On June 25 in downtown Los Angeles, more than 200 artists, producers, presenters, grant-makers, museum directors, curators, librarians, cultural administrators, government officials, members of philanthropic entities and journalists came together to consider “What Can the World Teach California About Arts Engagement?” The Zócalo Public Square conference attracted panelists and attendees from across California, the United States and other corners of the planet.

The gathering at the Omni Hotel began with welcoming remarks from Michael Alexander, executive director emeritus of Los Angeles’s Grand Performances series of free outdoor cultural events, followed by a live performance by The Industry, the Los Angeles-based, independent, artist-driven experimental opera company led by artistic director Yuval Sharon.

To frame the day’s conversation, Sharon cited Bertolt Brecht’s adage that “a theater which makes no contact with the public is a nonsense.” Engagement is key to making art that is “responsive to our communities” and “to the times we’re living in,” and that enables us to address our hopes and fears, he concluded.

But how do artists tap into those communities? And does the public even know what it wants from the arts?

Chris Jones, chief theater critic of the Chicago Tribune, took up that question in the day’s first panel discussion. Jones flipped the question on its head, pointing out that some artists feel no obligation whatsoever to please their audiences, convinced that instead their main duty is to please themselves.

In response, panelist Randi Korn, who leads a Virginia-based museum planning firm, and has conducted extensive research on museum audiences, suggested that the real challenge for culture producers is how to create the memorable and meaningful experiences that arise “from people being surprised by what they see.”

“It’s not about meeting people’s expectations,” Korn said. “It’s about exceeding them.”

Another panelist, Cristina King Miranda, a Mexico City-based performing arts curator, suggested that being part of an audience requires its members to connect with each other, and not shy from the debate, conflict and even pain that great art sometimes provokes. “We need to become cartographers of our own experiences in our communities,” she said.

Leslie A. Ito, president of the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, said that culture producers should be asking themselves how to create the kind of cultural spaces that encourage the fullest participation. She said that her center is presenting more non-Japanese artists in order to connect with the rest of Greater Los Angeles, but also was careful “to ground them in Japanese culture.” For a recent series on world dance music, for example, “we brought artists in for orientation that started with a tea ceremony—so they understand the space and the history of the place in which they are performing,” Ito said.

The conversation also took up the issue of how digital “sharing” and social media have conditioned audiences to seek out cultural events that make cool Facebook posts and generate dozens of Instagram “likes.” Korn warned against “superficial” arts experiences that rely on ginning up Snapchat and Twitter traffic. To make an impact, she said, you “want to be about deepening experience,” as opposed to broadening the arts experience.

Yet the panel concurred that arts and cultural organizations can engage wider audiences, and new audience segments, without pandering to them. Ito cited one New York Historical Society exhibition about taxi drivers that extended its hours from 2 to 6 a.m. to accommodate cabbies working the graveyard shift.

When Jones pressed about how the arts might survive if arts organizations offer collections that are a whole lot of “non-interactive stuff,” panelists said the ability to be in the presence of great stuff (otherwise known as art) still reliably draws audiences and keeps them coming back. “It’s about the intimacy of being with stuff,” said Ito, who recalled visiting a theater in Kyoto, Japan with a very small performance space, no bigger than a table, and the impact of experiencing art in such close, personal quarters.

Jones also pressed the panel on whether the arts must present ways of talking and interacting with people with whom we sharply disagree—particularly in stressed-out, polarized eras like the present. King Miranda responded by making a distinction between “normalization” and “democratization.” She noted that in Mexico, where the state “has failed us” in protecting “security, peace, and justice,” the arts represent a form of resistance.

“The arts remind us of our otherness and our normalness,” King Miranda said.

The morning panel’s exchange set the stage for Steven J. Tepper to deliver the lunchtime keynote address, entitled “Does Arts Engagement Even Matter?” Tepper, the Dean of Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design & the Arts, structured his talk around a transitional process that he described as moving from “Me Experiences” to “Bigger-Than-Me Experiences.”

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Americans generated much of their own art by themselves and at home, through playing parlor piano, reciting Shakespeare around the dinner table, and other exercises in Emersonian self-reliance. All that changed with the introduction of radio, sound recordings, movie theaters, and other forms of industrially produced mass entertainment. The audience’s role increasingly was reduced to coming to a large venue, sitting in a darkened room, then applauding on cue.

“We saw the rise of cathedrals of consumption,” Tepper said. “It distinctly removed arts and culture from our everyday lives and put it in other places.”

That paradigm persisted through the decades following World War II. But a Wallace Foundation study later recorded a sharp drop in participation in benchmark arts events, setting off some hand-wringing and soul-searching among the cultural cognoscenti.

What was missing in this analysis, Tepper said, was that new forms of engagement were emerging to replace the old ones, leading to a “renaissance” of engagement, in cultural as well as civil life. That ongoing renaissance has been powered by what sociologist C. Wright Mills called “the exuberant expression of self,” which Tepper reframed as the culture of the “I Want What I Want When and How I Want It” generation.

Tepper said he’d taken his daughter to a Taylor Swift concert at which costumed fans posed in front of Taylor Swift-branded props that had been set up to give fangirls a place to snap selfies. Meanwhile, Tepper said, his son has been ordering personally customized Nike shoes.

They’re all symptoms of a phenomenon that Tepper calls the “Curatorial Me.” But if that sounds hopelessly self-absorbed, it also is the phenomenon behind the soaring numbers of people who are buying musical instruments, making their own music, uploading 6 billion hours of content each month onto YouTube, and teaching themselves other new creative pursuits.

Has the pendulum swung too far toward cultural self-expression and consumer autonomy? Studies suggest that this overstimulating our brains may limit capacity for empathy, our receptivity to others’ stories and others’ lives, Tepper said.

Tepper added that “Bigger-Than-Me Experiences” are about purpose more than pleasure, about transformation rather than merely “doing,” about identification rather than identity, and about the “empathetic imagination” rather than the “egoist imagination.” Millennials have shown that they value immersive experiences, diversity, loyalty and the “slow-down economy,” which can be glimpsed in the comeback of vinyl records, the resurgence of community darkrooms, and the popularity of mass group experiences like the Coachella music festival.

“Something about re-immersing ourselves in these shared experiences is extremely powerful for the millennials,” Tepper said.

Alexander then took the floor again to direct an informal exchange among conference attendees, who were encouraged to share their own ideas about arts engagement. One conferee, a library historian, said that museums and theaters could learn a valuable lesson from libraries. “The message that I can bring you from library history is … [if you] provide access and content” you’ll maintain your value, she said.

The discussion moved deeper into the political realm with the day’s third panel talk, “Does Art Really Make Us Better Citizens?” Lynne Conner, a University of North Carolina at Charlotte cultural historian, said that our experiences as members of arts audiences have the potential to teach us how to be better citizens—by learning how to be free thinkers. She added that arts participation can be a means of “rehearsing citizenship.”

Luz María Sánchez, arts and humanities chair of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana de México, Lerma, argued that arts serve society and citizenship in three ways. First, the arts are one of the best ways humans have to include people whose voices aren’t being heard.

Second, she noted that in arts work she had done in San Antonio, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico, art could make people more aware of the places they live, and empower them to improve communities. And third, the arts can democratize knowledge. “It is a better way to make outside knowledge, that is being made in the university, and get it out in the proper way and socialize concepts around it,” she said.

In response to a question about the connection between art and citizenship in the Middle East from moderator Suse Anderson, an assistant professor of museum studies at George Washington University, Lyne Sneige, director of the Middle East Institute Arts & Culture Program, said that arts play huge roles in social transformations and in response to conflict. As illustrated by the Arab Spring, she said, “the arts have been the way in which younger generations have resisted in a non-violent way … and the way that they have really demanded that they be treated as citizens in a dignified and respectful way.”

