 Hello and thank you to everyone for joining us today for this conversation on achieving a resilient US theater post pandemic. I'm Barbara Fuchs here with Rhonda Sharra, my research assistant on this project, as well as our panelists, Corinna Schillenburg, director of communications and research for theater communications group, and Greg Reiner, theater and musical theater director of the performing arts division of the National Endowment for the Arts. We'd like to thank HowlRound for hosting us with special thanks to Ramona King, Vijay Matthew and Emily Ferris for all your work to make this event happen. We wanted to begin by telling you a little bit about this project, how we came to undertake this research and write this report, and then focus on a few of our key recommendations. Before I forget, and we will post this repeatedly in the chat, on our webpage, you can access our full report, which takes us from conditions leading up to the pandemic to pandemic responses to the aftermath in which we are still existing. After our presentation, we will hand things over to our panelists for their responses. And last but certainly not least, we'll open up the discussion for questions from you, our audience, which you can post to the group chat. So our report on the US is part of pandemic preparedness in the live performing arts, a comparative transnational study on the resilience of theater post COVID funded by the British Academy. Between April 2023, about January 2024, a team of researchers from the USA, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan examined the lessons learned from the responses of the live performing arts sector and governments to COVID-19 in the G7 countries. The aim of the overall study was to support sector preparedness for future crises, whether caused by new pandemics, climate related disasters, demographic changes, economic pressures, or the impacts on the live performing arts of national and international politics. Of course, the challenges and solutions in each national context are different but the transnational study offers some sense of the possibilities. So if you want to consult that study, we've posted that link to the chat. While the general study was very focused on the pandemic and its aftermath, we found as we began our work that in the US there were many other long term trends to consider and that we needed to think about those in order to present the whole picture. For the US we conducted a literature review and held subsequent interviews with stakeholders across the US with a particular focus on California and New York. Given relatively little formal research on the sector in the US, we have collected available studies from the government agencies and arts service organizations, as well as from the SMU data arts program which is directed by the invaluable Zannie Boss who has done so much good work in this area. Given logs in data collection and publication timelines, much of the research we found covers the period of 2021 and 2022 early pandemic and towards some more post shutdown but still ongoing effects period. With less information thus far on how the inner makers are faring as the pandemic recedes and the exceptional government support afforded during that period comes to an end. Support which had briefly brought the US closer to but still not on par with the government support for the arts that's enjoyed in other countries such as those that participated in the wider transnational survey we took part in. To cover the intervening time period up to today, we mostly turn to the fast and furious appearance of articles in newspapers and industry publication. Times and American theater, chronicling the closures and contractions going on across the country recently as well as the current conversations about ways to move forward. We also had to lived experience panelists Jesse Berger of Red Bull Theater in New York and genre of era of playwrights arena here in Los Angeles, as we wanted to hear directly from practitioners what their experience of this period had been all of the resulting information went into the report which you can find at the link. So before we jump in, I really want to take a moment to offer a huge thanks first to Pascal Abishare and Karen Gray who led the transnational study, as well as to our colleagues across the G seven nations for their inspiring work in in their own research. I also want to thank all the stakeholders who took time to speak with us and whose ongoing work we very much want to recognize in our report, much of what we're recommending builds and expands on existing work, which we hope to lift and visualize. And again, I want to offer thanks to how around for being exactly the kind of platform that we need to come together and consider shared solutions. What did we find? Well, we found an incredibly rich and varied landscape with relatively few spaces for sharing knowledge about it. We found a number of companies that were thinking about their place in the local ecosystem in very exciting ways, not just their relation to a community which many theaters foreground, but to an ecosystem of artists and arts organizations. We found companies like Detroit Public Theater or Cannonball in Philadelphia, sharing space and expertise, offering alternatives to the purely transactional imagining creative ways to make resources go further. We found companies striving to address the urgent calls for racial and social justice that with the murder of George Floyd were also a key part of the pandemic moment. We found art service organizations making powerful arguments for the arts and funders who had bent over backwards to address the challenges of the pandemic. We found ourselves wishing that there were more ways for the field to find out about them and learn from them through more arts journalism, more research, more thinking as a sector. We found that the pandemic was both a unique cataclysm and that it exacerbated long term challenges and trends, including crucially an erosion of the subscription system that was decades in the making and an increasing shortfall between ticket income and expenses. Although companies are trying all kinds of creative ways to address the shortfall with a quote C change as one article put it in the frequency of co productions and slider production schedules. Fewer productions is fewer productions with less work for theater makers and a reduced experience of the arts for audiences. There's widespread support in the sector also for improved working conditions, including higher salaries overall to keep up with inflation and make up for financial losses caused by the shutdowns. As well as reduce rehearsal times and fewer performances per week to increase work life balance and support a burnout workforce and a push for reliable full time employment instead of precarious gig work overall. A major milestone in this conversation about the workforce was the publication of the we see you white American theater manifesto in June 2020 by a collection of BIPOC artists who highlighted long term racial inequities in the industry and called for a