The Future of Community Is Now
Artists, makers, creators, craftspeople, whatever we call ourselves… We bounce between a deep and pragmatic need for solitude and an equally deep need for other people. We need solitude to think, to prepare, to create and to recharge our batteries, but we need community and collaboration to grow, to avoid becoming stale and to give our work scope and power.
For nearly half of 2020, we’ve found ourselves in a place where we feel we have an overabundance of solitude and a scarcity of community. We can’t gather in person, at least not in close quarters, effectively hobbling arts disciplines that rely on group work and live performance.
Add to that our collective distrust in the effectiveness of video conferencing like Zoom and Facetime, and we can feel as if we’re on our own tiny islands in a sea of sickness, unrest and general weirdness.
Simultaneously, we need community now more than any time in our lifetimes.
In his 1948 book Northern Farm, writer and naturalist Henry Beston observed humanity still reeling from World War II, trying to make sense of what had happened, the change that had come upon the world, and how to move forward. He wrote:
“Under today’s disorders there is something at work among the nations whose great importance has not yet been adequately realized — the need … for a community to live in and live with. The hope is vague, unsaid, and unformulated, but the need is great …
I suspect that if this open wound is to heal, it will have to heal like all wounds from the bottom, and that we shall have to begin at the beginning with the family and its obligations, with the village and its responsibilities, and with our universal and neglected duty to the earth.”
We need community desperately if we want to heal our societal and personal wounds. But we’re all at home, or at least six feet apart from one another — and we’ve even found ways to divide ourselves over that, as if Americans find the idea of sacrificing for others is so repellant that they consider it fascism.
I’ve interviewed 18 artists since Outer Voice began, and had countless casual conversations with writers, theatre artists, musicians and more. Like you, I’ve taken part in any number of online events, from Zoom play readings to panels and cohorts. There is an encouraging development that I’ve noticed over these past months (that’s not something we hear often these days).
We’re undergoing a slow but consistent shift from isolation to community. How? And where is it coming from? It’s coming from the exact tool that was intended to unite us but that has inevitably divided us — the frigging internet.
Go ahead and pause to use your favorite phrase of disbelief and annoyance. But please keep reading.
Zoom and its video conferencing cousins have gotten a bad rap in the pandemic. At first we were bewildered, then annoyed, then burnt out. Our eyes are dry, our voices hoarse, that one person never puts themselves on mute and there’s always somebody who can’t make their camera work.
But, over the past months, we’ve made progress. Because we had to. And, gripe as we might about it, it’s begun to generate real traction as a channel for real human connection.
Two quick personal case studies: In the past two months, I’ve performed in two Zoom play readings with Actors Bridge Ensemble, and taken part in an anti-racism/inclusive democracy cohort for musicians with the Western States Center.
With the play readings, we faced the same challenges all theatre faces via video conference (cue the rabid theatrical anti-Zoomers). Timing, cues, volume, iffy wifi. However, I was astounded by the depth of investment from the audience. Each performance was well-attended, and in each a large group stuck around for a post-show talkback. A real sense of communion rose in those conversations and, while the in-person immediate connection was missed, there was a new hybrid connection being made. It was real and it was intimate.
In the cohort, I was surprised at how quickly a group of musicians who largely didn’t know one another coalesced around common goals. Breakout sessions are typically excruciating for shy people like myself, but even the video conference breakout sessions proved productive, and soon all of us were following each other on social media and sharing ideas.
My conversations with other artists reinforce the evidence of this trend. Artists are now collaborating with companies across the country and the globe because somewhere amid our global isolation, our gaze turned outward. Our circle of conversation and influence has grown exponentially, and our comfort with the digital format has grown enough to allow real human connection. Maybe our boredom with video conferencing contributes to making it easier to really connect through it — we’ve shed a layer of self-consciousness.
Here’s the most exciting news. We don’t have to wait for a post-COVID world to build community. It’s right here at our fingertips and already working organically.
Nice, but what does that look like? Here are a few ways we can push this kind of community building forward.
Start Small
Some of you already have standing video conference happy hours. I’ve found that mine are with people who don’t even live in my city … which makes me ask why were weren’t doing this in the first place.
As Benton intimated, we have to start with the very local and very small. Fortunately for this moment, “local” doesn’t only mean physical space anymore so much as… familiarity, time zone or international date lines.
We can begin with small groups of artist friends. Don’t think of them as artistic think tanks or brain trusts or even formal groups, but as social gatherings. Support groups. Maybe I start by getting a group of close artist friends to gather online and vent about what’s making their practice the most difficult right now. I mean, that’s essentially a salon, right? Likeminded, interesting people gathering around a loose topic. Relax and see where it goes.
I can offer you a money-back guarantee on the cost of reading this article that at least one collaborative project will be born out of this, and most of you will come out with new solutions and ideas. Maybe not in the first meeting, or the third, but it will come.
Also, let’s try to make sure everybody in that group doesn’t look the same and come from the same background. It’ll make the group 1,000 times better.
Quick Sidebar:
There is a big difference between building community and asking people to work for free. Never invite someone to be part of something where they’re expected to work for free, and don’t ask a person of color to educate other members on systemic racism.
Think Globally
In the past month, I’ve watched African dance companies, Japanese theatre performances and listened to bands from countries whose music I’d never considered. Why hadn’t I done this before? Ignorance and complacency more than anything else. But the global arts community has been pushed online at a scale it never has before, and more of it is getting to more of us.
Seek out new work from other countries. And, if you like it, email those artists and let them know. Maybe a dialogue will start. Maybe collaborations will come. Maybe you’ll make a friend.
All About Accessibility
Accessibility is the biggest game-changer to come from the mass migration of arts to the web. Some of the biggest barriers to arts access have been erased. Geography is no longer an issue. Prohibitive ticket prices are gone. We’re moving away from the idea that “good” art has to be polished and pedigreed. Conferences, training, panels and more are online and largely free. Art online is more accessible to the disabled, to the poor and even to those experiencing homelessness.
How can we as creators contribute to greater accessibility in the way we put our work online, and how can we carry those practices over into a future hybrid physical/digital practice?
[In Jeff Goldblum Voice] Community Finds a Way
Our comfort with and connections through video conferencing deepened without our realizing it in the same way a casual party or classroom encounter sometimes becomes a lifetime friendship — community grows wherever it can. It’s a natural human instinct to come together (even for us misanthropes) because we can’t do it all by ourselves.
We need community to move forward with our personal arts practices, and as a society. The move toward it will come on its own as it always has, but we have to be intentional about how it is shaped, and we have to make it equitable, inclusive, kind and empowering.
In his essay “Africa and Her Writers,” Chinua Achebe wrote:
“The making of art is not the exclusive concern of a particular caste or secret society … There is no rigid barrier between makers of culture and its consumers. Art belongs to all and is a ‘function’ of society.”
How might we embody the spirit of that quote in our practices and our communities?
That is a personal responsibility for each of us. Nobody else is going to do it for us.
Whether this is sharing a friend’s new release on social media, reaching out to a new and struggling artist, or simply building a diverse and equitable cohort of collaborators and friends, we have to take the steps ourselves. We have to reach out the hand. It doesn’t have to be scary or intimidating. Each of us is in some way currently caught in a web of self-doubt, uncertainty and a little fear. Why not open with that?
Ok, last quote. Playwright-turned-politician Vaclav Havel wrote in “Radical Renewal of Human Responsibility,”
“I have been given to understand how small this world is and how it torments itself with countless things it need not torment itself with if people could find within themselves a little more courage, a little more hope, a little more responsibility, a little more mutual understanding and love.”
Open the conversation with what we have in common.
