewb arwyr poli Carl, y fyrdd cycanol cymdeithasol ymw lustur. Yr ysgolion o'r ysgolion o'r ysgolion o'r Fyredu Ymweyr, yn Llywodraeth Gwylliannau, yn ymwylltyn Vorsiwyd i ddifigedd i'r dysgu'r fffordd. Yn Ymclyw yno, Llywodraeth Poli wedi eu blynyddiad yw Emerson College i sicrhau'r ddaf y Cymru, yw'r ysgolion sy'n teimlo, a dywed ymwyno, rydyn ni'n unrhyw gweithio y cyfnod i'r ysgrifennu i ddweud i ddeithasol. Y dywed y panel yw'r cyfnod yma, ond yn ei wneud i ddiweddol ar y internet ar y TV newplay, y project at HowlRound.com, ac mae'r cyfnod i ddweud y cwysig sy'n ddweud i ddweud yn y twitter. Mwy'r ddweud i ddweud y cwysig yw i'r ddweud, dyfodd ddweud i ddweud y cwysig i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud y cwysig, A gennym ymddangos, mae'n ddweud sy'n gweithio gyda'n gweld y convosion roi gynghwyl â'r pwysig, Facebook, o'r logi am gyntaf y theatra sy'n dwi'n wahanol. A mae'n hyn, mae'n fawr! Mae'n cychwyn i fòi. Fyddwn i'n gweithio'n ardullan oeddio llyfrig posibl yna. Rwy'n gweithio'r quesffyn fel ymdwys i chi'n gweithio. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio, iddo i ddim i elwedd gan Sasha, iddo i ddim i elwedd. Felly, rydw i'n Sasha, Anna Walt. yng Nghymru, yn ymwneud deziaelwyr yng Nghymru, a'r ysgol i'r dyfodol o Gwyllwyr 28.com. Hwych yn ymwneud, Dybrysdain. Mae'n cyflau'r ysgol am y dyfodol ac mae'n gyfrifio'r ysgol i'r ymddangos Cymru yn Ymddangos Cymru, ac mae'n gyfrifio'r ysgol i'r Ymddangos Cymru hynny. Yr ysgol i'r Ymddangos Cymru, mae'n cyfrifio'r ysgol i'r ymddangos Cymru, mae'n cyfrifio ymddangos Cymru. I perform the method gun here two years ago. Hi, my name is Ilana Brownstein. I'm the director of New Work at Company One in Boston and also the founding dramaturg at Playwrights Commons, which is a playwright development organization. I'm Will Assistant. I'm American Theatre Magazine and I'm a freelance journalist at New York. I'm Bill Hirshman. I'm the editor, founder and chief critic for Florida Theatre on Stage. I'm also on the executive committee of the American Theatre Critics Association as well as the chairman of its new plays committee. I'm Gordon Cox. I'm a reporter and editor at Variety. Great panel. I've been asked to do the impossible, which is to moderate seven panellists who are super articulate in essentially now under an hour to talk about the future of theatre criticism. This actually cannot be done. We are going to try a format that I've used for those of you who I always have asked to moderate panels never to sit on them and I've tried this before and it's worked pretty well. So what we're going to do is, I'm a big sports fan. It's out of ESPN. If you watch part neat eruption or around the horn, we are going to do a kind of around the horn. I want everyone's intelligence to be a part of the conversation. I'm going to be giving people a lot of time to respond to the questions and I'm actually going to time them with my stop watch. The landlord in Boston calls me and tells me I can have the apartment. They've been really good sports about this. It can kind of cramp the style, but I think it'll get the conversation going. So our goal is to do a little bit of the past of criticism very briefly, the present and the future. I'm going to try to leave a solid 15 minutes for questions from both this audience and the new play TV audience. Before diving into the future, let's talk a little bit about the current state of theatre criticism. Chloe Beltman on a haul around yesterday was a theatre critic in San Francisco. Wrote a lovely little blog post and she says the thing is that criticism, when practiced diligently, is a much higher calling than commentary. Anyone can comment on something, but to construct and engaging deeply felt educational and entertaining response to a work of art is an art form in itself. And unless I spend the necessary time digesting the work, reading around it, and thinking about it before putting my thoughts into the public domain, then it's not criticism, it's merely commentary. And so I guess my first question to you all is to think about in this world where everybody is commenting on everything, where does criticism fit and does it still matter in that context? And if, Bill, you're ready to roll I think. And so this is going to be a 90 second response. Sorry, I know it's so brutal. All right, take it away Bill. Do I have 140 characters here? The short version, if there is such a thing, and which I've just used up another 10 seconds, is that criticism continues to be vital because, for the exact reason you mentioned, there is a difference between commentary and criticism. My website was created as professional, vetted, edited arts journalism as opposed to the very many wonderful sites out there that have a dialogue between simply patrons. My goal is to give out truth as objectively as subjective people can do it. And my sense is that I've been trained, I've spent a lot of time learning how to do what I do, and I bring something to it that simply somebody who happens to be twittering at this exact moment may or may not bring you the party. Great, that was only a minute. I feel like criticism has to matter in that if commentary is kind of the first step toward creating or thinking critically about something, then if a piece of theatre really grabs you, then I feel like criticism is the first place you turn to if you want to learn and think more about it. It's also the thing that can inspire further curiosity, or encourage you to look at things from different perspectives, or encourage deeper thought, etc. It is not only the place that people first think of when they discover a passion for theatre and they want to learn more about it, but it's also the thing that can stoke the fires of that passion. So I feel like if theatre is in fact going to door, then criticism does matter, and it is important to that, and now the challenge of finding a space for it. Divya, I wanted to expand a little bit on what Bill said about criticism and commentary, and also what Chloe wrote. I was in the arts journalism program at Syracuse University. I graduated last year, so I'm really young. My advisor always told us that she doesn't want us to be reviewers. She wants us to be critics, and the difference is a reviewer can just say whether or not he or she would like this piece of work. Whereas a critic has a knowledge to contextualize a piece of work, the social, political repercussions of that piece of work, and also how it stands up next to the playwright's other works. And I feel like that's a good way of recording this as a federal piece of theatre that may never be seen again, or it