TCG's 2014 Online Conference Blog Salons

In just two months, the 24th TCG National Conference: Crossing Borders will take place in San Diego from June 19-21, 2014. I can hardly wait! Each year, the conference offers an opportunity to see friends, meet new colleagues, learn from presenters, and engage in dialogue that will help shape the future of the American Theatre. 

Building on the success of the programmatic arcs from the 2013 TCG National Conference: Learn Do Teach in Dallas, the conference will focus on four main areas of exploration:

Art | People: How are relationships changing between theatres and communities? 
Survive | Thrive: How can we move our financial practices from surviving to thriving?
Theatre | Technology: How can the live arts better engage with our digital culture?
Conflict | Confluence: How can we have productive conversations about difference?

To make these arcs even more intentional and impactful, TCG will host a series of online salons on their blog, the TCG Circle. Over the next couple of months, I'll be curating salon around the following arcs:

{Theatre | Technology} How can the live arts better engage with our digital culture?
As the rate of cultural change from disruptive technologies increases, its impact is often seen as detrimental to theatre and other live arts. Yet many theatres are harnessing those technologies—through marketing resources, backstage tools and in the work itself—to innovate and strengthen their programming and infrastructure. {Theatre | Technology} sessions will ask big questions about crossing the boundaries between the live and the digital, and trade nuts and bolts tactics for taking advantage of the latest technological advances.

{Conflict | Confluence} How can we have productive conversations about difference?
Let’s face it: in the theatre field, we disagree as often as we agree, and those disagreements often shed more heat than light. How can we create space for the taboo topics and difficult conversations we need to have: between departmental silos, between funders and institutions, between all our intersections of diversity? How can conflict of ideas lead to positive growth? Participants attending {Conflict | Confluence} sessions will not only learn strategies for managing complexity and difference within their own institutions, but also together reimagine some of the most significant perceived barriers that divide our field.

Additionally, I'll be continuing each of the blogs related to TCG’s Diversity & Inclusion Initiative:

1. Diversity & Inclusion Institute Field Reports
2. Gender Parity Salon
3. Defining Identies
4. Latino/A Theatre
5. Asian American Theatre
6. South Asian American Theatre
7. #Trayvon
8. Middle Eastern American Theatre
9. Native American Theatre
10. Mixed Race/Culture Theatre
11. The Role of Allies
12. Disability in the American Theatre
13. Diversity & Inclusion Initiative

If you'd like to contribute to any of these salons–and everyone is invited to participate–please email me and I’ll send you more information.

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