The global arts consultant Gail Dexter Lord said that the arts constitute “a soft power” that influences people’s behavior as citizens through persuasion and agenda setting. Such persuasion can be good—she said that 19th-century novels fostered readers’ empathy and provided the foundation of the modern human rights movement. And she noted that cities around the world have become welcoming places where artists and newcomers can champion notions of citizenship that serve as a check on states that rely on the “hard power” of war and violence.

But, she added, people with ill intentions can also use the arts to try to persuade or set an agenda. “My theory is that art makes some people better citizens, and some people worse citizens,” she said.

So how are the arts and artists innovating to take up these myriad challenges to reach broader audiences? Moderator Seth Porges, a technology writer and television personality, led the day’s third panel in chewing over that question. For New Orleans-based visual artist Brandan “BMike” Odums, an answer has been doing stealth mural interventions in New Orleans public housing complexes that were abandoned in the wake of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster. Odums said he didn’t view these buildings as “blank canvasses” for making art, but as spaces that had histories and told pre-existing stories, and where a shared “level of struggle” was required of those wanting to share in the experience.

“You had to physically get dirty with the space and consequently to ask questions about what could be in that space and what should be in that space,” Odums said.

Lydia Steier, a Connecticut-born opera director who has been living and working in Europe for the last 15 years, emphasized the importance of having a public funding stream for the arts, as is far more common in European countries than the United States. That financial security allows for greater freedom to experiment with content and form, and permits occasional failure. In the United States, she said, the reliance on private money creates an artistic environment that is generally more conservative.

“The reason people [in America] think [opera] is an uncool art for uncool people is because you need funders who tend to be old rich white ladies,” Steier explained. “You’re looking at extremely traditional productions, corsets, the big wigs.”

Rosa Ferré, exhibitions chief at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, stressed the importance of helping audiences to grasp the relevance and context of artistic expression.

“I think that going to new audiences you need to have risk, you have to have the possibility of failure,” she said, recounting how hard it had been to persuade her board to do an exhibition on Big Data.

In a concluding keynote, Boon Hui Tan, the Asia Society’s vice president for global arts programming, warned against blockbuster exhibitions and attempts to define arts as global.

In this era, the former director of the Singapore Art Museum said, “the purpose of the arts is to awaken a sense of empathy—towards other lives.” With so many social, political, and economic forces creating a situation in which lines are drawn, “the purpose of the arts now is to scratch that line.” Specifically, that requires the arts to help build people’s “ability to read ambiguity,” though that is challenging because “the way things are funded” can encourage simplification or “dumbing down” of art.

“We need, across all sectors of art, to teach people how to engage with complex and ambiguous ideas,” he said.

He championed a “comparative approach” in which a specific locality connects its arts with those of a geographically or historically distant place. He mentioned efforts from Indonesia to Holland to do that kind of comparative work.

Finally, he argued that children’s exhibitions can be particularly powerful in reaching people, and he argued for creating physical spaces for communities (he noted powerful examples from Japan to France) and physical links between neighboring arts institutions so that people find their ways between them.

That brought the day full circle to a point made by emcee Michael Alexander several hours earlier, paraphrasing an observation made by late UCLA musicologist Charles Seeger. “The question is not whether the art is good,” Alexander said. “It’s what the art is good for.”

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Since that time our location has changed to a separate building; Hong Kong stopped being a British colony and became part of the People’s Republic of China. The way we apply our vision at the museum has changed considerably from what we started with. And it has prepared us to think about how museums work as more and more of humanity learns how to live in between the real and the virtual, the local and the global, the present and the past.

Back in 1962, Hong Kong was a British colony and the first curator was a British man named John Warner who put on an exhibit called “Hong Kong Art Today,” bringing together artists working in Chinese and Western media. This was the first time there had been a professional venue for art in Hong Kong. Before that artists showed in restaurants and artists working with Western media showed in churches or hotels that were not easily accessible to the public. So the show was a historic occasion, and a period of exchange, between two types of artists that did not usually show together and a public that did not usually get to see art. The museum continued to hold these shows and also granted awards to outstanding artists.

The museum was important then because we brought art works from overseas to show in Hong Kong, so that art lovers would have an opportunity to see them. At this time people didn’t travel the way they do now. Other museums soon opened in Hong Kong, so we stopped being the only one. Yet with the diverse collection that we built of Chinese antiquities, traditional Chinese paintings, and contemporary art, we saw ourselves as a convenient place to see art in all its plurality.

Admission to the museum has always been free, or very low-priced. From 1962 to 1990 we were free. In 1991 we moved to our new building in Tsim Sha Tsui and began charging $10HK, which is very low (about $1.25 in the U.S.). Since last August all government museums have been free again, although for blockbuster shows that we have to pay to bring here we do charge $20 to 30 HK.

Ever since the beginning, the core business of this museum has been free art education. We bring school children to the museum, which is important because Hong Kong doesn’t have art education at the grammar school level. Visual art is not considered pragmatic. So getting children to the museum is important because museum going has to start very early. If a child doesn’t go to a museum by the age of seven they’re unlikely go on their own when they’re older.

We are also here for general visitors to nurture an interest in art. In Hong Kong people do not think of museum-going as part of life. You really have to make an effort to go. There’s a different environment and context in Hong Kong than in some European countries where families often go to museums. I think that one reason is that some parents find it embarrassing when kids ask questions and they don’t know the answers. In the West, the parents often take children to art they don’t know and the family makes guesses together. In Hong Kong, parents are more reserved.

The other population we’re working with is the senior generation of retirees who are not educated in art but would like to be. Hong Kong’s population is aging and we will need to work with them in the coming years.

In the past we always talked about globalizing the museum. Did we meet global benchmarks, were we a global city? It used to be that we’d bring in exhibits from London, but traveling exhibits don’t make sense anymore. Hong Kong is obviously a very global city, and so people travel and whenever they go to London, for instance, they go to the British Museum. And there is a crushing sameness to global exhibits. I know that when I travel to see the art “biennials,” I’m always seeing the same thing and the same artists. When you get more globalized it’s harder to find anything different. And we have to stay different to be unique and sustainable.

When people came to realize that they cannot do without “local,” they invented the word “glocal” to be global and local as the same time. Yet “global” still came first. Instead, I’ve started thinking about doing “lobal” programming—really trying to put the local sensibility first in looking at a globalized situation. This is my current vision of the museum.

This shift to the local mirrors Hong Kong’s history. From the 1990’s through the early 2000’s the museum reflected the city’s status of being very cosmopolitan. But in 1997, at the time of the handover, there was a growing sense among young people of the importance of their local identity. They were very concerned about preserving local landmarks and old buildings. But don’t get me wrong in thinking that when we say “Hong Kong,” we are romanticizing the rural or being nostalgic. However, we began to look more at our own culture and nurture our own artists.

Hong Kong is so internationally-oriented that, by telling local stories in our programming, we inevitably end up telling the story of the world. Our collections, which draw from both the Chinese and the Western cultural tradition also fit Hong Kong’s history, style, and language.

So whether we’re bringing exhibits from mainland China or from Paris and London, we present them with a Hong Kong twist. We don’t use the canned exhibits; we feel we need to go deeper to make it particular to Hong Kong.

For example, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Return of Hong Kong to China, we’re showing an exhibit that comes from the Palace Museum in Beijing. It’s a collection of artwork and relics from the Yangxindian (the Hall of Mental Cultivation) —the working and living space of the emperors of the Qing Dynasty. Here, we’ve rebuilt the way visitors experience the exhibit. Before entering you’ll feel like you’re entering a palace. Instead of putting the objects in showcases, we put them in “real” settings as they used to be in the palace. We also created an immersive visual experience for visitors to appreciate not only the artifacts but to replicate the experience of a palace visit.