will be remounted for another 10, 20 years, and so it's a good way of keeping record. Great. Thank you. You guys are really good at this. I'm so impressed. It's not easy to do it. Sasha, why don't you jump in that? I had to deceive my time for the future rather than the past, but since we're in the past, one of the interesting things I think is, you know, this generation of critics like Eric Bentley and Robert Brustine and Harold Glurman and that kind of generation of critic, really we are in this transitional stage of passing things down, and it's kind of a broken period, and in that broken period partly because of the internet, I think, and having to do sort of speed dating things like this, when your mind works really fast, you tend to say and see what you expect to tend to see and to say. And so developing critical thought is really hard to do right now. What I've noticed with students is that students tend to dance back, dance, and paint back painting, and do theatre back to theatre. That criticism as we know it may be changing, and that in this world of the internet where suddenly you have diminishing numbers of critics in the traditional sense, you have a bigger wider megaphone and a bigger space, that maybe what we're looking at is something legally different and to become open to this expression. On the other hand, I think the word is really important and that the critic is there to understand and interpret and extend the conversation of the word. Theatre is about word, and criticism is about metaphor. It's good for 90 seconds. The way that most of us tend to interact with criticism most often is in the consumer report style should I go see this kind of way. While I am very interested in the more academic after I've seen something going and filling in what I know and becoming more informed thing, I think that the state of that consumer report is something that I've been really obsessed with and trying to look at how those are written and how we as patrons of the arts use them. And thinking about this difference between commentary and criticism, and thinking of criticism as people brought this up as something that contextualizes. But contextualizes is not something you've already seen, but contextualizes something you've never encountered before in a way that will make you hopefully want to go see it. And I think that that's the tremendous responsibility that critics working today have, especially when responding to new work, that I really think it's a critic's responsibility, whether it's thumbs up, thumbs down, how they like it or not, to also, I feel like we all have responsibility to engage on something on the level of what is this artist trying to accomplish and what is the community of work in which this artist is working. And that I think that there's a tendency, at least in the critics that I've encountered in the communities in which I've mostly produced work, to if they don't like that community of work to dismiss it and not take it into account at all. And I always think of that as being someone who was an art critic at the time of abstract expressionism, just really wishing someone would paint a flower and not taking into account that all of this other stuff was part of a huge body of work, both of artists and of viewers, people going to see the work and participating with it in that way. I think if a critic doesn't acknowledge that, even if they don't like something, they're falling down on the job. Good criticism connects our work as theatre makers to a larger conversation and it educates our audience. And we need criticism, not just commentary, because theatre matters, and criticism is what explains how theatre matters, how and why theatre matters. And good criticism makes this case by discussing how successfully or unsuccessfully theatre engages with the world around it. I think criticism is very different by locality, where it's based. And in Austin, Texas, we look for critics that can help our audiences understand how the rude mechs shows are in conversation with contemporary performance happening elsewhere. So that's one of the ways in which we can benefit from really good, honest criticism and not just commentary. And I think also a critic is both, criticism implies focus and commitment. A critic comes back again and again to the theatre and focuses mostly on theatre, whereas commentary, they may see a play one time and not see again a play for a whole another year. And as a collaborative theatre artist, we demand commitment and focus from our collaborators and we expect the same from critics. I'm glad I went after you guys, because this thing about collaborating with a critic I think is really important. I'll just share an anecdote earlier this week. My company in Boston opened a new play by a young writer, and it's a workshop production. And a little bit late in the game we found out that the playwright didn't really want reviewers to come, which is fine. It meant we had to scramble a little bit to figure out how we were going to communicate with our press who had already been invited. And we ended up finding a really good solution, which was I ended up writing a letter to our press contacts, really trying to explain what this production was. What do we mean when we say workshop production or developmental premiere rather than world premiere? Where did this play sit in context of its process so far? And what was happening right after our production, it's actually in another production already, another workshop production, and then after that, the playwright will end up bringing it together wherever the quote-unquote final version is before it gets changed. And you know, I had this really great moment where the reviewer came and he ended up calling our idea like three or four times on Monday before the review came out to double check to make sure he understood what we were talking about when we were saying workshop production and what we meant when we were asking our audiences to sort of receive the play as a piece in process. And when the review came out, I cried, and I never cried at reviews. I never cried at reviews. And I didn't cry because it was good. I actually cried because I felt like we were understood and I felt like there had been a moment of collaboration with the critic who also was, he's new to theatre criticism and I think he had an effort to try and meet us halfway. And that was one of those moments I thought, yes, this is what criticism is for because we ended up getting really good feedback that I can use with the playwright. Thank you. You can see, I only like this format because everybody gets to talk and