new social contract for theater. Research for the report that we did clearly shows that artists from minority backgrounds had already been underrepresented underfunded for years, which only worsened in the pandemic. However, there is simultaneously recognition that these necessary changes can increase costs for companies who are already facing existentially threatening financial issues. Rising labor costs combined with higher materials costs, general inflation and lagging audience returns all present challenges for theater companies who nonetheless want to do right by their workers. To that end conversations in the industry have begun to think about significant overhauls to the financial models of nonprofit theater companies. In our study we spoke with the arts advocacy group Californians for the arts who are thinking large scale about labor and employment issues, including worker classification laws payroll systems and more things on a state level. Although it remains perhaps the most significant challenge to the sector in the history of us theater. We also found that the pandemic presented a remarkable opportunity in that lobbying worked. What do we mean by this, as the federal government began rolling out programs to address the acute economic crisis theaters grappled with the complexities of applying for support that had been imagined primarily for businesses. The performing arts alliance, the coalition of performing arts advocates worked tirelessly to ensure that nonprofits could apply for the paycheck protection program or PPP loans offered by the small business administration. Loans that would be forgiven if organizations could prove that they'd been used on payroll costs. The most important legislation to prop up the sector was the shutter then with operators grant operated by the SBA, which offered an unprecedented $16 billion while focusing on businesses rather than artists. Crucially securing the extension of this urgent legislation to the nonprofit sector and its eventual passage required leaders to come together and pursue specific lobbying. This raises for us the crucial question of whether after the decades long retreat in the aftermath of the culture wars of the 90s, theater and the arts more broadly can now once again effectively make an argument for government support in the wake of the pandemic. In short, we found that the challenges of the theater sector in the US are those of US society more generally this won't come as a surprise to anyone, individualism and a dearth of collective endeavor, precarization of workers, decreased investment in the political polarization, social isolation. We just find it ever more urgent and important for the sector to think and operate as a sector in a shared ecosystem. But this is no easy matter, given how varied that ecosystem is across an enormous national landscape. We also see an opportunity now to make the case for theater in relation to other post pandemic revitalization efforts, including movements for social and racial justice, mental health, and crucially the revitalization of urban cores. In fact, many state and local arts service organizations as Rhonda was mentioning are already making those arguments. The NEA is I'm sure Greg will expand upon is actively developing promising partnerships with other government agencies, including Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency. There have even been calls for reconceptualizing cultures infrastructure in order better to support it. One of our key questions then is how these various efforts might be aggregated and multiplied for greater effectiveness. So we're going to focus today on a small subset of our recommendations, some of the ones we consider most urgent, and those which might be most surprising to you and this is a little bit like picking your favorite child we've really put a lot of thought and research into every recommendation in the report. And again, you can consult it for the full range. And again that link is posted in the chat. So we begin with two key recommendations, which involve thinking strategically. Perhaps most urgent for companies is advocacy. It is key to build coalitions and common messaging to advocate for sustained investments from public and private resources to expand advocacy and loving efforts at all levels. Organizations of all types would do well to educate themselves about what activities are permitted to them, instead of assuming that they're not allowed to advocate for themselves. The sector's unprecedented success in securing government support to whether the pandemic showed the importance of this work. And this is the moment to embark on more energetic advocacy and lobbying at the federal, state and local level. And I'll just share anecdotically that we met with a very sympathetic state senator in California who had chaired a committee on the arts, and we're told by him that theater was not there to ask for resources the way that some other sectors are. That is a missed opportunity to capture resources that exist, but that are not being directed to theater or the arts more broadly. A key question, of course, is who has the capacity to do this advocacy work, this coalition building, and I know that we'll hear from Karuna on how some of this is already happening. But I urge us to think about how it can be more effective and how the sector can best advocate for itself, again, at the national, state and local level. And for funders, the questions raised by the report are around thinking about the theater ecosystem as a whole. Just funding individual artists and companies with changing funding priorities over time and mostly short term grants inhibits the sector's ability to plan for the longer term outside of constant crisis mode. This kind of thinking in the longer term is necessary in order to make the changes that are being called for by audiences and creative workers alike. Funders can help bring people to the table, can help develop models for public and private partnerships, help support more research into what is and is not working on a systems level, help fund service and advocacy organizations doing this work and doing some of the lobbying that Barbara mentioned, and help support arts journalism that is helping to keep everyone in the industry and communication with each other about all of these developments. Funders can also be conveners and enablers of new thinking about how arts and culture in the US can make a case for itself on the government and cultural level as well. Current conversations in the industry are looking at how the arts can become more involved in community building and various mental, physical and social wellness initiatives. Funders can support people and organizations who are innovating in these areas to allow them to develop pilot programs and models for wider sector level transformation. Thank you Rhonda. So I want to turn now to two linked recommendations, which were some of the most surprising aspects of our research. These may not be on your radar every day, but we find that they're critical for thinking about resilience there for