Big Money and Small Fish

And Now We Dance! The Sage Awards for Dance were held last week, and my column ran too early in the day to talk about them. Before I delve into this week's conjecturing, complaining and cajoling, let me start by congratulating all the designers, choreographers and performers who make the Minnesota dance scene so exciting! For the rest of you who, like me, don't know much about dance, but are intrigued, you can start your journey into your new dance-associated life by checking out this year's Sage winners. A Mighty Roar In July 1997, Disney tested out its latest creation in Minneapolis, the stage adaptation of its cartoon blockbuster, The Lion King. Director Julie Taymor had previously been known for avant-garde puppet shows and high-concept reimaginings of Shakespeare that academics write lengthy papers about. The design was radically different from the Disney movie, featuring puppets, acrobats and guys on stilts instead of snappy dance numbers and plush lion costumes. Though it's hard to believe now, there was some question at the time as to whether or not this thing would take off. It was a hit in Minneapolis, and a few months later, after Disney stopped testing its experiment on the Midwesterners, it was a hit on Broadway. The Lion King is now known as a cultural institution that seems to have always existed. It's raking in the cash. The flagship production (already the fifth-longest running and highest-grossing show in Broadway history) is on track to reach the billion dollar mark this year. Of course, that's just the Broadway receipts. The international and touring versions of the show have brought back another $4 billion to The Mouse, and it shows no signs of stopping. Turn Off the Show Unfortunately, Julie Taymor is currently known as the director of a show that is actively trying to murder its cast. Producers who expected the director to recreate the success of The Lion King with a stunt-packed fever dream musical based on Spiderman are now watching the most expensive musical in Broadway history struggle to pay its bills. Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark has been plagued with problems from its inception, and the soap opera surrounding the production has turned out to be far more interesting than any wire stunts or weird trips in to Greek mythology contained within it. One more nail in the musical's coffin (which has been slowly constructed for three years now) is the upcoming release of punk manifesto for theater here on Playlist last week, exhorting the theater world to behave more like the punk music scene of the 1980s: smaller, cheaper, faster and more immediate. Of course, this DIY approach already has a long tradition here in the Twin Cities, since we have our own behemoths and leviathans that gobble up most of the money and attention. However, this discussion is happening all over the country as more and more theater artists come to the conclusion that the old model for big theater is no longer attuned to our culture. A new study released by Dance/NYC shows a marked increase in the number of small dance companies as dancers leave the large, struggling traditional companies and purposely seek to make groups that are lighter and more agile. Instead of seeking funding from endowments, public institutions or large donors, these smaller companies are focusing on niche audience development, corporate partnerships and event-based fundraising. Gwydion Suilebhan at HowlRound advocates for ditching "waterfall development" of plays (for reference, waterfall development in software refers to a product that is created through a highly-regulated series of sequential steps that are difficult and costly to change if the product is not working). This model, based on traditional industrial manufacturing, he argues is the model on which big theaters currently develop new plays and seasons. Instead, Suilebhan would like to see play work based on "agile development", a much messier and more audience interactive process that sees multiple iterations of a product that the public is allowed to play with before a final form is complete. Questions? All of this is antithetical to how the majority of our grand regional theaters operate. Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, recently put out an op-ed piece with a series of good questions for theaters to answer in the future. Embedded in his questions are are glimpses of a possible future that mirrors the current economic state of affairs. Just as the roles of the middle class are shrinking and the fortunes of the top earners are growing like gangbusters, the gap between the billion dollar commercial theater producers (see The Lion King above) and the smaller, nearly unfunded groups (see just about everyone else) is widening, and our mid-level $10 million organizations are the ones who may get frozen out. We may get to a world where there will only be mammoths and mice in theater. That may scare the tar out of many people, but remember which creatures survived the ice age and which ones are dug up at La Brea.