Last week, I wrote about my goal to launch a global, intentional and organized movement to build the Beloved Community through musical theatre. It’s a big dream. Big enough to be overwhelming. But there’s that saying about eating an elephant one bite at a time. It’s even more doable if you hold an elephant-eating party. So today, I want to cut that dream into a bunch of bite-sized pieces and invite you to help me tackle any tidbits that look particularly delectable.
Item 1: Gather a skilled and visionary community of playwrights, composers, dramaturges and choreographers who want to create new musicals that lift and unite us.
Summmit Stages News is step one on this. It allows me the opportunity to interview the kinds of people the movement needs to gather, introduce them to our community and invite them in. Many of these creators are already out there and already producing inspiring work, despite doubting it will ever be shown on a major stage. You may know some of them. Please inbox me if you do, so I can put them on my list of people to interview.
Item 2: Hone together our musical-writing craft, to world class.
There are 9-month to one-year intensive programs specifically designed to help composers, lyricists and librettists do this in New York, London, and Los Angeles. We need our own version that incorporates lifting and uniting into its purpose and that honours the Summit Stages value of reverence. We need veterans of the traditional intensive programs who share our vision, to help us develop ours.
Item 3: Develop a community with world-class capabilities for collaboration across divides.
Bridging divides is a big part of what makes this initiative unique and important, what takes it from entertaining to world-changing. And we are doing this at a time when talking across differences seems littered with land-mines. So how do we do this? Form strategic alliances with organizations like Braver Angels that are all about bridging divides.
Item 4: Create and collect an exciting body of plays and musicals that is thoroughly vetted for quality and capacity for building the Beloved Community. Build such a buzz that audience demand has producers and directors lining up to stage them.
Some ideas for this include holding contests for new musicals that lift and unite, where the winners are chosen by a combination of expert judges and subscriber votes. Promote concept albums. Hold 15-minute musical festivals. Launch a podcast that highlights these works.
Item 5: Establish and preserve unity in our movement that keeps it focused on building the Beloved Community rather than on self-serving empires.
At this precise moment, I’m particularly excited about this one. I believe a key to accomplishing this is incorporating collaborative decision making into our structure from the beginning. We need a formal organization that pulls in leaders from all of the groups that will be necessary to bring our vision to pass: actors, creators, venue managers, producers, etc. And all these leaders need to be able to come to the table as full and equal partners, so we all benefit from everybody’s creativity and insight and we resolve our problems in ways that forward our mission and work for everyone.
Just tonight, I was part of a founding meeting for a local non-profit that aims to build joy, belonging, and resilience through the arts across an ethnic divide. We organized it with a management style called sociocracy that is designed to maximize collaboration among full and equal partners. This is a whole other topic for another time. But the feeling of unity and excitement in the room was incredible.
Item 6: Win over the theatre managers in Salt Lake City, so that they are eager to stage our plays during the 2034 Olympics (so people from all over the world can attend and catch the vision).
We just need to start with one venue. And make the experience so positive for everyone (and profitable for the theatre) that neighboring venues catch the vision. One by one, they’ll come onboard.
Item 7: Nurture a community of world-class actors who can portray our inspiring and unifying stories in a way that thrills us, pulls us fully into the characters, and leaves us changed.
Salt Lake City (our movement’s ground zero) is teeming with talent. We need to find ways to employ a nucleus of actors in theatre full-time, so that they can turn out Broadway quality performances. Ideas here are too new to flesh out right now. But I wanted to get this on the list.
Item 8: Find sponsors who recognize the value of this work and are ready to invest in it.
I probably should have put this way earlier, because we need it sooner rather than later. If you know someone who might be interested in helping finance this cause, would you please help me make that connection? In the meantime, I’m inviting you to help sponsor it by becoming a Summit Stages member for $5/month or $50/year (USD). This will get you a monthly report on efforts to forward the movement. And it will help me to make this work sustainable. The weekly newsletter will remain free of charge to all subscribers.
Thank you for being here with me. Thank you for your encouragement, your emails, your honest feedback, and your incredible support!
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