theater makers, but also for the funders and supporters who could help enable shared solutions. So the first that I want to speak about in these two linked ones is climate resilience. We found that most of the thinking to date about how theater can help that most of the thinking to date has been about how theater can help advocate for climate action, or how companies operations might be made more sustainable. And instead, we suggest theaters must face up to the fact that the climate crisis is here and impacting their work already in this moment, we need adaptation, as well as advocacy. In the summer 2022, we found Michael Paulson, who covers the theater industry for the New York Times, was writing about the raging wildfires in California impeding the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and how climate change was impacting the beloved tradition of summer outdoor performance. By summer 2023, he was writing about how smoke from massive wildfires in Canada that forced Broadway theaters in New York City some 400 miles away to cancel performances. The saving grace was that some of those theaters had installed air filtration systems during COVID that were making it possible, barely for the show to go on, assuming patrons were willing to brave the air outside to get there. In the past year, I have personally had the experience of canceled performances due to floods in Los Angeles and in New York. Unfortunately, none of those companies could call on alternate forms of delivery to salvage the performances. So our strong recommendation is that theaters confront the fact that the climate catastrophe will lead to cancel performances and other disruptions to business as usual. Companies need to build climate resilience and decarbonization into their current organizational models and their future goals. The time to prepare is now, whether by making contingency plans or purchasing a generator. In addition, also involves recognizing what we learned from the pandemic. Digital platforms and other forms of outreach offer a crucial lifeline, one that would allow theaters to switch modes rather than entirely cancel performances. In addition to enabling performances in the event of a new health emergency, that is, streaming theater can also preserve vital access to culture and protect companies livelihoods amid the climate catastrophe. And this leads me directly into discussing those digital platforms. In 2021, increasing audience accessibility was identified as one of the key ways to reimagine the industry in a survey of theaters essential workers. Despite claims during the pandemic that the accessibility of digital theater was a crucial advance, zoom fatigue rules the day, and most theater makers emphasize their desire now to be back in a room with audiences, which we absolutely respect. Yet, so now we have very little streaming of existing productions, much less continued experimentation in the digital space. Communions have worked out limited agreements, at least for the Lord theaters, yet other obstacles remain, including worries about diluting the impact of in-person productions. Yet a commitment to streaming in quote unquote normal times, do we ever have those anymore, would help build relationships with audiences and access underserved communities while developing and maintaining a robust alternative to in-person performance for the next crisis. We see a role here for the NEA as a federal agency or for other funders to work on issues of access, whether geographic or for the disabled or other people who cannot make it to the theater. To reiterate, digital delivery systems are a key part of building resilience, not just in the face of another health emergency, but of climate catastrophe and other unknowns. So with that, I'm going to conclude our discussion of the report and just remind you once again that the link to the full text and the full list of recommendations, as well as to the broader transnational report has been posted. So moving on, I am truly beyond delighted to have with us today Karina and Greg, both of whom were incredibly generous in speaking with us as we began our research, pointing us to other people we needed to speak to, alerting us to what was going on. They represent two key nodes of the theater ecosystem, theater communications group for Karina and the NEA of course for Greg. So I'm going to start with Karina, if I may, and turn to you now so we can hear from you on where some of this work to think strategically as a sector is already happening, where advocacy might be located, and anything else that you want to share with us. Thank you Barbara and Ronda. I'm very, very grateful for the invitation today. And I'm grateful for the care that you've shown in crafting these recommendations. They very much admire the way you've met the complexity of this moment. These compounding crises, but also these opportunities. Hey everybody, I'm Karina Schiehlenberg. I use she her pronouns. I'm the director of communications and research at theater communications group. I'm joining you from the lands of the monstila not they and the canarsie and what is colonially known as forest hills Queens. And if anyone needs a visual description, I am a middle-aged white trans woman with glasses, kind of brownish strawberry blonde hair, and a sort of salmon colored shirt. Sitting in front of my daughter's art, which includes a very realistic looking donut. So I really appreciate the invitation to name where some of the work is already happening. In many cases it's been happening before the pandemic. You know, looking over the report and thinking about resiliency. I was thinking about, you know, this invitation of where to start the conversation about theater resiliency. You brought up the culture war of the, of the, you know, in the 90s. I think even like trace it back to 1965, which was around the resident theater movement was really building up steam. And that was when these academics, Obama and Bowen published their analysis of cost disease. Right. This idea that inflation would put increasing pressure on the live performing arts, since we can't take the same advantages of technology to scale. Although digital theater is one opportunity to address that. But it's not a surprise that after the pandemic and with rising inflation that this that our theater ecology would be facing these pressures very intensely. I also think back if we started the conversation in 1939. When Congress killed the federal theater project, which I think is honestly the closest analogy we have to the impact of the pandemic. You know, just have a whole ecosystem kind of blinking off overnight almost. And how that shifted our expectations on the levels of support we could expect from the federal government. Although I think we need to push back on those expectations. You know, we could honestly go back to the ships that brought over our colonial model of board governance, but I'm going to start more recently than that. And I really want to focus in on these 2 recommendations about advocacy because I do think that they are important in and of themselves. And