So... some of the posts I'm writing (and Adam's writing) we are composing for Arena, to keep a record of what's going on on an objective level. Those posts (the objective record/white paper of the 21st century kind) will appear on Arena's blog and my blog as soon as they're proofed/approved, which should be towards the end of the weekend.
Posts that are more my own subjective experience can be posted here without Arena's approval, so those might be coming today and tomorrow, we'll see.
It seems to me in thinking about this conference that there's a tension between two different kinds of diversity. One I'll call institutional diversity and the other is landscape diversity. Institutional Diversity is the kind of diversity we normally talk about-- integrating institutions, their staffs, the actors they hire, the playwrights they produce etc. The other one, the kind August Wilson talked about in The Ground On Which I Stand and the kind Michael Kaiser talked about in his blog post on HuffPo is the idea of diversifying the landscape of theater in general, in other words building new institutions and groups that are not Euro-centric.
These two appear to exist in tension with each other, or at least they're generally talked about as in tension. Kaiser's blog post certainly puts them in tension. Do they have to exist in tension? Does diversifying larger institutions mean that non-eurocentric theaters won't have room to grow? Can we have both integrated older institutions and institutions devoted to other kinds of work in same landscape? Is there anywhere where we've successfully accomplished this?
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