Confronting my anti-business bias.

L - R: Merce Cunningham, my Mom Barbara Dilley, Albert Reid in a PR shot for the European tour of 1966. I was on that tour. I was 3 turning 4.

I was not raised in a “business-centric” family. My Dad had a long career working for nonprofits and my Mom is a dancer, choreographer, teacher. I had a privileged upbringing of private schools, fancy colleges and grad school, and then - the life of the struggling actor/teacher for twenty years. I adopted the identity of the “art warrior”, a kind of rebel super-hero who “fights The Man” and aligns himself with anti-capitalism and progressive political positions. And I retain some - but not all - of those points of view. Because somehow, as the result of my mid-life crisis, I became a businessman.

Sort of . . . I run a nonprofit called Bright Invention which has an entrepreneurial program called Creative Corporate Training. Bright Invention was created from disillusion and hope. I was profoundly disillusioned with the life of the stage actor and the nonprofit ecosystem that “supports” it. And I was filled with hope that if I could somehow direct the transformative power of live performance at specific problems, I could create a new way to support actors.

The nonprofit ecosystem of regional theatres is filled with noble and principled leaders who make a lot of noise about empowering creativity, supporting artists and being an antidote to the materialistic culture we live in. And it is filled with struggling artists of all kinds who routinely can’t pay their bills, sacrifice having families, develop mental illness from the stress and anxiety of the life they have chosen, and see no other options. My lightbulb moment came when I was “successful” within this ecosystem. I was acting in two or three union stage acting jobs per year, and teaching as an adjunct at a college or two (another career path rank with institutional hypocrisy), and trying to raise two kids and stay afloat . . . and failing. My White privilege gave me a safety net many of my creative brothers and sisters don’t have - I could beg my family for assistance, an act of abject humiliation for a man in his middle age.

Meet the Medicis - one of the greatest supporters of the nonprofit ecosystem.

Here is the lightbulb: it’s actually not that the nonprofit leaders are exploiters and oppressors, it’s that the economics of it don’t work, and never have. The world of performing arts nonprofits is an ecosystem based on begging. We know we can’t function as common businesses, because if we did, tickets to our shows would be $400 each and . . . well you can see how that ends. So we make up for the fact that we can’t actually meet our bottom line selling our services in the marketplace by asking for support from donors and foundations. And thank God for them. Bright Invention would not exist but for its donors, especially The Wyncote Foundation. And it’s been this way since Michelangelo bowed before the Medicis and Shakespeare made friends with the Queen.

In order to succeed in the word of fundraising and development, you need to prove to funders that you are fiscally responsible: keeping costs down, raising money from other sources, and working with a clear strategy supported by professionals. Performing arts nonprofits are especially expensive because they rely on human beings. And human beings - at a bare minimum -need to eat and pay their bills. If theatres performed with dancing robots, well, things might be less expensive. So nonprofits are constantly underpaying artists in order to create budgets that are workable to foundations, because if they asked for the money their artists actually need to survive, no one would fund them (especially the small and mid-size theatres which employ most of us.) And the dancing robots? Mark my words: they are coming.

So where did I find my hope? In a form of theatrical performance that needs little to no capital support: no sets, no theatres, no costumes, no scripts. It’s called long form improvisation, and it was invented by a mad genius named Del Close in the 70s. It’s the foundation everything I do now, creatively and professionally. As I began exploring and experimenting with our ensemble, I discovered something else about improvisation: it’s economically nimble, and professionally adaptable. I wanted to develop a program which effectively monetized an actor’s creativity, so I developed a technique I call “scenario-based training”. Our actors perform scenarios for our clients using structured improvisation: a kind of in-between form which has the structure and repeatability of a script, and the flexibility of improvisation. I found out later this work is related to the ground-breaking work of South American theatre artist Augusto Boal.

Del Close during one of his calmer moments.

We a did a couple of pilot workshops and we knew we were on to something. Now - how to sell it? Through fits, starts, consultations and professional development I became . . . an entrepreneur, a business man, and began to think of our work as a dynamic service to sell, as opposed to artistic work to find funding for. I was immediately energized by the proactive and action-based mindset of the entrepreneur: leads, targets, strategies, connections and follow ups. It felt refreshing next to the submissive work of asking for money. Business activates, asking waits.

During the pandemic I knew I needed to up my game if we were to survive. So I invested in online networking groups, hired a business strategy coach and learned how to turbo-charge my LinkedIn activity. It was in the networking groups that I first became aware of my anti-business bias, because I felt myself shedding it. The people I have met in these groups and through the connections they create have been business people like me, trying to grow, refine and nurture their Big Idea. Far from being the competitive, aggressive and obnoxious stereotype I had in my head about “business people”, I have been delighted by the open, curious and mutually supportive people I have met. It’s not a stretch to say that the relationships I have made in the business community over the last nine months have not only supported the growth of my business, they have also been meaningful source of real human connection.

Performing a scenario for Community Associations Institute. Pictured: Caitlin Chin and Josh Kirwin.

And here’s a wrinkle. Into my business meetings I bring with me all my years of creative training, an elaborate understanding of narrative and storytelling, and a hopeful mindset about human relationships profoundly shaped by years in the theatre. I bring with me an essentially artistic point of view. It’s a point of view that loves innovation, nurtures authenticity, dares to be bold - ironically, all high-value traits in the business world. I find the people I meet thrill to this energy and want more of it. Far from being alien to this world, I believe artists are in fact natural entrepreneurs.

There is a lot about capitalism to critique, especially as it is practiced in America. American capitalism makes a fetish out of individualism and winning. It promotes a binary win/lose mindset antithetical to cooperation and community. All too often, managers cast themselves as the winners, which means the workers have to be the losers. I pay my actors between $75 and $200 per hour for our CCT workshops - an hourly rate that more than doubles what they might make in other contracted work as actors. And still, I have a long way to go to achieve the Big Goal: salaried positions for ensemble members with benefits, working in multi-faceted full-time positions, performing, teaching, and growing the business in a variety of ways.

And let’s be honest, I am having my cake and eating it too by continuing to raise money as a nonprofit. But my goal isn’t to stop being a nonprofit, my goal is to demonstrate there’s another way to be a nonprofit, one that relies more on earned program income, and less on donated income. One that engages the dynamism of entrepreneurship, drives its resources to supporting people not products, and lives in the assumption of abundance. But in order to become that kind of nonprofit, we need to prove our value to businesses. We need to activate, not wait.