also, in thinking about them, we can think about some of the ways we need to address the other recommendations. So for me, you know, I sort of lead with blessed are the organizers. And I mean organizer in the sort of grassroots sense the people who have that energy to get people together to make the connections to say, look at the places where we have in common. Now let's build some power together. Sometimes that occurs within organizational frameworks like TCG very often it's grassroots. As with we see white American theater. And I think, you know, blessed are the organizers because organized demands are realized demands. That is sort of my mantra from my other life, because I also do a lot of political organizing outside of TCG. And I believe that theaters and theater workers are only going to be fully resourced when we commit to advocacy as one part of building our collective power. So, electoral power is an important part of collective power. Advocacy is an important part of electoral politics. But there is so much for us beyond those things. One example at TCG is recent theater for activism charge up gathering. We have this amazing conversation. Lori Baskin our amazing director of advocacy was there she's been the unit's work for so long just want to sing her name out. And we were also joined with a campaign director from the working families party. This was really a fantastic conversation where we heard from the WFP. How they conceptualize building power and advocacy is a part of that, but not the whole part, right? Because as powerful as arts advocacy can be, it begins after representatives have already been elected. So there are other models out there. Just to give one example, the League of Independent Theater, which is a 501c6 organization has endorsed candidates in New York City based on their art platforms. I know that Americans for the arts used to have maybe still does an action fund pack, which has made donations to arts friendly candidates. And during the pandemic, our friends at the professional nonprofit theater coalition worked and continue to work with Arnold importer a lobbying firm and be an arts hero organized historic levels of freelance theater worker activism. All of these approaches are needed as we seek to build our collective power. And make sure that no candidate would ever run for office without a compelling arts platform. But we're a long way from that. You know, most of the time you don't see candidates with a strong arts platform. I think that we at TCG really want to be a part of building that collective power. I'm going to share a few ways in which we're going to be doing that in the very near term. And then I'm excited to hand it over to Greg. So one of the ways that we're doing it of course is through advocacy, which is still very important. It's still a core strength for TCG. And we are joining with our friends from the professional nonprofit theater coalition next week in Washington DC for the first ever theater week, which is intended to hopefully be a recurring event where we can get the whole sector to show up and to advocate on Capitol Hill. And that we need everybody in that effort, because we have a wide ranging set of needs. Organizations have specific needs that the federal government can meet. Individual individual freelance workers have specific needs. One of the victories that, you know, we didn't mention so far during the pandemic was the expansion of unemployment benefits for gig workers. And there's still a lot of laws that penalize gig workers who are very often, you know, theater workers are gig workers very often. So, you know, we need to be thinking holistically about what an arts issue is it's not just funding for organizations, although it absolutely is funding for organizations. It's also visa issues. It's also funding arts education. You know, I recently read a report about a DACA recipient who is not able to continue performing in the, in the show that he's in right now, because of the backlog and the immigration system. To me, that's an arts issue, right? If performers can't do their work, it's an arts issue. And I think what's really important about expanding that definition of what an arts issue is, is it is a place of strength and solidarity. You know, if we have time, I think we can talk about how a solidarity approach to advocacy links to a solidarity economy approach to building the overall resilience of our theater ecology. And we could praise Seema Sawicko for her amazing talk about an organizer organizing around building solidarity economy models, but I know I've only got 10 minutes before I got handed over to Greg, so I'm going to try to wrap this up. But what I want to say is, I think when we have this expensive view of what advocacy is, what activism is. It allows us to build relationships across a sector where we often have shared interests, and then our collective power, I think, just becomes so strong. And I am excited to be one of the organizers out of the hundreds, if not thousands, in our theater ecology, who are working to make that happen. And if you are one of those organizers and you haven't already signed up to join us in DC next week, it is not too late. Please come on down. We're also going to be talking about governance in DC, which is absolutely connected to all of this. Our governance model is a huge part of whether or not the theater field will expand its resilience. I am looking at my little clock that I set myself, and I see that I am almost out of time. And I believe in sharing time, I believe in sharing the power, so I am thrilled to pass it over to Greg. Thank you, Karina. That's, you've left a lot of tantalizing things to return to, which I think will be able to do in the Q&A section. Thank you so much to so much to think about. I really appreciate your contribution. I'm going to turn now to Greg. And as we had discussed, I think what might be particularly valuable for our viewers would be to hear your sense of how the NEA can operate as a multiplier can address the ecosystem. And engage other funders, as Rondo was describing earlier, or help encourage them to consider new possibilities. And again, anything that you want to bring to the table. Great. Thank you, Barbara. And I will use my time to try to use my 10 minutes judiciously here because there's a few other things I want to talk about in addition to that question, which is super important and very top of mind for everyone at the Arts Endowment right now. But I just want to first say thank you, Karina, for, even though they tell you never follow a star when you're presenting, I will do my best to follow you. And you brought up something, you know, I'm really thinking about the importance, as you spoke, Karina, of PCG and of our service organizations across all artistic disciplines, not just theater, but in theater, we have such great ones, TCG, of course, the TYA USA Theater for Young Audiences, and I'm actually here in Oklahoma City this week for the National Alliance for Music Theater Conference. And these organizations are, you know, not involved with them, they