Arts Advocacy Roundtable

Over the course of the last decade, many of us in the academy have discovered that our survival requires more than simply practicing and teaching the discipline of theatre. Some theatre departments have found themselves defending their very existence. Others find themselves in communities where the arts themselves are controversial, where "offensive" productions threaten a backlash resulting in censorship or loss of funding. While we once may have been so caught up in teaching classes and producing shows that there was little or no time to introduce arts advocacy to our students, some of us are finding we must become advocates simply to survive. Even when our survival is not directly threatened, our value systems often compel us to speak out and devise strategies to advocate for our colleagues.

How do we manage this situation when so few of us are trained to be arts advocates? For those of us who feel ill-equipped to teach arts advocacy, are we qualified to bring it into our classrooms? Does the political stance implied by arts advocacy belong in a classroom in the first place? Even if we want to teach advocacy, how do we find the time to include it when our syllabi are already jam-packed? How do we make valuing the arts one of our institution's core goals, especially when that institution may have a completely different paradigm at its core? How do we rock the boat and still keep our jobs and our departments?

In August of 2000, at the ATHE conference in DC, I chaired a panel exploring these very questions. The panelists generated a lively and provocative dialogue with the audience, prompting me to continue the conversation on-line in the fall with a wider variety of participants whose professional work includes an advocacy focus. Sharon Green has incorporated a unit on arts advocacy and First Amendment rights into her Introduction to Theatre class. Susan Haedicke has extensive experience with community-based theatre both as a scholar and a practitioner, particularly with Living Stage Theatre Company, and has coedited a forthcoming book on community-based theatre. Gail Humphries Mardirosian, in addition to deputy chairing a department, has participated nationally in the Goals 2000 initiative and served as a link between ATHE and K-12 theatre arts organizations such as the American Alliance for Theatre and Education and the Educational Theatre Association. Deborah Martin not only teaches in a graduate management program that features a class on arts advocacy and public relations but also has served as a regional consultant for not-for-profit organizations on strategic planning, fundraising, and grass roots arts development. Jordan Schildcrout provides the perspective of a graduate student, as well as that of a dramaturg who has worked in the professional theatre. Jenny Spencer is former head of a faculty union at a large public university and has experience advocating for higher education on a statewide level. Mark Weinberg has trained extensively with Augusto Boal and has years of expertise using theatre as a tool for political and social activism.

I hope the following edited transcript of this "virtual roundtable" helps to energize the wide variety of advocacy work taking place in our profession--and inspire even more.

--Ann Marie Costa

ANN MARIE COSTA: What does arts advocacy mean to you as an educator, theatre artist, and scholar?

GAIL HUMPHRIES MARDIROSIAN: It means speaking out about the value and importance of the arts in everyone's life. It means acknowledging, when we practice our art with integrity and conviction, that we become representatives of the art to others. We artists are marginalized. Some people are fascinated and entertained by us. Others simply brush us off when we explain what we do. But the bottom line is, so few people in America have actually been exposed to...