I appreciate everybody getting so many great comments. Just thinking about that commentary criticism thing, we may talk about this at the end, but when the whole Mike Daisy thing happened, the need to respond without thinking, if you didn't have a response in 24 hours as a person who writes in a world of journalism, you had missed the boat. And I don't know how people formulate thoughts that quickly I find that interesting, it's interesting that pressure. And it leads me to this next question and again this is kind of the last question about whatever the past is, but in that conversation that Eric Bentley and Stanley Kaufman and Bob Bruce Dean did a few years back called the critic as thinker, Eric Bentley said that the role of the Broadway critic was to do a consumer guide and that it was a very particular role as a Broadway critic. You had to tell people who were coming into town whether they should spend their, at that time it was $100, I think it's closer to $300 now on that Broadway ticket and I've been in Chicago the last few years and we have the star system, four stars, and if Chris Jones reviews it with four stars, it will sell the show up to guarantee and then in San Francisco they have that horrible person's dance. And so I just wonder, what is the role of the consumer guide for the critic and is that how criticism now is making itself relevant and maybe we start, Sasha you want to jump in on that one first? This is only a 60 second response. Anyway a critic, a critic is not an advertiser, it's not somebody, it's not a person who is there, when people behave in the thumbs down kind of way you tend to begin to know much more about what that so-called critic or reviewer, I would call that person a reviewer, is thinking and who that person is rather than what the characters are thinking and I just think it's just reductive and you know it exists but it is not a substitute. I mean we all know that. I think what's interesting is to begin to start to think about, I brought this book here and I really highly recommend you all get it, it's called Counting New Beans The Intrinsic Impact and the Value of Art a production of Clayton Ward wrote a fabulous beginning to this and I'd like to think that the critic can move between the marketing and the artistic staffs inside of organizations and that there is a place there kind of between but not so simplistic is that? I think the consumer report question implies that there's a consumer and that we're all angry about who that is and I find that more and more to not be true and I feel like the best reviews that I've gotten are not necessarily the most positive reviews but the ones that were able to translate the work for audiences who might not necessarily be already interested in either the work that my company was doing or the specific theatre that it was being produced in that we're in a way in the theatre of very tribal and that I think some of the most exciting consumer report style reviewing or criticism is able to collaborate both with the artists and with their audiences and that that means that there's some kind of agreement about what we're all doing, what the critic slash reviewer is doing, what the artists are up to and who their intended hoped for audience is and I find myself wanting more and more conversation about that and not knowing how to have a conversation about who is our audience already, who's going to come to your work anyway because they know they already want to and who are those people out there who don't necessarily know about it because our circles don't intersect enough and I find that reviewing and criticism are forms where that overlap can happen and that translation act that a critic can perform is really exciting when it really works. I think that if we're looking for a consumer guide that commentary suffices as a good consumer guide and I think as things progress I think that we'll see probably a rotten tomatoes of the theatre, an aggregate that can gather these things and give us a simple thumbs up and thumbs down but I think that criticism can do so much more than that and does so much more than just give us a thumbs up or thumbs down I have to admit that as a self-producing theatre company we do look for great pull quotes to slap on a poster I mean that is something we want but I think you can get an awesome pull quote from really good criticism and hopefully a deeper and more meaningful pull quote but speaking to this idea of criticism working with critics as collaborators I think it's hugely important in Austin where we've had a community of critics that have been around since the inception of our company in 96 and so they have a really good context for our work and can bring a real depth to their criticism and so when we do a musical which we've never done before they can put that in context and help make sense of that to our audience and the other thing in Austin they do such a good job of nurturing new work and understanding that some people getting together in a room and just experimenting and not judging that but really have been really able to foster what Austin is which is a community of people making new work I don't want to jump the gun into the next question which I know is coming but I have found for me I have found that I discover better criticism on blogs and more reviewing in print media that's just where I'm looking and even in something like The New York Times where we're talking about these Broadway consumer reports I almost never read that anymore I almost always go straight to the arts beatlog where there's more thoughtful commentary there's more context and I teach dramatic literature and dramaturgy and theatre writing at Boston University and one of the things I try and do is train my kids from the time they're freshmen until they graduate to write in the form of a critical response whenever they're talking about a play whether it's in print or in production that immediately identifies where they are meeting the piece what is their own context what baggage do they bring what are their expectations and if they can learn to say that first we can understand what their response is and how to contextualize that and to me that's where a lot of the best criticism on the blogs comes in because I feel like there's a deep bench of sort of a record in those blogs about people sort of questioning their own stance in relationship to the work they're seeing and I prefer getting my criticism that way but I also think our audiences don't necessarily do that go ahead, yes, Gordon I sort of think the consumer reports angle on criticism is the thing that makes theatre