learn about them, make it a point, because they are the connectors for our field. We're spread out all over this wonderful, huge country of ours. And these service organizations serve such an important function, particularly now. And I'm also just saying this point because I understand that there are challenges service organizations have that theaters don't in terms of fundraising. And some of our fellow institutional funders are even pulling back their traditionally large support, which is very unfortunate in this moment. So for the NEA support for service organizations is very important. And we're committed to that support financially, and all the other ways that we support, whether it's showing up here in Oklahoma, or I'll be with you looking forward to seeing you and you see next week, Karina, Karina, and in Chicago for the National Conference in June. So I just wanted to say that so important, we're so lucky to have you as in our field. So I just want to briefly talk about some of the things we've seen as we're, and you and I talked about this Barbara. And some of the trends we're seeing and how we're trying to figure out ways that we can help address these challenges. You've already talked about audience is not returning to preach pandemic number. That's a big one. We've talked about how some of these trans subscription models were declining before the pandemic. And one of the new models, we're looking at a lot of new models. Art's journalism is a big piece of this that. So we're working on a convening with the presenting and arts arts and humanities to bring together all sorts of different groups of theater makers and stakeholders. One of the most important groups, I think our arts journalists because if you don't have coverage of the arts, you don't know how do you even know, you know how audience even know to show up and I've even personally encountered performances that I missed locally in DC and it's sort of my job to know about the stuff. I'm not hearing it. What luck does anybody else have out there. So I just across the country, especially in markets on something happened in Wisconsin. Last year, where the local paper was bought out by a big, big hedge fund company. And the first thing it was lay off all the local journalists which include arts journalists so the theaters were struggling to find ways to get the word out about our shows. What just happened to my computer. We can see you fine. Okay. I might my screen just went black so. You still hear me. Yes. Okay, good. All right. So, next thing is eventization. This is a term that I heard when I was visiting Rhode Island and shared with me by Todd tree board was the acting deputy director of the Rhode Island state arts. This idea that everything has to be an event to get folks out so for your regular shows in your season, the wonderful new play, small two character play. People want to see the big show something that gets them off the couch and into something in person, and that just puts huge pressure downstream on everything and the decisions that are made in programming. So that that's a challenge working with schools is more challenging. So, many theaters are having trouble just just reinvigorating the existing contacts they had with schools because of turnover and all challenges of getting folks back to in person learning. Some theaters Los Angeles reporting that they started turning to libraries for partnerships after not being able to renew partnership with local schools. And just in general the struggles of young people are facing is adding new dimensions and challenges to theaters engagement programs. So theaters are taking on increasingly social service functions that were met by other other organizations in the past just the needs of their young people. One example again promote island that was shared was that there was a theater that was working with elementary children and they discovered that the students didn't know how to use scissors these were second graders, and that's just something we take for granted that we learned that except for unless they were in person in kindergarten first grade. The cross sector and this is something we're talking about forever, the cross sector importance of arts and culture is becoming more broadly recognized. I'm going to get to that at the end, in terms of how we're working on that is a huge challenge across the board, especially the technicians and fundraising professionals. So this is something we're thinking about are there ways to do apprenticeship programs that we can aid apprenticeships. And so look out for announcement that's going to be paired with our renewal of the Shakespeare communities program that's coming up in the next few months or so that's going to be specifically addressing the, the staffing challenges the learning gap the apprenticeships that we need in the field to get people in the high programming is a big deal. We talked about that a little bit earlier. There are lots of challenges, both with with costs and with technology, and just with with with paying people working with unions. But for some theaters, when I was in Alaska, the perseverance theater really talked about how important it was for them because there's so many villages that are, you can only get into from flying or by boat. And so to have the ability to connect, you know, some of these communities of folks like England elders, where they where they don't have the ability to always for the in person engagement, super important to keeping those connections alive. And then the last thing on my list was something you talked about wherever this climate change and disaster preparedness is just becoming a necessity, and we're looking at all over the place. In the last month, we had a theaters that were closed or had to cancel programming due to flooding. And I'm really happy that we have been able to be a little more nimble than maybe in the past with addressing those through agency grants, and just waving things like if there was a deadline that was that night but your internet was down because you've had a flood will find ways to extend that which we normally wouldn't do but if something has been declared a disaster area. That's something that we are able to have flexibility in. We're also partnering I mentioned the presence committee on the arts humanities and have a lot of exciting moments to partner with them that we've never had before that I'm really thrilled about one of those is working with FEMA on specifically these issues and cultural preservation. We've been art, any 18 sit down in Puerto Rico frequently over the last several years working with them on their recovery and helping them, you know, apply for regular funding as well as emergency funding. And so those. So stay tuned for more about what's going to happen with PCH and FEMA, but that's a big project. And as I mentioned, we're working with them on how might do in three minutes on our on our we're working with them on a big convening that we're going to bring together folks from different sectors that'll hopefully be happening later in August in the lead up to