On Thinking Outside The Box

I write a weekly column for the website AudienceOutlookMonitor.com which collects audience surveys taken by arts groups from around the world and analyzes the results and tracks the data over time since this spring. Here are some columns over the last few months.

Sept. 11, 2020

Good day,

A news story today sent a shudder down my spine.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S.’s leading expert on COVID-19, said we likely will not be able to return to theaters for at least another year — or more.

It’s a harsh reality check for the optimists among us, hoping that a return to normalcy is right around the corner.

I was already planning today on talking about those who have been using these past six months to explore alternative ways to share artistic experiences.

But now it seems even more relevant.

You might loathe that overused expression — “Thinking outside the box” — as much as I do. It’s a cliche that’s been repeated so many times during this pandemic that I now prefer to think of it as a drinking game.

But as we watched spring turn into summer and then into fall with no prospect for an immediate return of our audiences en masse — especially here in the U.S. — the stories that are now especially important may be those about creative artists in music, dance, theater and the visual arts who have broken free of the structures of their typical or traditional performance spaces.

Instead of “restorationists” — those who focus solely on the return to business-as-usual in these unusual times — the immediate future may belong to these “re-envisionists” from across all disciplines who are doing what artists do: experiment and seeing things in new and sometimes radical ways.

Often their results are not resounding success at first but sometimes they hit on something that may lead….

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