criticism relevant to the people who own newspapers right now I think that's the only thing that keeps them around as little as they are at this point but I also feel like that is also the thing that is being replaced by social networking and there's a lot of Broadway research that says that critics don't sell as many tickets as they used to and the thinking is that it's because audiences are finding out what to buy from their friends on Facebook or they're following Twitter feeds so if that's the role that is slowly being supplanted by the social networking then I feel like we have to try and find a space for criticism doing all the things that we talked about but I'm not convinced that it can be you're going to have a hard time convincing the people on newspapers that it's valuable enough to keep a staff on and have the space for and that stuff so I think that's the challenge moving forward I think the answer is all will be above I think there is a need for consumer consumer reporting in the sense that one of the first things when I'm going to New York is I want to know what should I see and I don't mean and I want to know what other people thought and I want to know what other people thought that I think has some kind of insight and taste that doesn't have to agree with me but I'm not looking for what the 14 year old fanboy thinks I'm sorry that's fine and I think there's a place for that but I think that the future of theatre criticism or the state even with what I think criticism should be today has five or six elements to it of which one and maybe at this point the most minor one is the yay or nay and I think again I agree with context telling people what it is they're going to go see I'll try to do this in 15 seconds but I have a famous story where one of the finest things I ever saw in regional theatre was a production of Floyd Collins at a mainstream musical house and the people who came didn't know what to expect they thought they were coming to see Oklahoma and they got Gorgie and Bess they walked out in droves and it was one of the finest things I've seen in 50 some odd years of theatre going and it was because they didn't know what to expect and one of the things that I believe criticism should do in addition to did I have a good time did it do what the creative people wanted it to do whether I liked it or not but whether it did what they wanted to do is to help the consumer know what it is they're going to go see so that they're what's the phrase managing expectations I think you have a heck of a lot less walk out even for people who aren't looking forward to that particular type of work particularly for seasoned subscribers they may not like that particular kind of work but if they know what they're coming to see and I'm going to get part of what a critic should do Being the last person it means that everyone just said what you're going to do but I just wanted to expand on the consumer guide because it assumes that the readers already know what's going on in a theatrical landscape but what if they don't and that's a role of the critic is to either bring in your readers or to help towners figure out what they should go see and also for me I don't see social media as supplanting that because it also assumes that you have people that you know who know a lot about theatre which for me personally I didn't grow up with theatre and I just happened to be reading a lot of newspaper reviews and I realized oh wait I should go see that because it sounds pretty good and so it's a way to bring in new audiences it's a way to retain old ones it's also a way of managing dialogue and racism can have many facets it's just you need now it just needs to figure out how to make money off of going forward and on that note we'll solve that and actually though I think that raises a really interesting question it's kind of where we're headed now which is to the current state of affairs which I think as Sasha points out in a really interesting way we're in a kind of broken we don't know what we're quite doing and it's all changing and where is that going to leave us and it's that question I think it's a big question of amateur professionals you know if everybody can chime in what does that mean for the professional critic and then what does that mean for the artists who are in trying to engage a community it used to be obvious who the people were that you were engaging and now that's so much less obvious you know Willie Manlow did a thing recently they did this Twitter experiment and the plan I'm just reading from the article about it but the plan was a call for applicants to join a tweet up and so it was just random audience people joining a tweet up out of which we would pick three participants the experimental nature of this undertaking led us to limit the number of participants our three participants were invited to attend our first rehearsal a civilisation all you can eat a technical rehearsal and then the final dress participants were invited to tweet their thoughts and reactions to these events using the show's hashtag Willie Sue it was kind of a interesting disaster for them which they wrote about partly because they forgot to tell the playwright that we were going to do it but I think that it really speaks to this question of audience coming in and being the people that talk about the show versus critics coming in for an advanced preview and being the people that talk about the show so in this world where social networking and criticism are kind of all messed up and audience community commentary and blogging is replacing the idea of the review and in Willie's situation artists and institutions are now able to create their own buzz about the work I mean actually that even the debacle of it created kind of enormous amount of buzz around the show how does the professional critic enter into that particular realm of reality because now we're getting kind of a meet and we're going to give you a whole two minutes to respond to this one so Deborah you want to jump in on that one well that's a you know I have to go first but this isn't my contrary which is that I I love, I love, love, love any opportunity to bring an audience into the process and I I think that's an extraordinarily important part of making theatre vital and relevant in the 21st century and being transparent about that and also because I think it's fun and I think that audiences love it and I love it and I love that conversation that said I feel like that is on the spectrum of audience development not on the spectrum of criticism and I think that what that does in a really wonderful way is create more