In all, it is not object-oriented, but a total viewing experience which starts even before you enter into the gallery. We’ve installed a grand staircase at the entrance of the museum as well as a courtyard leading up to the gallery. Above all, we promote the Hall as a “home-office” of the emperor, a concept that is more accessible to contemporary audiences, connecting historical narratives to modern terminology. Of course we also created an area where people can take photos of themselves in the hall to let them see themselves a part of history. Our approach was so different from the Palace Museum’s that they sent a film crew to document what we did and how we did it.

But we do the same thing with Western art. A few years ago there was a traveling exhibition of Andy Warhol. We decided to highlight his visit to Hong Kong in the 1980s. We placed his work “Silver Clouds”—a set of large pillow-shaped silver balloons—right at the entrance of the gallery. Going under the balloons to the exhibition area prepared visitors for an imaginative journey. They were venturing into the creative mind of the artist, and leaving the real world behind.

Right now, the museum is closed—we’ve been renovating for the past three years, and so we’ve used that time to go into the community. We’ve really focused on children and have developed different art appreciation programs that include a mobile museum that visits schools. And we’ve made a set of videos about local Hong Kong artists working in a wide range of media, including painting, conceptual art, ceramics, photography, seal-carving, etc. Hong Kong’s schools lack local teaching materials: Most have been developed in the West and though they include Van Gogh, they leave out local artists. Our hope is that Hong Kong children will enter into the art world through the visions of Hong Kong artists.

Understanding art, particularly in Hong Kong, where citizens must work with people and institutions all over the world, means creating new knowledge and new meanings. Juxtaposing art and our viewers’ experiences is a way to help people reach new understandings in a changing world. Often our work is to bring people in and show them things they know in a new, comparative way.

This style of experiencing art reminds me of Charles Darwin. Everyone saw layers of fossils but they never thought of how to make sense of them in a holistic and comparative way. And then Darwin came and he told a story of evolution that made sense of the layers of fossils. Conventionally, museum collections are classified in way that compartmentalizes knowledge in disconnected ways. Like Darwin, we’d like to consider things that others would not; we’d like to look at ideas less for how they “fit” but to see where they lead.

Hong Kong is strategically positioned. Living between China and the West, between the very old and the very new, it’s in the Hong Kong blood to be hybrid in the sense that we are used to playing around with culturally paradoxical concepts. So it’s natural for us to see in a comparative way. It’s the Hong Kong method!

This essay was transcribed from an interview.

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Over the last three decades, the term “arts participation” has essentially been understood as arts attendance within the non-profit arts field. The field’s key indicator of arts participation over this time has been attendance at any of the seven “benchmark” arts events: performances of ballet, musical and nonmusical theater, jazz, classical music, opera, and visiting an art museum—at least once a year as measured by the National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA) Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.

But in this century, rates of attendance at benchmark arts events in California have steadily declined. Even attendance at a wider range of arts events, extending beyond the benchmark arts, fell 10 percentage points between 2002 and 2012 in California.

Equally worrying, “benchmark” arts audiences do not resemble the population of the state; they are drawn disproportionately from those with higher incomes. In 2012 in California, 49 percent of arts attendees had household incomes of $75,000 or more—eight percentage points higher than the 41 percent of total California households earning that much. Arts attendees in California also had higher education levels; in 2012, 41 percent of them had at least a college degree, compared to 31 percent of the state’s population as a whole. Despite the fact that Hispanics have surpassed non-Hispanic whites as the largest portion of the state’s population, adult arts audiences remain 55 percent non-Hispanic white, even though this group comprises only 43 percent of the state’s total adult population. (These statistics draw from the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and more about them is available here.)

Despite such statistics, there is considerable evidence of deep interest in the arts among California’s highly diverse population. What does a more complete picture look like?

Two years ago, I led an effort, supported by The James Irvine Foundation, that used a more inclusive lens for looking at the landscape of artistic and cultural expression and experience in California. What we saw was profound, and involves the very meaning of arts and culture, and thus raises all kinds of questions about the future of the arts, of participation, and of the state itself. Detailed findings are available in two reports, A Closer Look at Arts Engagement in California and The Cultural Lives of Californians; here I highlight some key findings.

Arts participation today isn’t only about sitting in a concert hall or pondering a painting in a museum. Bikers light up a night ride in Santa Cruz in 2015. Photo courtesy of Richard Masoner/Flickr.

Across many different cultural contexts, two themes often appeared: choice and control.

For example, using the NEA’s 2012 survey we found that the most popular venue for California adults to attend arts was in a park or open-air facility. Approximately one in four California adults attended an art museum, craft fair or visual arts festival, historic park or monument, or outdoor performing arts festival.

These are all types of cultural events that tend to offer people control and choice over their own experience. They allow each person to handpick what to see and do, and afford degrees of flexibility as to when to arrive and depart, or whether or not to engage in different aspects of the event. Events that were less well-attended, according to the survey, were ones that tended to offer less control; they were activities that usually had precise starting and ending times, and that adhered to a set program.

Geography also influenced choice. Even after accounting for socioeconomic and demographic differences among regions, we found that adults living in the state’s large urban areas were more likely to attend arts events in general. These regions also tend to have the highest densities of non-profit arts organizations, suggesting that issues of access also may be affecting rates of participation. Attendance rates are significantly higher for California adults living in the state’s urban regions, compared to those living outside of those areas, specifically for visiting art museums, touring historic parks or monuments, and attending musical plays, classical music, and jazz performances. Urbanites also were more likely to create visual arts (although those living outside of these areas are more likely to make textile-based art, such as weaving, crocheting, quilting, needlepoint, knitting, or sewing).

There were other disparities in arts participation: Whites reported participating in art at the highest rates. But we found that educational attainment, age, income, immigrant status, and living in metropolitan areas are more important factors in determining arts participation than race or ethnicity. Indeed, the differences in participation among racial and ethnic groups could be largely explained by differences in education, household income, and an individual’s immigrant identity.

Most strikingly, one’s level of education was the strongest explanatory factor for differences in rates across all arts participation measures. Having at least a college degree was the single strongest predictor of whether one participates in the arts.

Can the digital revolution, a shift led by many California companies and institutions, change this? Trying to answer that question led to more questions.

We found that the most common form of arts participation among California adults, as measured in the NEA’s 2012 survey, was consuming arts through electronic media, including television, radio, computers, or handheld or mobile devices. Seventy-seven percent of adults accessed arts electronically. Back then, the rate of consuming arts was almost 1.5 times the rate at which California adults attend live arts events (53 percent) or make art (54 percent).

But five years ago is a long time. And the ways in which we describe and understand digital technologies as new means of consuming, interacting with, and creating art are evolving as technology changes. The ability to choose when and how to participate is central to the digital word. And that choice is in turn changing the definition of cultural participation, while enabling new forms of art. Platforms such as online gaming, crowdsourced art, writing and posting fan fiction, and sharing YouTube content (either self-created or otherwise) are forms of online cultural and arts participation.

And digital is only one force changing the meaning of arts participation. As attendance at benchmark events declines, arts participation through the making of art and creative expression is palpable. In 2012, 54 percent of California adults engaged in art making. The most commonly reported art making activity in California was social dancing (African Americans had the highest participation rates in social dance compared to any other activity measured in the NEA’s 2012 survey).

The range of artistic activities and forms of creative and cultural expression that are meaningful to Californians – and to people across the U.S. – demands that the term “arts participation” become more elastic. We must consider the many ways that people engage with art and artistic forms. For example, there are a large number and variety of folk arts in which people take part, though they have not traditionally been captured in arts participation studies. These activities often are passed along through family heritage. For example, an important part of traditional Hmong cultural activity, among Southeast Asian immigrants in the San Joaquin Valley, is a private home ceremony that involves playing the qeej, a bamboo mouth organ. (More about widening the aperture for what is considered arts participation is available here).

