4/1/2023 0 Comments Little theatre movement![]() ![]() ![]() It has always been in the theatre that the learned and the educated have had the greatest difficulty in making their tastes prevail over that of the people and preventing themselves from being carried away by them. Only in the theatre have the upper classes mingled with the middle and lower classes, and if they have not actually agreed to receive the latters’ advice, at least they have allowed it to be given. It has always been in the theatre that the learned and the educated have had the greatest difficulty in making their tastes prevail over that of the people and preventing themselves from being carried away by them.Īlexis de Tocqueville begins his 1835 magnum opus, Democracy in America, by declaring, “No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of the conditions.” In his chapter “Some Observations on the Theater among Democratic Peoples,” he states that “drama, more than any other form of literature, is bound by many close links to the actual state of society,” and he goes on to argue that, A 2002 national poll by the Urban Institute found that “96 percent of respondents said they were ‘greatly inspired and moved by art.’ However, only 27 percent said that artists contribute ‘a lot’ to the good of society.” This demographic is close to the inverse of the national norm for professional theatre, in which 80 percent of the audience comes from the wealthiest 15 percent of the population. Six years of national tracking in the 1990s by AMS, an independent research firm, found 73 percent of Roadside’s audience earned less than $50,000 a year and 30 percent of those earned $20,000 or less. The theatre also tours-so far to communities in forty-three states-reaching an audience whose demographics match those of our regional audience. ![]() Roadside’s regional audience in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, northeastern Tennessee, and southwestern Virginia is low income and working- and middle-class people from all walks of life and of all ages. Rather than make a special case for rural theatre, I wish to make a plea for the democratic arts. With Pregones Theater, Junebug Productions, and Idiwanan An Chawe, Roadside continues to make new plays-co-productions that are often bilingual and always intended for the entire community. Roadside’s stalwart collaborators over the past thirty years have been actors and musicians in the South Bronx, African American storytellers and musicians in New Orleans, and young and old tradition bearers in Pueblo Zuni, New Mexico. As one of the nation’s handful of rural professional theatres, Roadside has never wanted to be isolated as a special case, nor has it wanted its rural region to be separated from the fortunes and misfortunes of the rest of the country. I direct Roadside Theater, a part of Appalshop, in the rural central Appalachian coalfields. Two actors on stage in a production of Roadside Theater. We also know these disparities persist in a grinding recession that has affected middle- and working-class and economically poor people regardless of geography. Presently, there is insufficient attention to such disparities-per capita federal spending remains persistently lower in rural communities, and only 1 percent of private foundation giving in all categories reaches rural not-for-profit organizations. We know that, in the aggregate, incomes and life expectancies in rural America are significantly lower infant mortality rates and drug abuse significantly higher. ![]()
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