insiders and this comes back to the question again about when we're talking about criticism whether it's a consumer report or whether it is a learning contextualizing criticism who is the audience or who is the consumer and are we all on the same page about that and when we start thinking about this woolly experiment in the context of criticism I think we're saying that what we want to do is create more insiders get what we do and that's the only way our work can be understood and I remain hopeful that my work can communicate both to people who know a lot about the collaborative processes in which it is written and I also hope that the work will stand on its own for audiences who are not knowledgeable about that and so I don't think that one replaces the other I think that in order to keep in order for theatre to breathe and develop in the 21st century I think we should be more transparent about our processes and we should create opportunities for audiences who are interested in participating in that way to be a part of the room rather than treating it like a live movie that only exists as the final product however, at the end of the day, there is that show that people come to you whether they're paying 10 or 20 or 150 dollars and I think that that 90 minutes or 3 hours needs to stand on its own even if you don't know how it was made I think that the tweeting and things like that is happening now I think that these give the critics even more purchase I think that the critics can use these things I don't think that they necessarily displace the work of the critic it gives them access to varied opinions and they can use these YouTube videos and blog posts and things like that that theatre companies are putting out to deepen their knowledge of the piece I don't think that there's necessarily a displacement there I think that the landscape is definitely changing Jill Dolan won the Nathan Award for criticism this year so it's the first time that a blog has won this critics award but if it's a sign of changing times I think it's a sign it's a good sign Jill Dolan's blog, Feminist Spectator is one of the best sources of criticism out there it's just brilliant and one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that it's so insightful and passionate is that she has an infinite number of words that she can work with so she often does the reviews and it's because of this new technology that she's able to do that and so I think that these things can coexist plays written by playwrights produced in conventional ways can coexist with new work devised by ensembles in the same way that criticism can live side by side with consumers and tweets by audience they coexist and they're better for it although I do mourn the loss of jobs I think we're seeing this breakdown of work and leisure in our society because of these new technologies the fact that I carry my work email around with me all the time is always accessible the fact that we're now doing the work of the cashier checking ourselves out at the grocery store just these little ways that work is entering into our leisure time and so it is a loss of jobs I think as people lose positions like the movie Critic at the Village Voice who recently left so I do more than that so I have to take issue with the idea that and I don't know that it's present up here but the internet is like some damning thing that oh no, criticism is dying because the internet is a great example of how it's not true and I also don't think that Twitter and Facebook are just for 14 year old fanboys for me, I'm on Twitter and I use it to have much larger grand scope conversations about the American theater than I ever had before I was on Twitter and the reason is because I have reach out to people who otherwise I would not be able to speak to because of the hierarchical nature of all kinds of things so like for example I'm really thankful that Peter Marks is on Twitter because he's a really interesting and thoughtful guy and he has a lot of things to say that don't get into the published critiques that are in the newspaper and I find it really valuable to me as a person who makes theater to be able to like have that conversation with Peter Marks or with any of the other people who otherwise I don't have access to whether it's artistic directors at large regional theaters or critics in other cities or critics in my own city otherwise there's not really sometimes there's not a method by which you can reach those people with like your short 140 character no stakes question one of the things that Twitter has done is that it's made it possible to have more contact and that gets back to my thinking about how I think it's more important for us to collaborate with critics then to sort of create these divides and I guess I'm just really thrilled by the advent of social media because it has given me way more access points than I ever had before and it's enriched my life as an artist and it also means that I have more access to more kinds of criticism which also makes my work better so the more I get to talk to the critics the better I think it is for everybody and that's something that I couldn't do before Twitter and Facebook because otherwise it was sending an email to the newspaper hoping that they got back to me and they didn't think I was trying to buy them off or some other things so yeah I guess that's that we're toward the end again I'm goody I used to have this almost pathological hatred of Twitter just because I'm I'm old fashioned by nature and I realized I thought it was just like everything indicative of everything that was going wrong in the culture everything was just so fast paced and you need today's news is yesterday's garbage and it won't be relevant all week from now not much less to say a month but now I realize Twitter and Facebook it's just a great way to encourage interactions both between critics and artists critics and audiences and it just opens up more ways of more ways of having dialogue because before it used to be it used to be there's an iron curtain up in terms of theatrical what was going on behind the scenes audiences are encouraged to come in tell you what they think and tell critics and journalists like us what they think about what the heck we're writing most of them are not very good but it's a mixed blessing and also now you can get information so quickly and for journalists it allows us to be right in when that news breaks because when the Mike Daisy thing broke I found out via Twitter and then 30 minutes later there was a blog post out of the blog post that was being posted and so it's just I feel like it's just