that we're going to be doing many listening sessions with stakeholders around groups around the country just virtually. And on this, you may be hearing from me or one of my colleagues very soon to line you up to one of those listening sessions, because we, one of the important things I feel like we can do as a federal agency when you talked about, you know, modeling for other institutional funders is that we're just here we're listening we're accessible. Our emails are in phone numbers are on our website so you can call us at any time, you know, kind of, you know, process to reaching out just email, and my email I'll say it on and you can share it later as Reiner at arts.gov. We're happy to hear from folks in the field, and something that's very important to our fellow funders just be talking to people and not just your usual clicks of folks that you already know. And that's part of the joy being out here in Oklahoma today to meet to actually see folks attending the SNAP conference in person. The last thing the last two minutes is really to get to the heart of your original question. I'm really excited to be at the NEA with the cross sector with this happening across all of government. We've never seen this level of engagement from other parts of government before we this committee that that happened recently the arts summit on healing thriving. I need to pull this up so I get healing bridging thriving it's that an arts and culture in our communities. It's a mouthful but they're all very important words to talk about what we were really trying to accomplish so for example, the surgeon general was there speaking about the loneliness epidemic in America, and how important the arts are to connect folks and bring them together in person in a room to the health and the Department of Health and Human Service was there. The environmental protection agency was there. So all these different federal agencies working together because we're a tiny, you know, agency in terms of the vastness of the federal government. But if we can be a catalyst in the gateway to address all of these challenges that you're talking about through the arts and through theater specifically, but really all of the arts. So it's such an important tool in this moment, I think as we come back together as as a culture and a humanity and a nation in post. I don't even know if this is the right word to use forgive me for saying this moment is a better word for that, because it's still very much alive and well but in this moment of real. Absolutely. Thank you, Greg, I just, you know, it's so, it's so delicate to try to point out anything positive and what happened to us. And yet it does seem that among the small right spots are this kind of opening to thinking more broadly about the place of the of the arts in healing right the place of the arts in these in these processes that desperately need to occur now. And so it seems to me very suggestive that you are finding this willingness to engage in those in those conversations across government agencies now in a way that perhaps was not available before the pandemic right that it is in in the wake of everything that occurred that people can recognize the centrality of the arts to those processes of healing and thriving. Thank you very much for those really rich interventions, I think we're going to open it up now for questions from the audience. So again, feel free to put your questions in the group chat, and Emily will relay them to us. And so we'll be checking the chat for those questions. And maybe, as people get a chance to post their questions on the chat, we might. Let me ask Rhonda, do you have anything that you want to put to our to our panelists since I thought I'd give you a chance to ask you anything you want to follow. Yeah, my first question that I just noted down. Thank you both for those wonderful presentations and hearing about what's going on out there, which is very heartening from our side, of course. I, my first question was for Karina, but Greg, I think you said you're going to be there in DC as well, just since we're on the West Coast and we're in LA. If we're not going to be in DC, what are some things that we and sort of like the viewing audience can do like what are some things that you think that the average person who, you know, is interested in helping out the cause can can do either with your suggestions or just work in general that we could, you know, throw out some suggestions. I really love that question. Certainly we do have a hybrid option for some of the conversations that will be happening so that's an immediate accessibility point for folks. But I think more broadly, you know, it is a kind of multi step thing that you want to be doing right so first. So you want to be thinking in a local way about where your networks are where your opportunity is to build the kind of community that is at the heart of all resilience, you know, certainly from an advocacy perspective there's always. I think people are often not fully aware of how many opportunities exist in municipal government to access support. Even beyond the kind of advocacy framework, you know, when these climate disasters hit, you know, it is the local community that is the first responders to make sure that people are safe, that they have food and water. If the theater was impacted that the theater can maybe find a new location in which to perform. You know, so even though TCG is a national service organization, you know, I think we're super clear on how critical that kind of local organizing is, you know, and then I think, you know, through that lens of local organizing, plugging into where you feel your time can make the most difference. Certainly, you should sign up for our, our E blast that will give you one click opportunities to contact your representatives about important issues, you know. But more than that, you know, I think it's good to program your representatives congressional but also state and local into your phone get their numbers in there. I call mine on a regular basis. You know, and very often you'll speak to people who will who will be a real person and especially at the local and state level will actually have answers for you and when you call. I think to the degree to which you can kind of get involved in any kind of electoral campaigning if that's something you feel comfortable with any kind of movement work that you can show up for. There are so many opportunities to do that and as a theater person you bring a really unique set of strengths into that conversation, you know, it's always been so clear to me that whenever I as a theater maker, come into a movement space, or political organizing they're like oh my goodness your skills as a theater person are so needed, you know. And I think that taking that kind of approach to building power at the local state and national level, you know, is the is how we're going to get through this building community at the local state and national level is going to be how we're going to do that. And it's going to look differently for everybody you know because we're, we're