Not long ago, I conducted a study with Chinese and Chinese Americans in Chicago’s Chinatown who had reported low levels of arts participation in standard surveys. But in interviews for the study, they revealed their participation in a great variety of artistic and creative activities. For example, an interviewee shared that he had attended an exhibition of Chinese calligraphy at a library, but that he was not sure whether that could be counted and reported when he was asked a survey question about whether he had visited an art museum or gallery.

The gap between survey responses and the reality of our interviewee’s activities highlights the need for terms and research tools that better reflect what is happening in today’s society. The distinctions between artistic genres are blending and blurring over time. Art creators do not necessarily assign themselves to a genre or even a precise artistic form, and classifications are seemingly less relevant for audiences as other dimensions of arts experiences—particularly having more control and flexibility over arts activities and experiences—come to the fore.

This shift in the meaning and measurement of arts and culture is of course not just an issue for California. A UNESCO report in 2012 found:

“We are currently observing big changes and the rise of new cultural paradigms and behavior, armed with a set of research tools elaborated in the last century and adapted to analyze social life through a well-defined taxonomy that is every year less adequate for helping our understanding.”

Californians and California organizations could lead a fundamental reconceptualization of culture—in its forms, modes of interaction, sites of engagement, actors, and the roles it plays in community matters across California. This is a critical moment for posing new and fundamental questions that have the potential to shift traditional paradigms. We need to ask ourselves: What are the many artistic, creative and aesthetic forms that people engage in? And how can we describe and understand the multiple dimensions and variations in the experiences, settings, contexts, motivations, and benefits of individual engagement in this broad domain of activity that we used to call “the arts?”

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I learned more about how to do that a few months ago, through a show I curated called One World Exposition #like4like. The exhibition, which presented 18 millennial media artists from Hong Kong and mainland China, took place at K11, a shopping mall blended with art galleries. It attracted more than 15,000 visitors within two months. It also went massively viral on social media. During its two-month exhibition period, #like4like appeared in more than a thousand photographs by visitors and became the most hashtagged and geotagged exhibition on Instagram in Hong Kong.

What were the reasons for this success?

One reason is content. In recent years, the heated art market has transformed artwork into a highly profitable commodity, creating a phenomenon of excessive commoditization. Many artworks are produced to be desirable in the art market, resulting in many easy-on-the-eye artworks shown in exhibitions and art fairs. At a time when nonprofit institutions, commercial galleries and auction houses are undergoing a process of corporatization and global expansion, many argue that the disengagement of art has already taken place.

Hearse Delusional Mandala by the artist Lu Yang, shown at the exhibition One World Exposition #like4like. Courtesy of One World Exposition #like4like.

Because the content of the exhibition is widely different from the previous exhibitions at the mall, #like4like has proven that mainstream audiences crave something niche and aesthetically challenging. Apart from the frequent shoppers at K11, the show also attracted massive young audiences who do not typically attend art exhibitions. While the millennial generation has been called “socially conscious, value-driven, and forward-looking,” presenting works that echo the personal values of these youth can potentially turn them into visitors.

But interface is also important. In Hong Kong, where shopping malls proliferate, using them to bring art to the public makes a lot of sense. During the Art Basel month this year, almost every shopping mall in Hong Kong showed art—from masters such as Picasso to the contemporary digital artist Julius Popp. That means that for a Hong Kong audience, seeing art in their everyday lives is nothing new. Curators have to create an interface that transforms the audience’s everyday shopping experience.

When creating the #like4like exhibition, therefore, I integrated technology that encouraged viewers to communicate. While some galleries ban the use of cameras, #like4like used digital culture to promote audience engagement. We provided audiences with the use of Snapchat Spectacles to record and upload their exhibition experience in the “Memories” section of a Snapchat account. #like4like also included “selfie points” with signs, graphics, and mirrors designed to encourage the audience to photograph themselves.

One audience member took a picture of herself licking the mirror as if she was kissing herself; another audience member lay on the floor, initiating Buddha postures in response to a work about reincarnation. Through these immersive and Instagram-friendly exhibition designs, #like4like strived to break away from the uptightness visitors might feel in museums and galleries.

The exhibition also worked to transform the stereotype of selfies—as expressions of digital narcissism and an unrealistic desire for validation through social media. #like4like saw social media as part of the creative potential of self-expression. I wanted the exhibition to provide an interface where viewers could meet themselves.

As they did, they also provided publicity. The rise of social media and digital culture has desensitized younger generations to conventional promotion and marketing. Social power has become decentralized. Digital natives can make formerly fringe groups into powerhouses. Among this “crowdculture”—the term that Cultural Strategy Group founder Douglas Holt coined for the phenomenon—decisions are often driven by word of mouth, particularly if the sources of knowledge and advice are Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs, as they’re called), from politicians to celebrities to social media trend-setters with strong followings. (The Kardashians are KOLs.)

In the commercial world, brands collaborate with KOLs to extend their reach—but the art world has been slower to explore their impact. #like4like became popular among the younger generations in part through the power of the KOLs—which helped us reach a larger, younger audience. For example, one KOL from Hong Kong, called Poortravel, posted a picture of #like4like on Instagram, and within 24 hours, the post received over 9,000 “likes” and 300 comments. As commenters tagged their friends, the very nature of internet communication fostered promotion and engagement.

An Instagram photo taken by a visitor to the art exhibition One World Exposition #like4like. Courtesy of @gnitmiy/Instagram.

Instagram engagement, though, is about more than increasing audience. It’s also about allowing the audience to construct knowledge. Scholar of museum education George E. Hein describes the didactic learning model by which knowledge and information are often transmitted in museums as trying to “instill a specific message in the visiting public.” But this tactic is not the only possibility. #like4like adopts an inquiry-based approach. I crafted an exhibition design that focuses on visitors’ interactions with exhibits. This allows for informal learning among gallery-goers while promoting multiple interpretations of each work by tapping individual viewers’ knowledge and experience.

For example, hundreds of audience members took selfies in front of Chen Wei’s piece “Unprecedented Freedom”—which consists of a neon sign with the title words. “Freedom” immediately caught the attention of audiences, especially in relation to the British colonial legacy in Hong Kong. On Instagram, posts of and selfies with this piece were often captioned with ruminations about what freedom is or comments that directly relate the piece to Hong Kong politics. Other captions were more personal. One spent more than 100 words describing the viewer’s love story. The variety of these posts emphasized that there is no single correct interpretation for this or any work of art.

Now that digital media gives almost every member of a museum audience a platform, museums can welcome visitors as active interpreters. Social media allows “exhibitions” to extend beyond a physical space—to become an open, never-ending event completed by the audience. While opening up engagement opportunities, this phenomenon also reminds audiences that knowledge is always mediated.

The use of social media in #like4like was one of the exhibition’s significant accomplishments. Because of it, I felt like I took more from the audiences than what I offered through my curation. The show taught me that curators can and must use technologies to create more powerful connections among people. Technology can widen the scope of art exhibitions and the power of community engagement.

The post Our Exhibition Embraced Selfies, Snapchat, and Shopping Malls—and Went Viral appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, is a 64-year-old Canadian repertory theater company known for its productions of Shakespeare and other classic plays, Broadway musicals, and new work. We are, by most measures, pretty far from Suchitoto, El Salvador, an ancient town of 25,000 on a hillside, in a country still struggling with the aftershocks of a 12-year civil war and the fallout from a vicious, ongoing territorial battle among rival drug gangs.

