Jacqueline E. Lawton
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On Diversity and Inclusion: Megan Sanberg-Zakian

9/14/2012

2 Comments

 
TCG's New Generations Future Leader, Megan Sanberg-Zakian, responds to Drew Barker's question on diversity and inclusion.

"How do institutions and artists negotiate between sincere attempts at 'bridge-building' and creating productive 'multicultural' explorations without falling into the potential traps of audience pandering or cliché?"

No Rage, No Pity: Culpability, Choice, and Engagement

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I'd like to build on my colleagues' excellent responses to this question by passing on three pieces of advice I've received over the years. I think about all three of these things almost every day.

1) Real, meaningful change is hard. Yes, we would all very much like to diversify our (fill in the blank... design teams, front of house staff, board, mainstage season...). We talk about it all the time. We reach out, we make good faith efforts to widen our net, but when it comes down to the wire, we too often find ourselves with something that looks more or less the same as the last thing we had. I think there's only one answer to this: try harder. We can't let ourselves off the hook. It will take more time, more energy, and more money than we think it will to get results. And at the end of the day, what matters is results; good intentions count for very little. 

2) Follow The Money. If we only have four equity contracts in a show with seven actors, who gets the equity contracts? If we have the money to commission one play every three years, who gets the commission? If we can give extra hours to one front of house employee, who gets the hours? What about the businesses who cater our openings, do our dry cleaning, print our posters, do our audit, our accounting, our banking - who owns those business? (and where are they? are we supporting the local economies we rely on?) Arts organizations (and artists) do have and spend money. Thinking of the resources we have as abundant rather than scare allows us to take responsibility for the choices we make about what to do with those resources. 

3) No Rage, No Pity. The best directing advice I every got was from playwright Lydia Diamond, while I was directing Harriet Jacobs, Lydia's beautiful adaptation of Jacobs' 1861 slave narrative. Like most works that tackle traumatic, violent aspects of our history, the play requires intense attention to tone. Too often we have all seen well-meaning and earnest approaches to this kind of material result in extremes of indulgent hysteria on the one hand or stoic heroism on the other -- neither of which honors the swirling complexity of the events and people whose stories we are attempting to tell, nor the multiplicity of the audiences who have come to hear these stories. Before the start of rehearsals, Lydia said to me, "The material must be approached with no rage and no pity." I wrote "NO RAGE, NO PITY" on the cover of my script and had the ensemble do the same. I learned that when our approach to storytelling comes from a place of anger (even righteous anger) or sentimentality (even well-meaning sentiment), it can cloud our view of the humanity and truth of our work, making us more fearful and less interesting, more strident and less dynamic. Engaging with material and characters simply and directly, with compassion but without pity, with precision but without rage, was a great touchstone for making acting, design, and even marketing choices (and if you're interested in exactly how this works in the rehearsal room I can talk for hours about it...). For me, this remains the best way to "avoid audience pandering or cliche" and make our work "productive" - in the sense of resisting and transforming, rather than reproducing, the old, tired images and discourses. It works for all material. But, you know... it's hard. See #1.

Thanks for this important conversation, Jackie. Please include my email address so that folks can contact me directly if desired: megansz@gmail.com.

2 Comments
Julie Hennrikus link
9/14/2012 02:57:41 am

Framing these conversations and the work we all want to do is really challenging. Thank you Megan for this post. No Rage, No Pity. To that I would add Create Change. Looking forward to more conversations!

Reply
Joan Lancourt
9/15/2012 08:34:59 am

Megan
I love your #2 and 3 and I'd like to comment on #1.  I think real meaningful change of the kind we're talking about is hard - really hard, so I'm with you there.  

What I have found helps more than simply increasing one's efforts (i.e. try harder) is to try differently - and how differently depends on one's analysis of what one has done that hasn't produced the desired result.  Sometimes it's as simple as that the desired results have not been very clearly articulated and shared - e.g. we are going to give 1 actor, 1 business, 1 employee of difference the contract this year; or recruit 1 board member each year for the next 4 years, etc.; sometimes its more complicated as when we are stuck in our own latent or unexamined prejudices or ignorances, or it can be all shades in between including "I tried, but couldn't find one, or I tried but 'they' didn't respond", which can sometimes be a "we didn't look in the right places or through the right channels because we didn't know channels other than the ones we've always used.  (I think your # 2 lays out a range of possibilities that really demonstrates that this is not just about casting, OR hiring, OR a board seat, but about an almost organic revisioning of the the organization and its environment/context/culture.  

It's also about commitment of energy, time and resources earlier rather than later,(which isn't always convenient).  This is a means of acknowledging that doing something hard does take more time, and if we are committed to the result in the not too distant future, we'd better start now.  To me commitment is demonstrated through the choices we make on a day to day basis, and is demonstrated when we make the inconvenient choice.  You don't need a lot of commitment to do easy stuff - to pick the low hanging fruit for example.  I once had a discussion with a CEO about how to demonstrate his commitment to a diversity initiative - and one of the examples we ended up with was that people would believe he was really committed when he chose to engage in some 'diversity' action when it was clear to all that it wasn't easy for him to make that choice - e.g. if there was a time conflict between engaging in the diversity action vs. a board meeting or meeting with a key client, and he chose to attend the diversity action and rescheduled the board meeting or the client, then people would  believe he was committed.  This was important in his role as a 'role model' to others, and 'seeing' his commitment was crucial for them to make their own commitments - and knowing it was OK to make the kind of choice he made.  

They say that high performing teams work smarter not just harder - and for me, that implies a conscious commitment to a continuous shared learning process.  Such a process involves periodic reflection, both individually and most especially collectively - what did we try, what worked, what didn't, and what can we do differently next time?  It involves lots of little experiments, to try things out, and when you experiment, you're bound to have some failures.   And that has to be made organizationally OK, because if you get punished if you fail, then you won't take a chance on trying something new.  One Japanese company used to have a meeting every year where they celebrated learningful failures - this worked because they were committed to learning from their failures, and it was the learnings that came out of the failures that led them more quickly to their successes.  And, of course, we need to really celebrate our successes, and make both the failures and the successes part of the organizational narrative.

Anyway, I think this is a great discussion to keep having, and I'm really psyched about TCG's Fall Forum for Board members where they are going to focus on this issue and where I expect that lots of learning will go on, with lots of examples of what's worked (and not worked) in other places.
Joan

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    I'm a playwright, dramaturg, and teaching artist. It is here where you'll find my queries and musings on life, theater and the world. My posts advocate for diversity, inclusion, and equity in the American Theatre and updates on my own work. Please enjoy!
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  • Home
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