In the game of creative survival, Met’s up by a lot

Getting back to DVDs and CDs of stage performances and why the heck the professional-theater industry can’t help itself financially by allowing its work to be recorded and sold … I ran across this release about Peter Gelb, general manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, last night. It credits Gelb with doing for the Met what the rest of the performing-arts community has been desperate to do for about, oh, 50 years, namely earn more income and attract younger audiences:

“Peter Gelb has been in charge at the Met since 2006, and has succeeded in reinventing opera by making it accessible to everyone through multiple distribution modes such as live HD broadcasts in cinemas, the Internet, satellite radio and mobile platforms.

“Under Peter Gelb’s management, the Met, which just celebrated its 125th anniversary, has managed to develop an audacious policy to reach out to a wider and younger audience. The introduction of public rehearsals, “last minute” tickets at $20, and the launch of the collection The Met: Live in HD – winner of the prestigious Peabody and Emmy Awards – have all contributed to attracting a new, broader, younger audience.”

Gelb will be the keynote speaker for the 2010 international MidemNet event, a forum for music professionals about the music business in the digital age. Maybe he should be talking to Actors Equity Association and the legitimate theater community, instead.

If Equity got creative, could stage actors earn a better living?

It seems like a good time to ask this question: Why, when theater companies and stage artists generally have trouble surviving even in the best of economic times, is Actors Equity Association still preventing them from making potentially lots more money off their own work  by selling recorded versions of it?  

It’s an issue that’s bothered me for some time, specifically since the First National Performing Arts Convention that took place in Pittsburgh in 2004. I was there reporting on the convention for a newspaper and, at many of the workshops, heard discussions about how nonprofits were having to explore for-profit-style ways of earning income because  – and this is even more the case now – there were no longer enough private grantors and donors or government funding sources to keep all the organizations alive. 

Many, such as orchestras and opera companies, had been doing this for a long time, making commercial recordings that earned them revenue for years afterward. Dance troupes were beginning to think about it, too.

The only performing discipline that apparently couldn’t plan to take advantage of this source of income was professional theater. And that’s because the stage actors’ and stage managers’ own union forbade the making and distributing of recorded stage performances. 

The original idea behind this, I gather, was to prevent artists and their work from being exploited by the mass media – i.e., denied pay for their own recorded work – and also to protect the vital live quality of stage performance that keeps at least some people buying tickets to theater productions. It seems Equity didn’t want America to be able to see plays performed on TV, because it was thought that if stage shows could be accessed there by everyone for free, no one would come to the theater anymore.

This is a position still held by some professional theater artists, I find. Even the unionized Norwegians subscribe to it. Or did. I have to say I think it’s outmoded. And I don’t think I’m alone: In recent discussions with theater artists around the nation, I’ve detected a rueful kind of resignation – numbers of them really wish they could record and sell their productions, but don’t think Equity is going to budge.   

It was an e-mail I received today from Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater that got me wondering again why Equity doesn’t change its mind. The message announced that, through the NT Live  broadcast series, a live stage version of Phedre produced by Britain’s National Theatre would be screened twice at the Guthrie as a high-definition re-broadcast on July 8 and 9 (and as a re-broadcast or live simulcast on other dates at other selected stage theaters across the U.S.).

Now, why can the National Theatre do this mass-media thing apparently without danger, but American theaters have to be protected from it? 

National Theatre Director Nicholas Hytner, who is also directing Phedre, says in a release, “The NT Live events are designed to bring what we do on the stages of the National Theatre to a far greater number of people than we would ever be able to reach otherwise. Through high-definition broadcasts, we have the technology at our disposal to present our productions beyond the four walls of the National, to reach passionate theatre-goers all over the world, and to do it really well.”  

Do Equity members disagree with that?

