Open-sourcing.

A Brief Story of New Street Arts

In 1991, several professional Atlanta film and theater actors, a few directors, musicians and other performing artists started work focused on new ways of creating intellectual product. It was a series of workshops about process and collaboration. We questioned the productivity of a proprietary, insular and vertically integrated creative hierarchy.

In other words, we were looking at new systems of rehearsal.

After six years of weekly workshops and a dozen trial theater productions, PushPush Theater was incorporated in 1997 to provide a space that offered an alternative to the typical theater. Auditions and other forms of top down control were abandoned. The core staff maintained an uncompromising adherence to the mission of the theater, while at the same time opening all staff meetings, financial records and planning to all the artists involved. Often frustrating those coming from the traditional theater world, the day-to-day evolution involved a unique blend of control and chaos, stubbornness and collaboration.

Decisions on what to produce and who would be involved in a project were arrived at collectively. The selection criterion were not based on the content but on the developmental possibilities for those involved. We were not a production house serving the entertainment needs of a mass audience, but a center for the development of those who create scripts, plays, films and other forms of art.

PushPush continued to expand and grow outward and not vertically. New, independent artists were gradually taking on leadership responsibilities and creating new production entities working loosely under the umbrella of PushPush Theater.

In 2007, New Street Arts became the new name of the umbrella organization and PushPush Theater became one of 15 independent groups calling New Street their home base. Each of these independent groups governs themselves independently and creates a unique product. There is active sharing of resources and manpower among all the groups and each of these groups is represented on The New Street Advisory Board that suggests improvements for the physical space and plans growth for the organization as a whole.

Our Current Stage of Development
As an organization devoted to the development of creative artists, we measure our success in terms of original content created and new artistic opportunities formed. Each year of our existence, we have originated a property that has gone on to a greater success beyond its workshop beginning. We’ve sent plays to The Humana Festival in Louisville, Theater Row in Manhattan, and Los Angeles as well as five productions to European theaters, including our 2003 production of Manny and Chicken at the BP that is currently running at The Freikammerspiele Theater in Germany.

Our Challenge: Retaining Atlanta’s Newest Artistic Leaders
These successes argue well for Atlanta’s homegrown talent, but it also makes us very eager to develop the support to retain this talent. Currently New Street Arts works with over 250 individual artists per year who create at least one product a year on New Street. Key to their development is the 25 to 35 core artists that have at least two years with PushPush in leadership roles and create at least 3 significant works per year.

In our early years at PushPush, we tended to lose younger artists. Funders, staff and our board often asked if we were moving too fast and expecting too much flexibility and growth from our artists. This has changed and now we tend to lose our more experienced artists. Increasingly, the more advanced artists find it necessary to move to faster growing environments and to take their Atlanta-created success to other cultural centers that provide the support they can’t find in Atlanta.

Retaining original creative artists will result in a lively scene in the performing arts – a scene that can keep pace with the most rapidly changing environment the performing arts have ever experienced. It will involve a new blend of film, theater, music and other disciplines and technologies. New technologies will level the playing field with other cultural centers. Atlanta is ready to take advantage of this new landscape. The key ingredient is developing and retaining our creative thinkers.

A New Age Where Individuals Participate
It is clear that we are living in a remarkable time as theater producers, workers and audiences. We are seeing the very core of live theater communal gathering being challenged like never before in recorded history. This year, Time Magazine named “You” as the person of the year. Young people increasingly have the skills to access the information age in ways we could only have dreamed of a decade ago and this is creating an entirely different purpose for live theater – and different expectations from the audience.

The biggest change we see in the Net Gen is a new ability to participate rather than being passive spectators. The Internet 2.0 is so named because it is the second wave of major change affecting internet users and it is marked by open-source access and active participation in self-developed programming. This is in a very early stage of development but one from which we will certainly never go back. Theater as we have known it has been disrupted.

Here at the beginning of the 21st century, it is up to the arts community to embrace these changes in technology that affect story telling and performative acts for the public. Being aware of and integrating new technologies does not mean that one has to completely abandon the traditional forms, but rather respond to the understanding that the anthropological desire for performing and enacting a story and connecting with an audience through that story is being newly redefined.

New Street Arts is designed to provide a place where artists and audiences can be actively involved with changes in the art form. Space and time are provided to build a community where artists and audiences pursue new artistic expressions. Artists and audiences have access to, and can participate in, every phase of the work from readings of new scripts to observing and/or taking part in rehearsals. Performances are open to the public and talkbacks and other forms of feedback and Q&A are available to all. The physical space on New Street is specifically designed to provide venues for conversation before and after presentations. This space also is extremely useful for the intersection of various producing groups coming and going in the space.

One can observe a worldwide desire for live theater, by both audiences and artists. In these next few years, the theatrical landscape will be reformed, reshaped and revitalized. The trend of “my personal world” will increase the desire for creating centers that can provide “interactive face-time” and functional places of public cultural gathering, and thus help redefine a need for a new concept of a public sphere, so crucial for any living democracy. As a result of this need, theaters that merely offer a place to go and view a “product” are becoming less necessary.

Arts and Entertainment
Often referring to a creative person means someone in the arts. In today’s language, we refer to creative talent in the gaming industry and other software and IT fields. Creative professionals come in every part of society and are the largest segment of our society working in the health field, transportation, military, science and on and on. More appropriate to any discussion regarding New Street Arts is the distinction between arts and entertainment.

Art can be entertaining, and entertainment is often artistic, but nevertheless there are sharp differences in terms of their individual aims. Making decisions based on pleasing an audience is essentially a different thing than making choices with a sense of truth and beauty regardless of the audience’s commercial support. This distinction is frequently overlooked in Atlanta. It is the heart of every discussion at New Street Arts. It is also important to recognize that most of the artists working here also have active roles in the entertainment business and commercial arts industry.

Ideally, the development of artistic expression should be free of any constraints from “outside.” Recognizing this freedom of the arts is at the heart of any city and society’s cultural worth – and certainly at the heart of concerns about our future’s cultural worth. Neglecting this distinction will directly affect Atlanta’s ability to attract and retain artistic leaders.

New Street Arts’ Strategy for the Future
In the past three years we have made huge developments in working with artists and providing support for local artistic growth. We have taken a long look at where we need to make adjustments to keep up with the current changes. We have researched how we can better serve the requests of our local developing artists.

The major areas of change are:

1. Individual Artistic Planning
We are developing a system where individual artists can be responsible and become cultural participants beyond a show-to-show, self-advancing agenda. We have a developing program that helps create individual artistic planning in order to connect smaller units of activity to a bigger picture. We help artists develop means of measuring progress that allow them further access to their own strategies and connects them to a larger community.

2. Exchange Work
We have laid a strong foundation for a program of national and international exchange work that allows our local artists to become involved in an artistic conversation that goes beyond Atlanta in order to learn from more experienced models and to increase our ability to speak to a larger audience.

3. Restructuring Traditional Theater Scheduling and Programming
We are restructuring the way we present our artists’ work. We are building on established models in other cultural centers, and responding to new technologies. We are asking artists, press and audiences to allow for new systems of theater programming. And we are developing new strategies of how we allow public access to this programming.

Each area of change is marked by opening doors to those who want to collaborate, hands-on participation on each level and the ability of each participant to continually make improvements in how New Street Arts provides its services.

We believe that the open, collaborative nature of our first ten years has anticipated current trends in the arts and hope you will join with us to make the most of the next ten years.