Cultural Commons - Who Pays and Who Benefits?

HowlRound - A Case Story in Cultural Commoning

Jamie Gahlon

“Commoning is at bottom a process by which we enter into a participatory culture and can sketch an idea of how we want to live together as a society”. David Bollier & Silke Helfrich (2015)

HowlRound is a free and open platform for theatre-makers worldwide dedicated to amplifying progressive, disruptive ideas about the art form and to facilitating artistic, intellectual and personal connection between diverse theatre practitioners. HowlRound aims not just to change the conversation, but to change theatre practice and its influence on communities around the world.

In Patterns of Commoning 51 Bollier and Helfrich write: “A commons must arise from the personal engagement of commoners themselves. It is unavoidably the product of unique personalities, geographic locations, cultural contexts, moments in time and political circumstances of that particular commons”. This is certainly true of HowlRound.

Created in 2011, HowlRound is a non-profit organization based at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Our founding came at a time in theatre practice where we saw too many voices left off our stages, not represented inside of our institutions, not recognized for their substantial contribution to our past and present. We set about creating a group of tools that would amplify voices and issues chronically under-represented and unheard in the theatre. Our name, HowlRound, is a technical term for what happens when you place a microphone next to an amplifier. It’s the sound of a feedback loop.

We found an organizing principle in the commons as a social structure that invites open participation around shared values. HowlRound is a knowledge commons that encourages freely sharing intellectual and artistic resources and expertise. It is our strong belief that the power of live theatre connects us across difference, puts us in proximity with one another, and strengthens our tether to our commonalities. Our current tools - a journal, a live-streaming video channel and archive, an opensource World Theatre Map,52 and in-person convenings - facilitate connection and conversation across geography, aesthetic and cultural difference. Zelda Fichandler,53 one of the founders of the American regional theatre movement, wrote in a letter to the Department of the Treasury in support of the taxexempt status for American theatre: “Once we made the choice to produce our plays not to recoup an investment but to recoup some corner of the universe for our understanding and enlargement, we entered the same world as the university, the museum, the church and became, like them, an instrument of civilization”.

Zelda articulated beautifully what those of us working in the arts understand innately - that theatre (and other public spaces of cultural value) cannot and should not be defined by market value alone. Despite being rooted in countercultural ideals, the American not-for-profit theatre risks being co-opted by our hyper-capitalist mores. For us, this is where the true value of cultural commoning comes in. It provides an alternative model and framework for creative action that promotes values necessary for influential and meaningful theatre-making:

• generosity and abundance - all are welcome and necessary

• community and collaboration - over isolation and competition

• counter-cultural ideas and leading-edge research that challenges - and seeks to revolutionize - the status quo

• diverse aesthetics and the evolution of forms of theatre practice

• visibility and accessibility for under-represented theatre communities and practices

• global connection - local communities becoming global practice

• timely discourse - work that addresses the most pressing issues of our time such as climate change, migration, and racial, gender and class equity.

HowlRound is an invitation to any theatre-maker who wants to participate - anyone can pitch an article for the journal, propose to livestream an event on HowlRound TV, or join and contribute information to the World Theatre Map. The beauty of a cultural commons is that it encourages access and participation. And in so doing it democratizes things like social standing and hierarchies that may normally prevent folks from contributing. Since our founding, we have published over 2,000 articles by 1,000 authors and have roughly 45,000 readers each month. HowlRound TV has amassed over 6,000 archived, on-demand videos, and viewers have logged a total of 7.5 million minutes of viewing time. In its first six weeks of existence 800

people from forty-eight countries contributed to the World Theatre Map. While these numbers are impressive, the breadth, depth, and diversity of perspectives and people that they represent are far more important. New self-organized collectives, such as the Latinx Theatre Commons,54 have formed in response to and in part because of HowlRound. Cultural commoning has allowed HowlRound to amplify the experiences of marginalized communities and to reveal the richness of our collective theatre-making past and present.

While we steward a primarily online space, we know that our work lives and breathes in real life - in communities of theatre-makers speaking face to face about an article they have read, in ‘watch parties’ for HowlRound TV events, in the implementation of programs modeled after those featured on HowlRound, to name a few. Commons are “social processes that foster and deepen thriving relationships”.55 This is what we’re after, really - to harness the amazing power of the internet and our digital age to create connection amongst theatre-makers so that we can all benefit from each other’s experience, and ultimately create a more socially relevant and just theatre and world.

