Pliability & Challenge

Artists define the times we live in.

Artists define.

The times are defined by artists.

I will continue to say this, because I believe it, and because history says it to be so.

As artists, we need to stay pliable. Pliable not to be taken advantage of, but pliable to make the adjustments needed for what is needed. Artistry and rigidity do not reside together with any comfort.

We are part of the new paradigm. We will be the change, not just in our business but in society as a whole. We already are the change.

We are always going to be challenged from without and, sadly, from within. However, this should challenge us as artists and as human beings to question, and explore, and not simply accept.

What do you stand for? Do you just fall in line and bitch and complain? Are you just going to say “yes, but..”? Or are you going to challenge the lack of pliability and say “yes, and…”

As the line from the musical Hamilton says “if you stand for nothing…what’ll you fall for?”

As artists, we need to be pliable: in how we live, how we create, how we embody, how we find intimacy in the theatrical device of story telling, but always how we are treated, and how we are engaged within our art form and the business of that art form.

The challenge always, and certainly now more than ever, is how pliable will we be moving forward?

How pliable are we, individually and collectively to make real change in our business? In our commitment to create theatre and art? Are we ready to lead our business into what is truly needed now?

What are we willing to do to create this new paradigm? What is worth saving and what is needed? What is important to release and change? How can we expose that? Engage that? Fully realize that?

The good, the bad, and the ugly is exposed during crisis. We can’t be afraid of that as a collective of artists. We need to embrace it in order to be the face of change; the face of no more; the face of what is needed, and necessary, to make the business of theatre, of art, of performance, of show, a place to thrive in a new normal.

Growing pains? We feel them - ALL of them - right now. Somehow, we still laugh; cry; and CREATE - together. We define what comes next. We expose what doesn’t work, what will not work, what cannot work and what should never have been accepted in the first place.

We then reveal what WILL work, what will be embrace, what CAN be accepted onward.

We define the next.

We shape the next.

We breathe life into the next.

Why? Because we are doing it already.

Stand for more.

Stand for real.

Stand for truth.

Stand for equality.

Stand for opportunity.

Stand for innovation.

Stand for more than status quo.

Stand for the living, breathing possibility of art and artists who inhabit this world and will change it in ways we have yet to imagine.

Stay pliable. Challenge yourself for that pliability. Ask yourself why you do what you do. Clean out the clutter. Imagine the possibility. Define that. Claim it. Breathe life into it, one exhale at a time. You are the change. Just by BEING.

BE the artist you wish to be. Now is that time. You have the opportunity to define it.

With fondness & fierceness,

Susan