It’s tricky, isn’t it…
Y’know, writing a #WorldTheatreDay blog post…
I guess this is when we’d normally talk about theatre, how grateful we are for it, that sort of thing, but we’ve sort of been doing that all year, in some shape of form, in response to its “absence” from our lives. Against our desires, needs, wants, etc, theatre has been empty.
There are people who have been waiting for theatre to be open again and, in a sense, to go back to how things were. With theatre that’s an interesting concept cos even in 2019 theatre reflected a huge amount about how things were already. Not how things were in 2019, not how things will be, but how things were in some amorphous but previous time before that.
I originally had a paragraph here explaining the sort of people who end up working in theatre but, we all know who it is. The privileged ones who feel the most confident and comfortable, who can network the best, who can afford the financially rocky early years of an arts career. People who don’t have the innate impetus to critically examine the system they’ve benefited from. They can learn to do it, they can understand its importance, but they don’t quite feel it the same way as those who are, unfortunately, turned away in droves by the industry.
*Hard and sudden change of topic*
In WW2, the US Airforce was losing planes in combat, and had a limited amount of armour to reinforce them with. They noticed that planes were coming back with bullet holes in their wings and tails, so they reinforced those areas. This didn’t work at all. They kept losing planes at the same rate.
Can anybody reading this see why..?
Eventually, they got a mathematician involved and he suggested that they should reinforce the areas that they couldn’t find bullet holes in. They did this, begrudgingly, and found that they actually had fewer planes get shot down during combat.
The problem was they didn’t consider the missing data. If a plane comes back with a bullet hole in part of it, maybe that hole isn’t fatal. If a plane doesn’t come back, it was shot somewhere fatal. Therefore, if planes that come back are never shot in a particular place then that place might be where a fatal shot can occur, and therefore that place needs reinforcement.
The airforce might have figured this out eventually, but would have lost way more planes in the process.
I don’t know what they did next but, if they didn’t keep the mathematician on, they might have wasted even more resources on similar problems in the future.
Outside help, with different perspectives and specialities, was needed for survival, and continued help will be necessary for continued survival.
*and... we're back on track*
If theatres are only run by people who love theatre, they won’t accurately or thoroughly examine flaws with the system. If they’re run by people who want to make changes, great, but most of these people still want to change things bit by bit, slowly but surely, so as to not dismantle that which they love and have benefitted from.
It doesn’t even need to be everybody. Just a few notable examples of successful complete overhauls concerning accessibility, diversity, sustainability, will help get the ball rolling.
And then theatre makers and audiences need to actually support them.
I love theatre, but I love a lot of different ways that stories can be told. Theatre has a lot of benefits, and it has its drawbacks. A year of Digital Theatre™ has helped us see where we can go to actually move theatre forward, not at a crawl, but at an accelerated rate so it can catch up with where it should be by now at this point in the 21st century.
The world won’t wait for us, it’ll move ahead, it’ll grant more people more rights, more flexibility, more comfort. More industries and ways of telling stories will pop up with new technology and culture. The video game industry is already eyeing the theatre industry up as it’s next pool of talent to acquire, and we’ll head there in droves, lured by security, flexibility, and a wide audience increasingly hungry for complex and different storytelling. You know the people that’ll leave will be exactly the people that theatre desperately needs to stay and help it catch up with the rest of the world. Theatre will be empty once again, and this time it'll be by choice.
Anyway, Social Media mandated #WorldTheatreDay rant over. I’ll pretend that not quite reaching a conclusion is so that you can “find one yourself as the reader” and bid you farewell for now.
Until next time!