Executive Director's Note: Collective Crisis, Cooperative Action
by Brad Erickson

Change, I pointed out in last month's column, is not only the theme of the two presidential campaigns; it is an undeniable reality here in the Bay Area, where demographic shifts have transformed our social landscape. In September and October, astonishing changes occurred, almost daily, in the economic sector. Even the presidential candidates seemed unable to explain the fine points of a $700 billion rescue package for Wall Street. Explanations are murky as to how we got into this mess, and no one is presuming to predict where all of this will lead.

At our recent Annual Conference, theatre managers and trustees were baffled as to what immediate action, if any, to take. Prudence seems in order, everyone agreed, but paralysis was also seen as a real danger. Following 9/11 the theatres of New York, Chicago, the Bay Area and cities across the country united with others in their respective communities to confront a catastrophic situation together. Today's crisis facing our national economy is another moment begging for collective action and a common will--a time to offer emotional and spiritual engagement to worried citizens and a chance to kindle an economic spark for sputtering communities. We have a moment that calls for new opportunities for cooperation.

With our Free Night of Theater campaign we have a powerful example of cooperation among theatre companies locally and nationwide. Here is a massive cooperative effort to raise the profile of theatre in communities across the country and to work collectively to build new audiences, both for the discipline as a whole and for each of our individual theatres.

Last month, Free Night celebrated its national launch, with Theatre Communications Group (TCG)--the national theatre service organization--coordinating the campaign's growth to 120 cities across the country. This fall Free Night rolled out for the first time in major new markets including New York, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, St. Louis, Salt Lake City and a host of smaller communities.

The national initiative is indebted to the generous and far-sighted theatres of the Bay Area who year after year make the campaign in this region the benchmark in terms of the number of theatres participating and tickets given away. This fall over 100 of the 610 theatre companies participating nationwide come from the Bay Area.

As we prepared to embark on this year's campaign, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation awarded Theatre Bay Area a grant of $200,000 to work with TCG in spurring the national launch of Free Night of Theater. The monies will fund an enhanced PR campaign, support creative innovations here and in other cities, and underwrite extensive tracking to help us more deeply understand the lasting impact of Free Night on audiences and participating theatres.

The grant will also help us study, record and disseminate the program's best practices, so we can assist new regions coming onto the campaign next year, and enable us to reach out to other arts disciplines--such as our colleagues in opera, dance and symphonic music--who are looking to replicate Free Night's success.

Perhaps most exciting of all, we are now commissioning researcher Alan Brown to conduct a groundbreaking study, measuring the intrinsic impact of Free Night of Theater's performances on its audiences. This is a brand-new field of research, and the Free Night study will be the first focused on a single arts discipline. We will be assessing not just how many butts were in the seats, or even trying to understand more about who exactly those derrieres belong to--how old they are, what color they are, how many times we've seen them before--but we will be measuring the core of what theatres actually do: How impactful was the art itself? We will be asking patrons, "Were you transformed? How transformed? And for how long?"

Now, in this moment of profound economic uncertainty, is the time to cooperate in new ways to further Free Night's goal of building new audiences. The Bay Area Big List, launched just five months ago and supported by the Wallace Foundation, has taken off with a bang, bringing on 69 organizations in San Francisco in the first pilot year. In January 2009, when we expand the initiative to the East Bay and South Bay regions, we expect the List to grow to 120 participating arts organizations--of all shapes, sizes and disciplines--making the Bay Area Big List the largest collective audience database in the country.

With the Big List, arts organizations pool information on their audiences, enabling groups to target their programming to precise demographics and histories of arts engagement. A theatre looking for young Asian Americans living in San Francisco's Richmond District who love musicals and modern dance can find them. Testimonials on the power of the Big List from organizations such the San Francisco Opera, ACT and the African-American Shakespeare Company show that participating groups of all types spend less money reaching new audiences and see far better results.

With Free Night of Theater and the Big List we have powerful models of arts organizations working cooperatively in a moment of economic uncertainty. We are learning to avoid the impulse to hoard from a sense of scarcity and opting to share in a common effort to change the habits of cultural participation across our region.