all so busy because of how capitalism functions. So we're not going to be able to do all three of those necessarily we're not all going to be able to be, you know, super tapped in at the local state and national level. You know, then, you know, if those of us at the state and national levels are doing well, if you're connected locally you will be connected on some level at the national and state level. You know, so I think it does go back to that kind of, you know, blessed are the organizers and blessed are the organized the people willing to show up, you know, put in the work to build power and to change the structures that they work for all of us. I think that's really interesting one of the things that we found was so complicated is as you move between these different levels. The organizations are different some might be geographically focused right they might be the arts in LA County or they might, you know, imagine certain coalitions of the performing arts but not others right they might carve up the arts in different ways and so it seems incredibly challenging I love hearing your optimism. But I but I wonder also, you know, to what extent there are spaces for thinking about things like providing scripts for theater people scripts for addressing your local representatives right scripts for bringing to to local government or state so that there is, again, this kind of multiplier effect for the kind of, you know, good thinking about rationales for supporting the arts that might be occurring at the federal level how do we get that, you know, out into as many communities as possible. I'm also very mindful of what you said about, you know, the impacts on people's time and and one of the things that we found repeatedly is that, you know, it's not that theater makers don't know these things that we're pointing out. They don't know that they need to focus on the audiences of the future they don't know that they need to think as a sector, but everyone is operating in conditions of scarcity and limited time and resources right so that's why I think and I sound so I don't know I don't know if it's anonymous, but that's why I keep thinking about, you know, the efficiencies in offering people resources and offering people models or scripts, so that they can do some of that some of that work. I'm going to turn. Unless you want to respond to any of that Karina. There's a question in the chat from Amanda, who says, I would love to hear more specific numbers, if even possible, about subscription audience findings from the post pandemic seasons. And while we do have some numbers in our report, they are mostly from TCG's theater reports. And so, Karina, do you want to say something to people about where they can find that kind of information and what sort of research goes into that invaluable report that you put out. Absolutely. So first, just want to thank our partners SMU data arts and new name checker earlier but you know Dr Zanni Voss just being a long term, long time leader in providing this kind of longitudinal field by data that is that is so critical. If you go to the TCG website TCG.org and you go to research and you go to theater facts you will find a very robust study. So I'm going to turn those into these questions about not just subscriptions, but also single ticket sales, working capital, you know, individual donor trends trends at the from funders, etc. You know, and what I'll say is that the sort of decline in subscriptions obviously predates the pandemic. Really, when you look back at older theater facts you see, you know, in the in the kind of 80s and 90s this boom time when theaters were growing the theaters were growing. And then, you know, right around the turn of the century. We start to see we begin to see the declines in the subscription model. There's the of course the what happens after 2001 and 911 and the sort of drop and rebound that happened there. And then in 2008. One thing that Zanni has said before is that there was scarring from 2008 that never healed. I think that's true. And it was also around that time that social media really began taking off, leading to a host of consequences, including mental health declines for young people, which brought up so beautifully. But also I think to impacting how people connect with each other and with entertainment. And then of course the pandemic so the truth of the matter is the subscription question is really complicated. There are theaters that are still doing subscriptions really well that are even, you know, in small in a small number of cases growing their subscriptions. And a lot of theaters that are thinking really strategically about how to make subscriptions, super flexible to meet people where they are, you know, which is very often it's difficult to plan far in advance. And, you know, that kind of foundational nature of the subscription model in the sustainability of the theaters that decline is real. It's significant. And it's something that we're certainly grappling with the TCG. And you can see more about that. The we go the theater facts on the website go way, way, way back. So if you're curious and going down the rabbit hole like I like to do. You can do that on the TCG website. And I'll just jump in and say that the work that TCG does and that as any boss does in this respect is really critical, but we were struck by how little research there is on the sector in the US and especially, you know, what we were able to see because we were part of this transnational study. You know, the way audience studies might be a research field for specialists, you know, in Canada, as was the case with in the research in that we were privy to it. We did have some conversations with people who were involved in the graduate training of people in the field. And I think that's another key space in which we may want to think about, you know, are people being brought up who are training in arts administration to think about the sector to think about these these broader issues right is that is that one of the places where we might get not just good information but great ideas and innovation in the in the field right so that seems to be also key. Rhonda I think you wanted to address another of the questions that had come through in the chat. Yes, so we had another question from Zoe in the chat that asks us to sort of consider why theater may have been less active than other arts in advocacy historically. And while that's, you know, sort of speculative on our part. I think we could probably address a couple angles on that one being something that was especially clear to us in working in this transnational report is that we don't really have a like a national theater in the same way that like the UK does for example, we don't have coming up we don't really have like a ministry of culture necessarily in the same way either so the pathways are less clear and a bit harder and in some cases in the US system for sure. And with theater, I think it's also, as we've been saying along sort of a confluence of a lot of different things coming together, you know, with theater you need in