Panaesthetic Mambo

This bugbear of co-creation and consumerism in the arts, and especially the performing arts, has been pestering me for more than a year now. I had a little "aha" moment this morning when this showed up in my You've Cott Mail: League of Rock.



The League of Rock offers would-be rockers with regular-joe day jobs the opportunity to, well, rock. And rock hard. This is real stuff - they record and perform live with technical assistance and coaching from real rockers.

What has this got to do with theatre? Glad you asked...

There is a big scary pile of stats pointing to an oversupply of theatre (and art in general) in America. The suggestions on the table so far are:

1. Increase demand by switching resources from the supply chain into things like k-12 education in arts. Presumably, this will create, ipso facto, the next generation of arts appreciators.

2. Increase demand by finding ways to use technology to better market your art and to allow arts consumers the ability to interact and co-create.

The problem with both of these is that they assume a traditional demand model, which is certainly no longer applicable. Our culture is rapidly becoming "panaesthetic" (think Michael Graves' toilet bowl brush - beauty with your pooty). People are getting used to having a say in how aesthetics interrelate to their lives in a very democratic fashion. For a professional theatre practitioner, this is hard for me to say, but community theatres are the interactive model that performing arts constituents are demanding. They're just not often satisfying to watch.

But the would-be actors in your community theatre don't slave night after night on top of their 40-hour work week to generate embarrassing crud - that just the model we're using. What if we employed a model that placed a premium on transmitting knowledge from the professional to the dilettante with the idea of increasing skill through exposure to the art - rather than a model that runs like a mediocrity mill?

People want to have an effect on the outcome of a participatory experience. Instead of letting the performing and visual arts languish in the elitist margins, they can follow the example of League of Rock. Professional artists will need to assume the role of curator of their own work and form.

I haven't read this book, but the obvious irony is that while the avant garde of marketing is adopting theatrical methodolgy to create rich, compelling staged experiences for their consumers to explore as part of their brand, theatre isn't.