(The following edited keynote presentation was re-constructed by Dudley Cocke from his speaking notes, the notes of Barbara Whitney, who attended the session, and from audio recordings of several sections of the presentation.)

A Call for Experimentation: Why Ensembles Are Especially Ready to Lead the American Theater into a New Period of Discovery
A Keynote Conversation with Dudley Cocke from the Network of Ensemble Theaters Festival held July 23, 2003 at Amherst College

Good morning. I’m hoping that this will be a relatively painless keynote, so let’s have it as a conversation, figuring that will help. If anyone wants to see what I’m fixing to say, here are the notes for my talk. Feel free to take one. That way if I get a little tedious, you can skip ahead to see what I’m going to say.

The title of this conversation is A Call for Experimentation: Why Ensembles Are Especially Ready to Lead the American Theater into a New Period of Discovery. (I hit on period of discovery since it’s the Lewis and Clark bicentennial, and because I do believe that NET can lead the American theater into an exciting new period.)

I’m going to follow my outline, picking it up point by point, and what I’d like to hear from you are questions and comments. Please do not hesitate to disagree, or to elaborate. We may not be able to resolve all the disagreements, but we at least want to name issues for later consideration.

I was talking to a colleague the other day: “I really think these networks and associations are counter-productive and a bad idea,” he said. (He was specifically referring to foundation grantmaker associations, like Grantmakers for the Environment and Grantmakers in the Arts.) And I asked, “Why?” “Because they encourage group-think,” he said. And I said, “Oh, alright.” So with that caution in mind – for NET, I don’t see that as an immediate problem – I do think we owe it to ourselves to debate things and to get the issues out. No reason not to – there’s plenty of safety here to disagree. That’s really what our work with ensembles is about in many ways – asking questions. And you don’t need to go through any formality to speak-up – just interrupt me. Hey, in the theater, timing is everything.

The first thing I’ve done is outline the assumptions that I made when considering NET’s future. I’ve been thinking about this future for a couple of months and talking to Bob and several others about just what NET might be. I come from 28 years of doing this work and have been in on the founding of other networks – Alternate ROOTS in ’76, the American Festival Project in ’81 with Naomi and others in San Francisco, and then the Global Network for Cultural Rights at the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York, to name three. You’ll have to decide if I’m any the wiser for it.

First, the general assumption upon which my argument is based: The history of theater not as chronology or anecdote but the study of the creative act itself – the process of making art. That assumption frames what follows. Any questions about this general assumption?

With this framework in mind, I made several specific assumptions about NET’s future. First, ensemble theaters are presently the most experimental cohort in the not-for-profit American theater, especially when experimental is broadly defined to include the full range of theatrical practice. Here I’m not talking just about NET’s membership, of course, because the ensemble universe is much larger than NET. I’m making this claim for ensemble theater as a whole. And I think that in the last couple of days we’ve heard some definition of what sets ensembles apart from other types of theater. I’d like to make the claim that ensembles have a bright future, because the regional theater model is based on the assembly line – bringing the various pieces together in one place to assemble a play, which of course is based on Henry Ford’s Michigan motor works. As that manufacturing model disappears in our new wired, information economy, I expect the average person will eventually forget that’s the way things were once done. The ensemble model has a bright future because it will more closely mirror the economic model that is coming down the pike. Young theater-makers 50 years from now won’t really appreciate the assembly line.

If ensemble theaters are presently the most experimental cohort in the not-for-profit theater, we in NET have a special obligation to be inclusive of what I will call intellectual and aesthetic diversity. Since we want to make the claim of being adventuresome, I think the more intellectual and aesthetic diversity we can bring into NET, the better for our purposes. Some of the key ways to get at that inclusion are through race, place, and class diversity. Intellectual and aesthetic diversity are high-sounding concepts, but one place they reside is in diversity of race/ethnicity, place, and class.

My second assumption is: The national service organization for ensemble theaters is Theatre Communications Group. I make this assumption because I don’t think it’s in NET’s best interest to set up an entire administrative structure to try to do what TCG should be doing for us. As you’ll see as I develop my argument, I’m really pushing for us to focus on the art, saying that making theater is what NET is going to be known for. Not known because we’re a great advocacy organization, not because we get our newsletter out on time, and so forth. All those things we may find that we need, but in my proposal they would be directed at the art making itself. If we set about it right in NET, we can get TCG to do the other important pieces of work for us. I think they want to do it, but it’s a matter of engaging them. And my practical suggestion is that when we get organized, we assign someone who can get to New York City regularly - someone eager to stay on the TCG case - to go talk to TCG once a month to tell them what’s happening with ensembles. TCG has a host of services important to us, and I think there’s now a receptiveness among its membership and on the TCG board because they’re feeling a little bit under the strain of the old industrial model. They are attracted to the company model.

Just a reminder – these are all proposals I’m putting out here for you to sift.

My next assumption: NET is at a stage in its development when its purpose and operating principles need to be clearly stated for adoption by its membership. We hear a lot about this, and it seems to be a consensus among the NET leadership that this needs to happen. I’m reminded of something the naturalist Francis Bacon said, “Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.” Lord knows we’re not afraid of error in the ensemble movement, but we could do ourselves a favor by corralling our confusion.

Those are my three specific assumptions. I now want to move on to what I am proposing, beginning with the NET charter: NET will formally evaluate its mission and operating principles every 4th year, at which time a new proposal of purpose and principles will be adopted by a three-quarters majority of the membership. What I’m proposing is that we decide on a mission and purpose for a discreet period of time, and then periodically we, the full membership, come together, assess that purpose, restate a purpose and mission, which then three-fourths of the members have to approve in a formal vote.

This recommendation is based on my often discouraging experience with other networks. When we founded ROOTS in 1976, we said that in five years ROOTS was going to be folded. Of course the fifth year came and we felt so invested that we never did shut it down. But, in retrospect, I think that we should have, and let it come back in a new incarnation. My experience with networks and coalitions is that they start developing a life of their own, without the understanding and consensus of the membership. Then you start to get all sorts of bad dynamics – for example, new members don’t understand founding members, and vice-versa – and power struggles replace trust and cooperation. I think that it’s fair to judge the viability of a coalition by its purpose and its trust and cooperation quotient. Perhaps we can forgo the agony of divisive power struggles – and it is agony – by just saying, o.k., every fourth year we have to reinvent this organization by coming up with a new mission. I don’t think our funding and other partners will mind if we articulate this way of working at the front end.

If this charter of re-invention guided us, here’s what I would propose as the mission for 2003-2005: NET’s mission is to support its members’ artistic experiments. I’m arguing for a fairly tight organizational focus, that we not spread ourselves thin trying to do everything – and, of course, that’s part of my rationale for working with TCG, to allow us to focus on our core purpose.

Page 2

Back to Reading Room