indicative of this culture that's just moved faster and I keep up with it or you fall behind to get it over wow I think you're spoiling for a fight in fact it's really encouraging to hear what everyone said I'm a dinosaur I started with the doing criticism with the monks with the illuminated manuscripts but I like many of my generation have embraced technology and only a fool meaning most of the print publishers in the world only fools don't recognize how you can take professional that it edited arts journalism which includes criticism and not only put it on a cyber platform but do wonderful things that you couldn't do before as far as interactivity being in contact with the people that you're communicating with only an idiot doesn't recognize what a wonderful tool the internet has been my hobby course again being a traditional newspaper journalist and an investigative reporter or former cop reporter is that there is a difference between uninformed commentary or even informed commentary and experienced practice criticism and arts journalism we probably won't get to my daisy thing but there is a search for truth that both artists and journalists are looking for but my truth has nothing to do with trying to sell tickets, newspapers yes but tickets no and I don't care where the chips fall as long as it improves the society and the art form in an overall sense and I've got a higher I am adamant in making a differentiation between people who merely have commentary and people who are professional journalists and analysts and that also includes academics who are writing reason criticism and one last thing along those lines one of the best things about the internet is that I'm sure Gordon can tell you everybody's space has shrunk and the ability to make cogent intelligent observations and analysis has evaporated particularly in the regional publications and regions and the great thing about the internet is that I have the room not to go on forever because people on the internet don't want to read forever either but to go on and give cogent intelligent and I have space to do and as you can see I can talk hecklo I won't go into that I'm not sure I have anything particular to add to this other than I feel like we've just answered the question which was how is criticism finding space for itself it's doing it online with these blogs that don't have work counts and that aren't sort of subject to the editorial and the vegetarian names of newspaper so I think that's where it all lives now Let me just like let me let Sasha finish up here and then it's okay go ahead I take umbridge at at the vilification of 14 of fanboys because that's where that's where the conversation is heading sadly enough to say because those are the people who are really passionate about what they're writing about so much that they don't really care what they're getting paid for they just want that opinion out there and that's the great thing about blogs it allows people people who don't have a training to make an informed to put their opinions out there and it also gives and just for me any any dialogue is good no matter where it's coming from either from a journalist or a blogger and these days newspapers have both and that can only be a good thing we're getting wound up I like the umbridge is good let me firefight nothing wrong with the conversation I believe in the public arena and the discourse and the value of 14 year old fanboys telling me that Les Miserable is the finest piece of dramatic literature ever created but and I mean it I think that the overall discourse that the internet has made possible has definitely value it just isn't criticism but it has great value in for instance critics having some idea what the heck is going on in the interaction between artists and audience and I learn a great deal by not from twitter but from other places that involve social interaction so I'm not I'm not dissing social interaction I'm just making a really nasty hard and fast differentiation between that and what we do you want to jump in on this one? No give me the next one well it's impossible we're barely going to just scratch the surface I kind of want to just stop now and start talking for the next six hours I'm going to get up and dance no it's not my secret so we're going to take some audience questions I want to do one last thing before we get there because we're not going to do just topic justice in our 45 seconds of talking but why don't we at least talk for everybody in 30 to 45 seconds down the horn here around the horn who's going to win the Louisville no I'm sorry if anybody can hit that topic how do you make a living in this context so if we could just go that way Sasha could you jump in for us? so of teaching and I have these students who come to my program at USC to learn how to be arts journalists and critics and I ask this question of myself all the time what am I doing I'm taking tuition from them from a job from what one has to ask this and the thing is it really comes down to this anybody and in our program we now take art artists because people who are in the arts who love the arts what we're really talking about it's all in this book and it's a great book about impact and about memory and those experiences that you have where you want to tell someone else and I happen to believe that critics are born not made I think critics are actually sort of thoroughbreds and that not everybody is a critic they just aren't it's a way of thinking and looking and seeing and expressing yourself and living your life as a kind of animal then a reporter then a commentator then it's just different the thing that's what's coming across now in terms of the money thing it's all about experimentation and that's what engine 28 is about and engine 29 is about and that's what I'm working on with my students in my classroom we play around a lot now what I've heard here is a report from the Irvine Foundation I mean we are getting more and more and more so that the audience is increasingly engaged with the art before and you think about the Greeks and you think well okay, they used to come we sit around just like this and it was all men and we watch Euripides the Men and they would have a discussion about well should we take these refugees in or not afterwards and then they'd go out and vote and that's what art journalism is which is to create, we frame the conversation and we create the environment in which you can vote that's bringing in the audiences critics and art journalists have audiences too and we serve our audience and we're figuring out who our audience is and we, you know in that piece because you