We started the Suchitoto Project in 2009, about three years after meeting with representatives of Canadian University Student Overseas (CUSO), a highly respected aid agency that sends volunteers to help countries around the world. CUSO representatives saw parallels between Stratford and the city of Suchitito, which had begun holding a music festival and had plans to renovate a theater in order to expand its economy, create jobs and offer a better future to its young people through the arts.

As it happens, that’s exactly what the town of Stratford, Ontario, did in 1952. When the divisional rail shop announced its closure here, the local community decided to save the economy by opening a Shakespeare Festival. And, as crazy as the idea sounds, it worked.

After initial meetings with CUSO, we decided to share the Stratford dream and went down to El Salvador with our mayor, developing a tripartite agreement between the city, CUSO, and the Stratford Festival. Since that time we have raised money from corporations and individuals; we have put together a group of volunteers (currently run by festival scenic carpenter Mark Smith); and together with CUSO, we have sent more than 50 people to Suchitoto to work with young people to develop a wide variety of theatrical skills, many of which are transferrable, and to mount a number of productions.

When CUSO came to us about this project, we did not realize all the challenges ahead. We thought, “Oh, we’ll go down there and we’ll put on some plays!”—with a kind of sunny, imbecilic optimism. But there was great power in that, because that’s exactly what we did.

The Festival Theatre at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. Photo by Richard Bain. Courtesy of the Stratford Festival.

Suchitoto, despite being photogenic and tourist-friendly, has serious problems that Stratford does not. During the bitter 1980-1992 civil war between El Salvador’s right-wing government and the leftist guerrilla opposition, Suchitoto’s population leaned right-of-center, but the surrounding area was left-of-center. So the town was really caught in the middle. The guerrillas surrounded the entire area, and yet there were government troops in the city. It was a time of extreme violence and residents were even afraid to pick up the remains of the dead in the streets, lest they be targeted next.

The civil war is now ancient history and, with the average age in El Salvador quite young, the struggle has changed. Now gangs fight for control and are enlisting young people, funneling drugs and people through the country, and really acting as a government unto themselves.

When our volunteers travel to the area, they continually have to go through gang-held parts of the highways. Shortly before our first group of volunteers arrived, seven teenagers were assassinated. At one point our volunteers got a call from Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino asking: “Are we sure we’re still committed to doing this?”

And we were, because we are optimists. We helped them develop and mount their first project, Voces de Los Cerros or Voices from the Hills, a reimagining of a Mayan folk tale. After the opening night, we had a huge party with hundreds of people celebrating with us. We were surprised to see pockets of people who were just weeping and holding onto one another. We didn’t understand the significance of this until the mayor of Suchitoto told us that those people hadn’t spoken to each other in nearly 20 years because they were on opposite sides of the civil war. But now, because their children were working together, it was leading them to put their differences behind them.

 So far we’ve had 12 full-scale productions. Five of those were classics, including some Shakespeare and Moliere plays and others from the Golden Age of Spanish drama. They did a production of Lope de Vega’s 1619 play Fuente Ovejuna, which is about a town besieged by warlords, and instead we made it about gangs. The local police chief was really taken by it. At first he wondered why the young actors were all dressed up like gang members–but then he came around! The kids also like writing their own work, especially based on their own experiences and observations with such issues as gang violence, poverty, and homelessness.
 
A large number of Festival staff have gone down to Suchitoto, including teaching artist Edward Daranyi who, since the project’s inception, has spent many months each year training and directing the young actors. We have sent propmakers, wardrobe people, electricians, lighting and sound technicians, actors, coaches, designers, administrators—people from every corner of the organization. And we have had people from the program here to North America—to Stratford, Toronto, and Washington, D.C.

Performers involved in the Suchitoto Project. Photo by Tito Hasbun. Courtesy of the Stratford Festival.

Estela Abrego was in our first group. She was a single mother and her family wasn’t happy that she wanted to enroll in the program. Seeing no merit in the arts, they thought her decision showed a lack of responsibility and were threatening to take away her young son, who was eight or nine, if she persisted.

To solve the problem, the artistic director at the time in El Salvador offered to let Estela’s son join the program along with his mother, even though he was younger than the adolescent age group we target. Fast forward, he’s now a budding young star and he came up for the International Festival of Children’s Theatre here in Stratford last year. Estela is one of the leaders in the program now; she writes plays and is the vice president of the governing board.

While tourism is growing in Suchitoto, we haven’t yet developed the infrastructure for consistent performances that would generate revenue among the tourism base. But that’s on the economic front.

For us, the real miracle has been in human-development and youth-engagement—giving them options as they move forward in life. Their advancement doesn’t always have to do with the arts. They have developed reading and writing skills, as well as critical thinking, and the hard skills that are part of what we do, such as carpentry and electrical work. It’s enough to spark interest in these students to imagine their lives differently.

One student is now a recording artist. Another has gone into design and is a student in the University of El Salvador’s new costume design program. She is making all kinds of costumes and wedding dresses in the community.

Some of the youth involved in the project are now writing their own plays and have formed an acting company. They’re being hired by different NGOs in-country to write plays that are socially responsive to things that they face, like anti-violence, gender equality, youth inclusion, and teenage pregnancy.

I think our greatest joy is that we’ve invited the youth in the program to teach us and we’re learning with them. We’ve brought our skills down and they’ve taken us up on the challenge, and now they’re the ones that are dictating the way that we go. We’re always inviting the question, “What do you want to do now?”

The post Staging a Life-Changing Project in El Salvador with Canada’s Stratford Festival appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The short answer: They have a lot to do with each other, and the relationship can have very positive effects.

How? The arts revolve around emotions. Democracy, on the other hand, corresponds to politics that, in a strict sense, should be grounded in rational decision-making. But the separation of rational decisions and emotions is not so simple. At their best, art and politics are not about manipulating feelings to produce political effects, but about activating emotions to “move” people to feel part of a community.

Democracy is based on popular sovereignty and the idea that citizenship requires effective channels to participate in the processes of political decision-making. Political debates alone do not produce much desire for people to feel a form of being “called” to action. But politics can do more than call; politics can excite, so that the called person feels a part of that community where he or she is going to make contributions and to define political decisions that transform a concrete reality.

Participation in democracy is often identified with voting, either to elect representatives or to make a decision in a referendum. Voting is the icon of democracy and it seems that democracy is reduced to that liturgical event.

However, we must recognize that there is another dimension of the democratic system that does not consist only in voting. Moreover, I dare say that voting is the least important aspect of democracy (and perhaps even an unnecessary one—but that is another story).

I am talking about the deliberative or dialogical dimension of democracy, in which the important thing is the debate, the contrast of arguments, the sharing of different opinions to build proposals or make contributions to certain public actions that affect the whole of the citizenship. To facilitate this type of action, the arts, particularly the performing arts (theater, dance, cinema, circus), are profoundly useful to the democratic journey.

Here in Barcelona, ​​where I am the city’s commissioner of citizen participation, we have lived the experience of seeing citizen participation rise from the production of small plays, filming a documentary, organizing photographic exhibitions, dancing (as a means of transmitting emotions), and reading poems. Mural paintings have been used to collectively express feelings or ideas about improvement in neighborhoods or the city as a whole.

In late 2015 and early 2016, we supported a process of participation that combined performing arts with debates on different themes to help develop our city legislature’s Municipal Action Program for the next four years. The combination of these actions—participation and the arts—can have a lot of impact in the places where they occur and on the people who are part of them. And that can foster a greater degree of collective involvement. This is the phenomenon of “communitarization”, of feeling part of the group, of joining forces with something greater than one’s own friends and family.