some cases, a theater you need a building you need more infrastructure and and some things like that versus perhaps, you know, maybe less infrastructure for something like painting or you know, like that. There's also just the collective nature of the endeavor it's, it's, it's, you know, by definition sort of a lot of workers together tech people actors directors people doing the administrative work and everything like that. So there's sort of added challenges again, versus some things that are more like individual artistic endeavors in the sublime sense. So, so there are challenges but also I think it's as we've been saying along as well and various people have brought up is that it's, it seems to be that that the industry is thinking about how to change their own self conception in order to help, you know, change the conception in the broader culture of the value of the arts, the value of theater and you know the performing arts to many different kinds of cultural life and you know health initiatives as we've been talking about the, the vitality of urban downtown's bringing together, you know, citizens for messaging around, you know, political issues or you know social issues and things like that so there's a way of trying very actively to get away from the idea of just the syniums sitting in the dark very quietly you know if you're expensive tickets and thinking about theater more broadly even outside of you know the existing sort of theater building spaces as well as the place of theater in the culture more broadly. Yeah, and I think more anecdotally, I've seen some discussions even of how this almost sort of self sacrificial ethos of the theater has heard it right the show must go on we'll do whatever it takes. All of those ways of thinking about what people are up to when they make theater has not always, I think allowed theater to ask for what it needs and what it and what it deserves right as part of the culture. There's a question also about what insights the transnational nature of the study provided, and are there specific approaches or models in other countries that us theater makers or government agencies could look to and so we can talk about that in the few minutes that we have left but I just actually was curious and I wanted to start by saying, is there any bandwidth in what you do Greg or what you do for looking outside the US, or sort of thinking about our own really complicated landscape. Take up all of that space. I mean, well I know you do a lot of international work, I'll say we have a small international division of folks who really are focused on that. From our perspective in theater, I mean, I'm certainly looking at what's happening over in other countries, particularly the UK just because we're so close in terms of theater practice, but also internationally beyond that. And, and you know they have, they have a whole different set of challenges I can't wait to read about that part of your report. When the UK piece comes out, you know personally I've always wish I had the budget to just travel over. There's so many shows in London I want to see right now. I think it is something we think about around the globe in terms of artistic practice and traditions. Yeah, I can speak to that briefly because I know we're close on time but I do just want to say that I think, you know it's not the full story to say that theater doesn't have a rich history of advocacy and activism, you know I think about, you know, researching back to Free Southern Theater, which was considered sort of the arts arm of the civil rights movement to El Teatro Campesino, you know, and putting literal lives on the line to make the art that would achieve the justice that they were looking for to like work that Greg has done before he got to the NEA that had a significant impact on policy, you know, and it was in fact an astonishing act of collective action across the country. And I want to say I think theater actually has a rich history of collective power. And it may be true that we don't always turn that to, and now support us for the resources that we deserve, but that strength is there. And then I would just say that, you know, from TCG and the global angle, you know, we are one of the centers of the International Theater Institute. We have a partnership called Global Theater Initiative. Amelia Cachapero and Big Kong Singh are two of the sort of heroes of getting out there into other countries and facilitating, you know, cross border collaborations, which are, which are incredibly vital. If we had more time, I would talk about them, but I will just pause to say if you're looking for more of that, just go to the international section of the TCG website and there's there's a lot of resources there that you can find. Thank you. And I'll just say quickly, we tried not to be too disparate and instead be inspired by what we saw in other countries. It is interesting to think about things like what it means to, you know, not have a ministry of culture. And in terms of sort of centralizing efforts, right, so that our colleagues in the UK were making recommendations for a future emergency about centralizing communications and centralizing response and so on. All of which would of course be wonderful in the US as well but it's much more complicated to implement here. And then, you know, there's a sense of the possible in terms of the support for the arts in those places and the givenness of the arguments about cultural value and the support for the arts that, again, I would choose to think of as inspiring rather than disparating in the comparison. Greg, you wanted to say something as we wrap up. I would point out, you know, because as we've known the different, you know, levels of funding in different countries that there's another side of that which was just speaking to someone, a grantee who runs a theater, who that's touring internationally right now and they were setting up a tour that they were going to be very much funded by that culture ministry and the government changed to a different government that did not favor the kinds of work they were doing for political reasons. And so the whole festival was canceled, not just their project so there are two sides of that where, you know, when you're completely dependent on the federal subsidy you are going to do what that government tells you. So I'm sure, depending on what's no matter what side of the aisle you're on, you're on, you probably wouldn't like whoever's in charge at any given time telling you what kind of art you can make and so that's, that's, I think a positive for our country and our expression. Interesting. Yeah, thank you well this has been an extraordinarily rich conversation I only wish that we had more time. But I feel that we've covered a great deal. Again, I want to very much thank our panelists for being here with us and for your thinking with us over this whole process. So once again to say please go check out the whole report check out the transnational report if you're interested and feel free to be in touch if you would like to follow up in any way from our Congress.