guys all want critics you want to hear of being understood and you cried that's the kind of criticism that I hope to create and help others create and it's that connection and now more than ever we just went in a sense through a dark period in which the critic had to be quote objective and held outside and now we can come in and there are a variety and everything is individual those individual critics in Austin and in Boston and in New York are different and your relationship to them is individual and it's different so it comes down it really comes down to that sort of this one by one by one thing and it's very personal thank you and Sasha had banked time she asked me about the banked time she asked me about the banked time and then she did it so so like a 30 second around the board and then questions things like future theatre criticism for God's sakes super encouraging thing about how the future of our criticism seems to be more about all of these different ways in which we are building a community between the people who are writing about what we do and the people who come see it and also those lines are blurring and I think that that's really extraordinary and really exciting and it makes it the more and more I've engaged with that in the last couple of years it's been more and more exciting to be an artist and I felt more engaged and in control of the trajectory of my own career because I do feel like the elephant in the room is that still especially in some cities there are critics who do sort of hold sway in a way that can be career making or career breaking and that that still maybe that won't be true in another generation but right now in this moment that is still true and so the challenge that I feel like I'm taking away from this is to erase all this community building and also figure out how to get that out to the people who aren't going to Jill Dolan's block who aren't seeking out that community because otherwise it's still a community of insiders and I want to broaden that reach I think that funds need to be made available I think at a national level hopefully from places like the Mellan and the NEA and I think that hopefully arts writing as artists, as theater artists we need to recognize how important arts writing and criticism is to to the field and advocate for that and I think that regionals and festivals hopefully will host conferences like the critics conference at the OMEAL center that run concurrent with a festival and can be a forum for critics to talk one another I think one of the things that unfortunately goes away when we lose newspapers is having an editor look at emerging writers criticism and having a being mentors to those people so I can imagine online forums for people to mentor other people's writing and hopefully edit and hopefully there are actually funds available for that that people can apply for to be a mentor to someone else's writing I think so I know you skipped the question about how artists generate their own buzz so I'm going to incorporate that here which is that I think about something like 2AMT online which is this amazing conglomeration of theater artists and writers and people really just talking about the issues of the theater and talking about plays and talking about lots of things and that to me it's both artists and critics together I think and stuff like that I think is where the future is headed and it's about creating dialogue right and then there's things like arts fuse in Boston or New England theater geek which also do this thing where it does provide a platform and it also provides a place where you get the context of who those people are in relationship to each other and that thing about it not being objective there's like I mean I say this to my students all the time there's no point in pretending that we can be objective about art there just isn't so we might as well just own our subjectivity and make that the material from which we write about what our thoughts are and how we are engaging that work and that to me seems to be the most exciting place where criticism is going and I'm going to break out of the democratic state and then to take some questions but you guys get to answer first how about that by the way we're going to give people no time to ask a question go ahead Bill will just go no there's a reason because I think there's something to add what I am doing is advertising supported we do not know if this is going to work but I will tell you that in 8 months of operation we have 13 ads on our website now we charge dog meat but the response from the theatrical community looking for another voice looking for an inexpensive advertising medium gives me some kind of hope that at some point this will not be simply a drain but in fact may possibly be a hint at an economic engine we don't know that but the signs are amazingly encouraging that's why I wanted to you're going to persist with democracy deep in the garden please as someone who was a journalism student Sasha I'm pointing this out to you they tell us don't be confident that you'll find a job within journalism because it's not just art journalism it cuts all across the board and so now I feel like the future is one you have to be a really good writer and you need to make your argument very cogently and you need to relate both to the audience and to the people that you're writing about and at the bridge still and two you need to have a really big online presence and you need to bring the people in because in journalism school they tell you you have to brand yourself you need people need to know oh this is a deep trend this is someone that I trust hopefully one of these days and that's how Ben Brantley that's his brand people know but when they read one of his reviews they know it's coming from somewhere that's very knowledgeable and very well written and three you need to just have enough followers that the advertising revenue will pay itself off because unless publications are charging for a viewership which hopefully is going to happen then that's how we're making money these days and you need to bring people in to read your work otherwise there is just all silence just that Gordon have the last word please I in my head the future of the kind of criticism that we're talking about exists I think is going to have to be funded by you know big foundation nonprofits foundations that have a lot of money towards supporting the arts or maybe even like a nonprofit theatre because they are the most invested and understand the usefulness of an investment of an engaged and growing and active and thoughtful audience so I just feel like that is