5Rights and the Power of Real-Life Gathering

Beeban Kidron

A few years ago I founded 5Rights - a framework that takes the established rights of children as enshrined in the UN Charter on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)56 and reimagines them for the digital sphere.

The journey of 5Rights began in 2012, when I made a documentary ‘InRealLife’. The film explored the lives of teenagers growing up in a 24/7 connected world: the only world they have ever known. The film added to an existing debate about how to help children and young people take advantage of the vast potential of the digital world, whilst avoiding its dangers, and a growing concern that young people simply do not understand the ‘pushes and pulls’ built into emerging digital technologies, nor possess enough skills to make good use of its infinite opportunities.

What emerged was the conviction that it is imperative for:

• society to look holistically, not as disconnected extremes, at the opportunities and risks for young people in the digital world..

• the rights that young people enjoy in the physical world to be enacted in their digital world.

• young people to have meaningful voice in how the digital world treats them.

The 5Rights framework was written to offer a single, principled approach that could be used to set a standard by which young people are treated in the digital world. There were contributions from policy experts, academics, teachers, digital engineers, civic society organisations, business leaders and young people themselves. The framework reflects the views and experience of individuals and organisations.

5Rights had been going some time when, in my capacity as Voluntary Arts President, I was invited to attend an Edinburgh round table that was the start of the Our Cultural Commons initiative. We talked a lot about the need for spaces,

transport, resources, organisation – all perquisites for gathering. Those present (or gathered) clearly felt that gathering had a value way beyond the utilitarian sharing of skills or making things, progressing an idea or an organisation. The subtext of the whole meeting was that getting people together wasn’t the method, it was the point. In a world that daily moves towards the virtual this fierce attachment to gathering as a central component of the Our Cultural Commons ambition really caught my attention.

Like many ideas that are of their time 5Rights had found it reasonably easy to find supporters. But, once the first flurry of media had subsided, and the obvious people had been recruited to the cause, it had stalled. I simply could not respond to the interest - attend the meetings, write the articles, give the speeches (as well as fulfill the needs of my work and family life) - alone.

And so, fresh from my visit to Edinburgh, I decided to invest some time in gathering together some of those who had shown most interest in 5Rights to see what, if anything, might happen.

What emerged was a leadership group - a group with no explicit roles, no home, no organizational structure, no remit beyond that which we collectively agreed at any individual gathering; a group that undertook to amplify the message and implement the principles in real world settings. It had always been important that 5Rights, an ethical framework by which to design, judge and understand the digital interactions of children and young people, should sit in the public arena. But the work of promoting it, which had fallen almost exclusively to me, needed to be shared.

I invited 6 people, and 6 people came. We talked about the framework and what might be done with it. We talked about our skills and our contexts and what each person might be able to offer. We ate an excessive amount of crisps and drank warm white wine from plastic cups. We were: a lawyer, a head of mobile products for a major broadcaster, a director of digital design for a major IT company, a regulator, an entrepreneur, a CEO of a Scottish children’s organization, and a member of the House of Lords.

Among the dozens of things done by us with our communities are:

• translating Snapchat’s terms and conditions from legalese into understandable

English

• contributing to the thinking behind age verification • building an app to help young people manage their internet use

• providing evidence to Government about children’s safety and education online

• supporting the case for the UNCRC to be extended into the digital environment.

• instigating a report about childhood development in the digital environment

• setting up a children’s commission in Scotland that has reported on rights and developed policy for Scottish Government.

• speaking, writing and blogging at many events and in many places – to help build a consensus that ‘children are children until they reach maturity not just until they reach for their smartphone’.

For me, the power of Our Cultural Commons is that commitment to real-life gathering. Neither the form of the leadership group nor its ambitious creativity would have been possible from behind a screen. And, whilst the digital world provides infinite possibilities for creativity and sharing, gathering in real life - whatever the struggle for places, spaces, transport, resources and organisation - is a powerful antidote to the fragmented and commodified experience so often available at the touch of the button. Without it we are alone. And alone we cannot do the creative work or make the social change we want.