It’s important to be clear: The use of the arts to promote citizen participation should not be confused with the actions of some political lobbies that play to emotions and stimulate cognitive frameworks in order to provoke reactions favorable to their own interests. Day by day, cities are plagued by efforts of this type.

What we need, instead, is to foster a relationship of the arts to democracy in a purer, more human sense. This is about recognizing the spiritual slope of every person, his or her emotional layers, which may be more or less active, more or less asleep. Once the existence of this spiritual layer is recognized, and activated in a positive way, it can favor creativity in the search for solutions to community problems.

It is true that on many occasions, citizens often face these artistic manifestations in a democracy in a passive way, and let the “artists” take the lead in moving, or not moving, emotions. I don’t wish to take anything away from such passive use of the arts, but it’s important to say that citizens can be active subjects in performing theater or dance, or making a painting, just as they can be active agents in their own governance.

In 1955, a Spanish poet, Gabriel Celaya, of the so-called Generation of ’27 that fought in the Republican ranks during the Spanish Civil War, wrote a poem titled “Poetry is a weapon loaded with future.” One of its verses reads:

The qualities that Celaya attributed to poetry in this text, I think, are attributable to all arts in general. They are manifestations of the spirit that should not appear as neutral (in reality, they never are). Instead, they should be that higher if muddled spirit that emerges from the mud of life to favor the involvement of people in collective processes and actions.

To take part in Celaya’s sense of poetry does not mean to make a flag of any concrete political option, but to keep our eyes open on everything that affects people, especially that which produces suffering, and which generates injustice and inequality. To take sides is to recognize that we live in an unequal society and that, for a decent coexistence to be attained, we must take sides for justice, equality and democracy.

Certainly art, such as written or spoken language itself, may serve to make precious love poems, or to stimulate the most terrible and inhuman actions. But let us also reflect on the human and humanizing potential that it can exert in political decision-making processes. And in strengthening democracy.

The post By Engaging Our Emotions, Art Can Strengthen Our Democracies appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The most recent show (PRH’s 46th) featured the group Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, whose installations dealt with issues like police brutality and the importance of physical self-care. The visiting artists helped to organize a Houston chapter of their group while they were in residency.
 
The second lesson, then, is to consider and reflect the community that you’re in. Project Row Houses gives black artists a much needed platform in a historically black neighborhood. The art is physically very accessible to local residents, and the works at hand respond directly to the surroundings they were created in, providing a common point of reference no matter how esoteric the end product might be. The art now reaches beyond the homes, as well. This spring, Project Row Houses co-presented a performance and installation by Kevin Beasley in the Third Ward’s defunct Eldorado Ballroom, an iconic venue for jazz and blues from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Project Row Houses, an art space in Houston’s historically black Third Ward, where the “shotgun” style of home-building predominates. Courtesy of Flickr.

What tends to grab the attention of outsiders is the next step Project Row Houses took after securing the homes and infusing them with art: the establishment of the Young Mothers Residential Program. Eight of the renovated shotgun homes were subsequently designated as subsidized housing for single mothers between the ages of 18 and 26, and their children. To be eligible to live there, these low-income mothers must work and pursue higher education, and their children must be enrolled in daycare or school. The mothers are deeply integrated with the artists, and are encouraged to apply the creative process and artistic expression to their own lives. They also represent a crucial part of the audiences for the arts at Project Row Houses.
 
This program has been a springboard for PRH’s involvement in other issues in the Third Ward: There are tutoring nights for local schoolkids, an incubator and semi-annual community market for local small businesses, and a partnership with Rice University to design and build sustainable new housing options. That Rice partnership has created 72 rental units for low-income residents that are managed by sister organization Row House Community Development Corporation.
 
This leads to the third and trickiest lesson, but the one with the deepest potential: Social safety nets are part of an arts community, too. That doesn’t mean that any old arts organization should start a soup kitchen in its basement. Instead, each arts group must carefully observe and consider its community and its environment, and then make something that fits that context.
 
“You respond to what’s in front of you and you make something out of it,” Lowe said on Social Design Insights. Project Row Houses, he added, “positioned the community as art, the people as art, and everyone all the time working on their art, which is their life.” Nikil Saval, writing for T Magazine, called PRH “one of the most original and ambitious works of art of the past century.” In 2014, Lowe was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship “genius” grant, which helps fund Project Row Houses.
 
Project Row Houses is part of a bigger story in Houston. Like so many neighborhoods where artists have made a concerted investment of time, creativity and resources, the Third Ward has seen substantial development over the past 15 or so years, including an upcoming $33 million renovation of nearby Emancipation Park, complete with a community center. Gentrification is now a real concern in the Third Ward, and PRH’s next move will be figuring out how to exist in an area where displacement, instead of disinvestment, is the driving community concern.

The post Turning Low-Income Housing into Art appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Spin the wheel until it stops. For the next ten minutes try to feel what it would be like to be in someone else’s shoes. In case you land on your own identity, spin again.

Notice your reaction to the result. Do whatever you were about to do in the next 10 minutes, just imagine yourself in that person’s shoes. If you wish to share your experience please use eye contact or #HiddenFortuneWheel.

I spun the wheel.

For weeks I had been pondering Zócalo Public Square’s invitation to write about arts engagement, specifically about approaches to building arts audiences.

The term “audience” means something very specific to me, as a performer: a person or group of people observing, probably passively, performers who are providing a product like entertainment or experience. The audience may or may not have bought a ticket. Either way, there is a transactional nature to the relationship that—especially if the audience has paid—somehow smacks of the reversal of the balance of power, as if the artists are begging the audience for their attention.

“Hidden Fortune Wheel” by Ori Alon and Ana Azzue Gallira. Photo by Priya Sircar.

As a dancer, I’m used to this: I often feel in the dance field, we’re begging audiences to sample our wares. And while most performers will tell you that, in return, we get an unparalleled thrill from our audiences through live performance, there is still that element of seeking—whether we seek ticket sales, a full house, applause, or all of the above.

But in my role as a consultant to arts organizations who interface with the public, I generally prefer to use terms that connote service—like “constituents” or “community/-ies”—rather than “audience.” Arts and cultural organizations exist to serve their community or constituency in whatever ways those are defined by the organization. Service implies that the service provider offers something that the consumer actually wants or needs. In other words, we provide something of value rather than something frivolous or extraneous. (Boosting the value Americans place on arts and culture is an ongoing challenge as any arts practitioner knows. While that should not be the goal of arts engagement, it could be a byproduct.)

Communities may be defined by external factors, like geographic boundaries, or internal ones, like shared identities or goals. In my consulting work, I often encounter divides within communities. It’s crucial to listen to how communities define themselves and discover which communities exist within others.

If “community” is a more suitable word than “audience” to describe the people served by arts organizations, then is “community engagement” a synonym for “building arts audiences”? Not exactly.

Doug Borwick, of ArtsEngaged, describes activities undertaken by arts organizations: audience development, audience engagement, and community engagement. To summarize, audience development comprises activities “undertaken … as part of a marketing strategy to produce immediate results,” such as sales and donations, in which the principal beneficiary is the arts organization. Audience engagement comprises activities “as part of a marketing strategy designed to deepen relationships with current stakeholders … to improve retention, increase frequency and expand reach,” where the principal beneficiary is the arts organization. Meanwhile, community engagement comprises mission-driven activities “to build deep relationships between the organization and the communities in which it operates” to achieve mutual benefit, based on developing trust and understanding.

I would take it one step further: All arts engagement should be community engagement, because arts organizations should exist to benefit—or serve—their communities, however those communities are defined and whatever form that service takes. The benefit to the arts organization is a moot point, since any benefit to an arts organization is in support of continuing to serve its community or communities.

So, what does service through community engagement look like?