the I feel like that's going to be the way forward at least of the options that I'm seeing right now so we have like five minutes I'm sorry I tried to control the panel but it is it's nothing but you need a microphone to ask a question the microphone is back there and if we have any I'll take one from twitter too the microphone is there a question there's a question right back there where is he, yeah he's coming I don't know I'd like the panel to comment on this recent trend of celebrity artists as critics Stephen Sondheim eviscerating Porg and Bess Kim Novak versus the artist how does that affect your work could you comment on that go ahead I think that's a different thing and I think that's not I don't know that readers for instance sort of conflate the two it's sort of another version of the social networking version of the audience the conversation is just growing and growing and everyone has their voice including Kim Novak about the soundtrack to the artist it's just another one of the voices that we can now hear in this sort of increasing coughing we would love if Stephen Sondheim would come see our plays where they're having artists that they like and admire choose a play to go see and then the critic goes see the show with this artist and then they have a conversation about it and that's what runs in the Wall Street Journal is this conversation between the critic and the artist about this third work and so I think that artists talking about other artists is awesome doing this thing at the Fusebox Festival in Austin where they have artists impersonate the so the artist goes to see another artist's work and then they have a talk back where they act like they made the piece and the audience asks them questions and they act like they made the piece and talk back about it because they did not make it go ahead as a journalist but I guess I'm primarily a director and I work on staff at off off Broadway performance venue and I guess I have always wondered why there are not more practitioners in arts journals and besides the obvious conflict of interest I actually think it would be incredibly interesting to have either an eminent former artistic director with a 40 year history and a theatre to comment on the theatre that he sees in his city or a working practitioner commenting on other theatre performances at the level that they work in one of the blogs I write for does have a mix actually writing about the scene that they're in which I think is brave and scary a little bit but gosh I think it's missing and I think it's what makes criticism for me sometimes feel rarified what does an issue would or should they have to do with or know about the process that happened maybe I can lend a little light on things from lighting design to other stuff that someone who has a straight writing background might not have ever had familiarity with and I wonder what you guys think about that and I don't mean to be dismissive of straight journalism or writing backgrounds I've always wondered why we don't have a sports type thing of like famous ex sports players sitting behind a desk famous economists comment on business why can't famous and then theatre people be allowed to comment on theatre and writing more that's your question so okay I'm not a famous theatre person but I will say that I train in criticism and dramaturgy and I often have these urges that I sort of stifle every six months or so to sort of start a place where I'm writing about the theatre I'm seeing but I don't do it because one of the reasons is that I it hurts my heart sometimes to be critical to people who I love and who and I think that that is one of I can't imagine that I'm alone in that and so I actually have a constant little war inside about that exact question and I wish that I were braver but I'm not here, you talk just a quick point of history the New Yorker has always had John Larve one of Tony Dorothy Parker wrote there S.J. Perlman, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams they all wrote for the New Yorkers there is a tradition of that it's a question of being allowed to because I think they're allowed to write as long as they're really good writers I think it's also can you remove yourself from this situation that you criticize unfairly and if you can't then then you're useless to your readers as a critic a Twitter question over there? Yeah, G. Kirshner asked what ideas do you have about reaching new audiences through criticism and how do we educate, excite, non-theatorgoers I have another one what ideas do you have about reaching new audiences through criticism and how do we educate, excite, non-theatorgoers the Alan Brown Alan Brown he talks about anticipation he talks about how the experience, the impact apparently the impact on your audiences if you're a theatre owner or playwright or any of this the more an audience is anticipating something, so the more they know beforehand and the more they're giving the opportunity to discuss it afterwards which is kind of where I think journalism does come in perhaps that that oh god, now I'm looking at you and I'm completely lost the space, the question on this but but there is an opportunity there I think with criticism and also I don't think criticism is you keep referring it to sort of as a thumbs up, thumbs down sort of thing I think it's the discussion and the conversation and that there is an opportunity here actually inside of the theatres themselves can I was just going to say simply that what most of us that are critics are trying to do as far as reaching new audiences is obviously leveraging the internet I use Facebook, the great deal and several people are using Twitter and then using that as word of mouth as the next step in the word of mouth chain to tell people that we're out here and what we're thinking I think there's actually as much as I love the social media which I've just now gone on about for an hour I also think that we have a problem which is that there are a lot of our portions of our audiences that are not using that at all and so maybe those people are actually more in touch with this consumer reports model so is there a way and I don't have an answer is there a way to harness the consumer reports model and include other parts in that so that there's an audience who can find other ways to get excited about things that don't mean they have to be on Twitter or Facebook because a lot of people aren't okay it's 11.33 and there's like 15 hands up so I think I have to we have to take it outside because there's a crew and there's a play and that kind of stuff so so I'm sorry I have more time, thank you very much