It turned out though, that while research around governing structures, planning, marketing, audiences, and finances for performing arts organizations in Chile exists—which have deepened the conversations around those subjects—very little has been done to address the fundamental questions around the core activity of an arts organization: programming.
We decided to do a research project of our own. We started by looking at who the current programmers are in Chile and how they decide on one project over another. Is it true that they have the freedom to make whatever selections they want? How does the context of their realities—such as the cultural ecosystem they respond to—influence their process, which is what leads to the country’s performing arts repertoires?
Two Common Misconceptions
Two basic ideas emerge around what people in the theatre field think of programmers. The first is that programmers are some kind of demigods—the same way King Midas turned everything into gold, programmers are the ones who turn artistic projects into blockbusters or masterpieces. The idea is that we have the “magic touch,” which, mostly due to our taste, thrusts artists and plays into the spotlight. We have been granted, at times, the power to help construct canons, social discourses, and artistic imaginaries. Even more, we mold cultural experiences for audiences, setting trends and affecting tastes, habits, and preferences of participation forms. In our experience, though, we face a very different reality; we don’t actually hold the keys for turning anything into gold. The degree to which we cannot control the outcomes of a season disproves this idea that we are demigods.
The second idea, held among artists and independent producers, is that programmers select plays solely based on their artistic preferences and affinities. This isn’t true, though. There are many other factors we consider when choosing what to program. Some of these might be aesthetic criteria regarding the overall quality of a play or the stylistic choices. For instance, a theatre’s mission statement might require the organization to choose works that are aesthetically more conservative, while other organizations might look for more contemporary choices. But there are also local and organizational realities that come into play when programming a season, like relationships with artists, economic imperatives, and cultural policy contexts for each territory—in particular, those related to funding opportunities.
Is it true that [programmers] have the freedom to make whatever selections they want? How does the context of their realities—such as the cultural ecosystem they respond to—influence their process?
Cultural Policy and Theatre Programming
Chilean theatre has been expanding over the last several years. In 2017, according to the most recent statistics available, there were over 1.5 million audience members and more than 7,000 performances across the country. While Chile has no public or national theatres, there are plenty of independent ones, from private to university-based to subsidized venues—a mixed model that includes both the private and public systems. Our research included interviews and surveys with fifteen programmers who worked at the main theatres in Santiago, Chile’s capital city. These theatres were diverse in venue size—big, medium, and small—and each had various governance and funding structures. We focused on different types of performing arts venues, including non-profit and for-profit theatres, because we believed these differences could be relevant when analyzing their programming processes. (To our surprise, this didn’t happen.)
In terms of protocols and processes, most of the interviewees mentioned similar methodologies and problems. Almost everyone’s selections were made based on open calls for projects, and many of their struggles related to budgets and the uncertainty of funding. However, there seems to be a broad consensus that the single programming model used by this group of programmers needs to be revised as it might become dangerous, leading us to a stagnant cultural ecosystem, especially if programmers aren’t making adjustments based on observations or innovations in the selection process or their theatre’s particular needs. It’s not that programmers want to work in a homogeneous form, it’s that there are larger structures at play, specifically related to the established
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