To me, the pros of selling recorded shows appear far greater than the cons. First and most obviously, the better-known theaters could make a lot more money and the lesser-known theaters could make at least a little more money and also raise their profiles. Second, all theaters could reach global markets made up of people who will never be able to get to most of the in-theater performances in faraway places, but might yearn to see the work of companies they’ve heard about – theaters’ followings and paying audiences would grow and their likelihood of survival would increase. Third, safeguards could be put in place to protect theaters from losing audiences that could actually come to see the live shows on stage – how about releasing the DVDs only after the run of the production or tour has ended?  Four, to paraphrase The King and I, might Equity not be protecting actors out of all they own by refusing to adapt contracts so union members could get residuals from recorded work? I mean, the film industry does it – why can’t theater do it, too, and let its artists make better livings? 

And five, a lot more great productions would be preserved instead of lost, providing unique artistic, entertainment and educational experiences to countless numbers of people who otherwise would never get to benefit from them.  

It might be a bit painful for the theater industry to go through the thinking, negotiation and adjustment periods necessary to get a policy and new contracts in place, but unions are adapting to changing member needs and industry circumstances all the time. It took a while, but symphony orchestras and the musicians’ union finally got around to dealing with streaming performances on the Internet. 

Finally and most obviously, if the likes of the National Theatre and New York’s Metropolitan Opera can find ways to get their work to the world through mass media, there has to be a way for American theaters to do the same.

Or does Equity really want most of its members not to be working in their field full time and most theaters to be in constant danger of closing?

Americans for the Arts working with Obama team on policy

Not just a place at the table, but an office in the halls of power.

Robert Lynch envisions this for the arts. For months, he has worked with Barack Obama’s transition team to pinpoint the ways in which arts and culture can help and be helped in the new president’s plan to rescue the economy.

He thinks change is coming.

 “I feel like we’ll be listened to, and we’re not going away,” said Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts, a research and advocacy organization. “I’m very pleased with the access we’re getting. It gives me optimism.”  

Not groundbreaking, but “groundsaving” is how Lynch described the recommendations that he and his organization have made to the Obama team – a set of practical tactics that would stabilize and strengthen the arts and cultural sector while drawing on artists’ expertise to improve education and community life around the nation.

The nine recommendations aim to: provide community teaching and mentoring jobs for artists, as well as arts-job training, affordable health care and unemployment insurance; increase development grants for neighborhood cultural projects, art districts and cultural facilities; boost funding for federal cultural agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts that support local arts agencies and their grants and services for local artists; and encourage state transportation departments to work with state arts agencies on providing more artist commissions for creative design, public artworks and historic preservation-projects in transportation infrastructure.

The point of increasing government funding for arts and culture is not to make the sector more dependent on federal money, Lynch said, but to give it an important tool: the lever of official approval. Being deemed worthy of a grant by the government helps artists and cultural groups persuade audiences and private donors to support them, too.  

That’s not a new idea, but the last recommendation comes close. It calls for the creation of a senior-level post in the Obama administration for an arts official, someone who would coordinate arts and cultural policies and guide arts-related initiatives stemming from federal agencies that deal with such issues as tourism, education, economic development, cultural exchange, intellectual property and broadband access.

To have for the first time a senior policy person in the White House “who can connect the dots … and truly represent the breadth and strength of the arts that is already there,” would be pretty close to groundbreaking, Lynch said.

Though he’s most concerned right now with restoring arts and culture to better health, Lynch does have an eye on the arts frontier. He sees new and creative ways for nonprofits to sustain themselves by being more entrepreneurial and blending their nonprofit mission with for-profit activities, as the Metropolitan Opera has by video-recording its performances to screen for paying audiences in local movie theaters.

He also sees an “explosion” of artworks that will take advantage of new technologies, and the development of new art forms based in folk culture and crafts that will increase the public’s consumption of art.

“I think that’s going to be what really helps the arts through this economic downturn,” Lynch said.

But a sympathetic president can’t hurt. Said Lynch of the transition team, “I’ve really been impressed with their receptiveness.”