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, takes an interesting approach through its Process Lab, which currently invites visitors to participate in their Citizen Design exhibit. Individually and collectively, participants in Citizen Design take part in an exercise that illuminates design processes while generating ideas for addressing social issues identified by the participants themselves. An example might be addressing accessibility through alternative transportation options. The exhibit gives visitors the opportunity to play with the processes that designers use to solve problems while “envisioning a better America.” Whether or not the resulting ideas are acted upon following the exhibit’s closing in September 2017, the experience of participatory design has the potential to help visitors see and think differently about how to solve community problems in a semi-collective way and, perhaps, to help them feel empowered to do so.

Last November, I was fortunate to organize and moderate a panel that included Chanon Judson of Urban Bush Women and Ebony Noelle Golden of Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative. In a powerful performance of Urban Bush Women’s origin story, Judson described UBW’s practice of engaging communities reciprocally, which begins with listening first and then involving communities in co-creation with the artists of UBW. Golden, a frequent collaborator of UBW, shared the notion of community as family, “a team that can get something done.”

Golden also stressed that, in her work as a cultural strategist, she applies the notion of “radical imagination”—not just how we see the world but how we see the opportunity to change the world. We explored the difference, if any, between “change” and “transformation.” Semantics aside, Golden offered a working distinction: Change occurs on an individual level whereas transformation occurs systemically as a result of individual changes.

Whether the goal of an artist or an arts organization is change or transformation, whether it is to make an impact on the individual or systemic level, the process starts with seeing—seeing things differently, or seeing something at all.

Thoughtful engagement done in service to the community, and often with the community, has the power to make us see things—and each other—differently. So, while “community engagement” isn’t a synonym for “building arts audiences,” it should replace the latter as our goal.

Of course not all art has to be community-based or community development, but arts organizations, which act as conduits between art and the public, need to look at all of their activities through a community engagement lens to ensure they continue to have a reason for being.

The pinwheel landed on Indigenous. Hmm, I thought. Okay. And then, in my excitement at finding this example of arts engagement in the wild, I immediately forgot the instructions and instead examined the pinwheel and the rest of the sign, then fairly skipped home as I reflected on what it all meant. I wondered how many people who saw the pinwheel actually spun it, and how many put themselves in the other person’s shoes for ten minutes (or for any minutes). At home, I looked up the artist’s website and the Instagram hashtag.

Was the Hidden Fortune Wheel successful? Did it get me to put myself in an indigenous person’s frame of mind? Not yet. Did it engage me, get me to think critically and to see something in a new way? Absolutely. As James Baldwin said: “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” Lover, artist—I’d add arts organization to that mix. And perhaps to the pinwheel.

The post Spin the Wheel and Land on Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As an American arts journalist living in London, I have always appreciated what a luxury it is to have access to a repertory company whose government funding means I can go to stellar productions at reasonable ticket prices. But since it is funded by taxpayers from all over Britain, the National Theatre also has had a challenge: how to be truly national, accessible to audiences around the United Kingdom, not just those within easy reach of its base in the capital.

The NT has amply repaid the public’s investment with financial blockbusters (and artistic landmarks) such as War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The History Boys, and One Man, Two Guvnors. Its productions range from canon stalwarts like Shakespeare and Ibsen to collaborations with groundbreaking experimental companies like Complicité, Kneehigh, and DV8. It’s also where, thanks to long-standing relationships, theatrical luminaries like Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, David Hare, and Mike Leigh premiere their latest works.

For all its successes, the NT has been acutely aware of the need to expand audiences beyond its middle-class base. The NT first experimented with touring productions in 1979, sending out a stripped-down version of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle to 20 arts venues around the country, with no costumes, sets, or props beside those provided by the venues. (Full-fledged productions now go around the world.)

And thanks to state-funded subsidies (which are generous by U.S. standards, but subject to considerable cutting depending on the government of the day), top prices for productions on the two mainstages hover around £65, or $103. An ongoing sponsorship arrangement with Travelex means selected productions offer a limited number of £15 tickets.

There has also been outreach to new audiences both in terms of non-traditional casting and in commissioning new works by playwrights from diverse backgrounds. But the NT’s most successful scheme for broadening its audience has been the NT Live simulcast.

The National Theatre’s production of War Horse was one of those broadcast to cinemas around the world. Photo courtesy of Peter Trimming/Flickr.

NT Live began in 2009, the brainchild of then-artistic director Nicholas Hytner, who started with a screening of Racine’s Phèdre starring Helen Mirren that was beamed live-by-satellite to some 50 UK cinemas, where it was seen by approximately 50,000 people.

“The objective is greater access,” Hytner told The Guardian at the time. “It will be a relatively expensive operation [the cost of those first broadcasts was £50,000] but we need to see whether there is a call for this. I keep thinking that if Olivier’s National Theatre had been available in a cinema in Manchester when I was a teenager I’d have gone every time and it would have been fantastic.”

It wasn’t an entirely new concept, of course. As long ago as 1964, a performance of a modern-dress Hamlet directed by John Gielgud with Richard Burton in the title role was filmed during its run at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne theater and distributed to movie theaters, but the visual quality left something to be desired.

The as-live performance concept was truly pioneered by the Metropolitan Opera—which began simulcasts in 2006 (by 2008 more people had seen the Met in a movie theater than in the opera house). The Met inspired other arts institutions like La Scala, The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet, The Bolshoi Ballet, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic (which started a simulcast program in 2011 but sadly had to cancel it two seasons later) to follow in their footsteps. It was in fact a Met cinema simulcast that convinced the National Theatre top brass the concept would work, although they still had their doubts whether an art form that didn’t involve music would be equally successful.

To avoid a static, overly-stagey feel while maintaining the immediacy of the theatrical experience, the NT Live broadcasts are multi-camera shoots in front of a live audience. Two fixed cameras, two tracking cameras, a crane and a Steadicam plus 16 microphones are positioned carefully throughout the auditorium, so the screen audience, as they would in person, looks at the stage from different angles (with guaranteed excellent sightlines). To create a fully-integrated experience, the camera script is devised in tandem with stage rehearsals. Sound levels, makeup, and even wigs (built-to-last theater wigs can look artificially stiff on camera) are tweaked.

Initially it was estimated that NT Live would need to reach 500 screens worldwide to cover average costs of £200,000 per broadcast. Since that first year, when the project lost £30,000, the NT Live broadcasts have been seen by over 6.5 million people and the number of venues has grown to 2,500, with 700 in the UK alone, representing one-third of the country’s movie theaters. The rest are in 60 other countries (international distribution is handled in partnership with BY Experience, a company that specializes in “live cinema events”) and the screenings now realize what the NT calls “a modest profit.”

The international expansion initially focused on English-speaking territories, but screenings are now offered with local language subtitles in almost 10 languages. And while venues initially were limited to arthouse and independent cinemas, the roster has grown to include multiplex screens. Ticket prices are set by the venues themselves, with pricing seeking a balance between the cost of a local cinema ticket and the cost of a live ticket for the same production. UK NT Live prices are currently around £20.

The growth in venues has been fueled by a combination of the National’s outreach to exhibitors and vice-versa. The commitment to live broadcasts (or “as live” for venues in other time zones or for encore screenings) has been maintained, with the NT resisting the siren call of a VOD or streaming model because, as an NT spokesperson said, “We are passionate about preserving the live, communal experience and the sense of event through these big screen exhibitions.”

While recent live television broadcasts in the United States have tended toward family-friendly musicals like Hairspray and Newsies, the National is dedicated to providing more serious, challenging fare as well as the crowd-pleasers, new plays as well as war horses (or indeed War Horse). Hytner declared that, “Playing dangerous, keeping grit always in the oyster, seems to me absolutely essential,” so productions have ranged from Coriolanus, Hedda Gabler, and Yerma to Peter Pan and Amadeus. The biggest draws have usually involved some element of star power, whether Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch in Frankenstein, Ralph Fiennes in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, or Nathan Lane and Andrew Garfield in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.

