Elizabeth McCloskey Miller

Supporting Art or Inhibiting It?

Posted by Elizabeth McCloskey Miller, Apr 04, 2012 0 comments


Elizabeth McCloskey Miller

Liz Miller

Elizabeth McCloskey Miller

In my last post, I wrote about a “leading vs. following” conversation that happened at an Emerging Arts Leaders DC event with Liz Lerman in January.

Lerman’s most recent book, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, sparked another interesting topic of conversation at that same event.

In her book, she dedicates a section to “Structures and Underpinnings.” In the introduction to that section, Liz acknowledges that her dance company is always in transition, and attributes this frequent shape-shifting to the improvisational structuring that informs choreography.

At the event, Liz emphasized the importance of building flexible structures in our art and our arts organizations. This idea resonated deeply for me. Too frequently we identify a process, idea, or concept as successful, then proceed to build walls around it. That marketing strategy worked for one show, so now we need to do it for every show. Creating inflexible structures not only inhibits our success as emerging leaders, but also inhibits our ability to create and support art in our community.

The conversation about flexible structures immediately made me think of a survey I was creating at work to assess interest in a project. We had filled the questionnaire with “select one” answers designed for quick and easy analysis of the results.

I was embarrassed to think about the inflexibility of possible responses in the survey. Surely we could not expect the dynamic arts organizations that would be receiving the document to accurately define their work by the limited perimeters we set forth.

My colleagues and I returned to the survey and revised it to allow for more flexibility in the responses, and indeed we were able to gather insightful and useful information from the organizations we contacted. In the end, our project was better served by gathering varied data through a more flexible survey instrument.

The emerging leaders at our January event all agreed that there is a need for more flexible structures in our arts organizations—structures that support our work instead of simply regulating it. In order to leverage the impact of the arts in the future, we must be open to more adaptable processes.

As Lerman says in Hiking the Horizontal, “Make enough architecture…and then create the prototype, then fix and improve, then test, then perform, then fix, then restructure, and then make new rules, then test, then let some fall away, then make space for the new, then test.”

How can we spark change in our communities if we are resistant to it within our own organizations?

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