As early as 2011, when it broadcast Complicité’s A Disappearing Number from the Theatre Royal Plymouth in the south of England, the NT partnered with other theater companies and regional theaters. Co-productions have included A Streetcar Named Desire starring Gillian Anderson from the Young Vic and Les Liaisons Dangereuses starring Dominic West and Janet McTeer from the Donmar Warehouse. NT Live’s biggest single broadcast to date, seen by more than 550,000 people, was Hamlet with Benedict Cumberbatch, a Barbican Theatre production. It even occasionally ventures into the commercial theater, broadcasting Peter Morgan’s The Audience and Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen from the West End, London’s equivalent of Broadway.

Fears that the digital broadcasts would reduce the incentive to see live performances proved unfounded. Research commissioned by Arts Council England showed that more people are likely to visit their local theater after seeing an NT Live screening.

The same study found that, far from reducing actual theater audiences, NT Live has generated larger audiences for live performances at regional repertory theaters and reached new audiences who have never previously attended a live National Theatre production. (The full study with further conclusions relating to pricing, marketing, development, and production can be found here.)

The success of NT Live has shown that digital technology need not drain audiences from live theater but, harnessed properly, can enhance them.

The post Bringing Shakespeare and Shaw Live from the Stage to the Screen appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Can you get closer to art by walking?

Grand Tour is an art project of the Contemporary Art Center Nau Côclea in Camallera, Catalunya, Spain, where I work. The tour consists of a 250-kilometer, three-week walk shared by people and artists of all kinds.

Every day people walk about 15 to 25 kilometers along with an artist or a group of artists who have prepared something for them. The path follows a topographical spiral down and around the region, crossing urban and rural areas, natural landscapes, and seaside or mountain trails. Both during the walk and at stops, the artists perform and make their artistic interventions—poetry, dance, installations, music. Day and night.

The trip is open to the public and offered in all possible formats: People can walk every day, or they can just do two or three days, or they can simply show up at a meeting point and enjoy the performance. Walkers can start or stop their journey at any time and adapt their trip to their personal plans. Grand Tour is a project for all types of audiences—families with children and solo travelers, old and young, experienced walkers and beginners.

Grand Tour was the name of the trip made in previous centuries by young artists and wealthy non-artists to discover Europe’s heritage. Every traveler had their own “Grand Tour,” an itinerary that combined visits to inescapable sites—the ruins of Rome, the streets of Paris, the paintings of the Flemish Primitives in Amsterdam and Bruges, the palaces of Florence and Venice—with stops that were more personal and idiosyncratic. The Grand Tour had a sense of initiation and ritual; young men and women were leaving home for the first time.

Map detail showing the walking route taken by participants of the Grand Tour, in northeastern Spain, near the border with France. Image courtesy of Grand Tour.

Today, tourism can be disappointing and leave you feeling impoverished. Why does it seem that the farther we go, the more we encounter the same globalized culture and environment? But there are still a thousand places and a thousand corners to discover in an intense and deeply experiential way. We each can make a real personal trip of artistic discovery. And that’s why the Grand Tour is still alive.

Today we make the Grand Tour on foot because we think that traveling is much more than just getting yourself to a particular place. Travel and touring bring us closer to everything external to us and thus make us see the world from the outside. Inevitably, we contrast the places and arts we encounter with our daily realities, and observe ourselves anew.

Discovery has an important role in this process. It is one thing to go to a place where you expect to see something. But it is something else entirely, something more transporting, to interrogate space and time because you guess that at any moment some wonder might happen.

The most characteristic feature of the Grand Tour is the creation of a process in which time does not count. There are so many places and people—artists, artisans, craftsmen, and other walkers—who may be very close in proximity to us, but we do not know them because we cannot give them the necessary time. The road offers time to the walker. This is often the greatest gift.

There is more: When artists and the public walk together, eat together, get tired, and rest together, creation becomes part of daily life, and the boundaries that separate artists from their audiences are completely blurred. A community that shares a path for a few days is neither a group of artists nor an audience but something halfway in between. It is a nomadic caravan that modifies, at least temporarily, the behavior of all participants. When all the members of a group commit to the same experience, the group changes. It becomes a provisional but solid society able to create and to produce art. Each work of art needs its audiences, its community.

The openness to receiving creation and art was what I sought in creating the Grand Tour. After many years of curatorial work in sound art and visual arts, I was feeling worried about the low level of reception at the Contemporary Art Center Nau Côclea. People walked through the exhibitions looking here and there and seeming a little distracted; their experiences lacked moments of intensity and intimacy. We detected a very great distance between the passion in the work of the artists and the relatively weak emotional capacity of the public. “To consume art” is not the same thing as being close to it. And “to consume quickly” does not allow for capturing the tempo or the soul of the art. Something had to be done.

We began to imagine site-specific presentations of art, bringing art to different locations, outside the museum. This would require a kind of pilgrimage by the visitor, a form of displacement. That was what we sought. We suspected that the act of going to the art had the power to transform the people’s approach to art. We had some clues in the work of artists such as Alícia Casadesús or Perejaume, who work in nature and who lead the public to the places where they want the work to be discovered. Some walking practices like those of Deriva Mussol (by Eva Marichalar-Freixa and Jordi Lafon in Catalunya) or Francis Alÿs or the more communitarian approach of Walking Women point in the same direction.

I myself have made many trips on foot—in the Pyrenees mountains, walking the border between Spain and France, in the Andalusian Sierra de Aracena, following the paths of the shepherds and the muleteers of the old times, or just walking from the home of one artist to the home of another and allowing them to lead me through their favorite paths and places. From walking I know how wonderful are the transformations the journey produces in the mind and the traveler’s gaze. The Grand Tour idea was exciting from the outset.

The project started in 2015. The first voyage began from the Contemporary Art Center Nau Côclea and toured various regions of Catalunya. In 2016 a tour along the coast in a northerly direction led us to France where we walked west. We crossed the border again and finished our trip in Ripoll. So far, 200 artists and 400 walkers have accompanied us, and some 2,000 people from across Europe and all over the world have come to share some of our activities at some point of the journey.

Walkers have to register at the Grand Tour website to join the trip. They pay for their own accommodations at the camping sites and mountain huts where we stop every day. From stop to stop, walkers carry some food and water for the day; the rest they get at destinations. They also pay 10 euros per day to cover a van carrying heavy bags and tents and accident insurance. Artists’ fees are paid partly with this money and partly with sponsored funding.

Each year, the Grand Tour program offers a residency grant to an artist for a project related to walking as an artistic practice. So we have been accompanied in Grand Tour by the Romanian Paula Onet, who in 2016 made walkers into actors in the filming of her documentary about Peter, the man with restless legs syndrome, who could not stop walking and had to travel on foot to survive. In 2017 we expect a lot from the project of the Dutch artist Monique Besten. She is now doing a virtual walk on the internet and this summer will overlap that with a real physical walk. In this, she is following the practice of the explorers who prepared with books, maps, and other traveler’s chronicles before they left on their remote travels.

For this summer, a small group has already formed from the two former trips that will act as the core of the event and inspire new walkers. They have a Facebook group called “Gran Tour, participants caminants.” On August 26, we will leave the sanctuary of Núria in the Pyrenees and walk for three weeks to the mountain of Montserrat, a very important, symbolic, and polysemic site for the Catalans. We will travel 290 kilometers by mountains, industrial zones, rivers, cities, and farmlands together with musicians, poets, live artists, performers, and visual artists. We will be a nomadic art brotherhood and sisterhood in search of our own Grand Tour.

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