The Spirit of the thing: Why the American Theater can’t change
Why can’t the American Theatre change? We all want to change. We all know this isn’t working. There are programming problems, financial issues galore, the influence of commercial money, artistic development houses crashing, donors vanishing, audiences not returning, no one is getting paid enough, everyone is leaving the industry and not returning - the ship is full of holes and we can see the water coming in. Why can’t we do anything about it?
Maybe we don’t want to? Or maybe there’s something else that wants us to stay the way we are.
Have you ever heard of the word Egregore? My partner, Fernando Gregorio, brought the concept to me 6 months ago and he and I have been tossing it around ever since. An Egregore is an occult concept that originally comes from the Book of Enoch and has its roots in ancient Hebrew mysticism. In brief, an Egregore is a non-physical entity that is made material and brought to existence by the collective belief of a people. A family might gather together the power of its love and manifest an archangel that comes to life, with a flaming sword to protect the ancestral land - or a town might summon a great monster that runs wild devouring children, created purely by the power of their bigotry. Egregore’s are not often created consciously - in fact, it’s most likely for an Egregore to be created unconsciously, accidently by group think - The Egregore is consensus made manifest. From the first moment the Egregore is born, it has Purpose. It knows what it is there to do, and it seeks out to do it immediately. Just as quickly, the Egregore separates itself from the people that created it, and though it maintains an energetic tether to them, the creators no longer have dominion over the creation. The creation is an organism all unto itself. It will continue to feed off the love of the family or the hatred of the village, but it doesn’t take orders. The Egregore lives to do two things; its given task and, like every other organism, to maintain its own existence.
Okay. So why am I going on about spirits that turn into material entities? What is this hippie nonsense? Well I hate to be the one to break it to you, but your theater is haunted. There is an Egregore living in your walls. There is an entity that IS the institution that you work at. It has interests and desires, it has moods and issues that are unique unto itself. It was created long before you arrived there and it will be there when you are gone. You could replace every single person at your institution, and the institution would behave in the same way. Because the Egregore is more than the people. You can have endless meetings about cultural transformation and not change a single thing about the way you do business. The Egregore wants to be itself. This “Spiritus Instituti” was summoned into existence to do a job in a certain manner and it will not rest until that job is done.
Can you see what your Egregore looks like? Can you hear its voice speaking through the mouths of your managers? Can you feel how it moves through your building stacking boxes? Can you see how it makes important decisions for you? It guides the institutions emotions, it’s budgets, its goals. And as you go from one institution to another, can you feel how the Egregores seems to be very familiar? Same same, but different? The tensions between the production and the administrative departments? The stress of tech week? Ways in which we must bite our tongue and sometimes engage in distasteful conversations with donors? The problems there are the problems here. They don’t change. The spirit is the same. Imagine with me, that the American Theater has an Egregore as well. A big looming Goliath - hands that stretch across state lines, a neck as wide as the Rocky Mountains, thighs falling off our southern borders, shoulders so broad they rub against both coasts. Imagine the energy contained within it. Imagine the power. Imagine the potential. Imagine the power of its wants. Remember, it wants to continue to exist - and existence for an Egregore, means existing as it currently exists - eating the same food, making the same things, working with the same people. Egregores don't want to change. This is the reason why, ironically, even as systems begin to fail it, even as the flow of donations dry up, even when audiences stop responding to kinds of art, even as the Egregore begins to starve to death, it has great difficulty adapting. And it will stop you from adapting too.
The greek word “egregoros” means “wakeful” - and it’s a useful root word for the concept we are exploring. Do we try to change the Egregore, knowing how difficult that will be, knowing the self awareness and the almost impossible collective buy-in that would take? Or do we kill the Egregore - drive it off a cliff, like the mob from an old black and white movie would a monster? Do we reach out to heal the breach with love, as mythic knowledge would guide us? I’m afraid I don’t know. But I do know that my growing awareness of our Egregores has given me the presence of mind to understand when and how it is working. We must learn to see it. Because if the Egregore is ever wakeful, always watching, we too must keep our eyes on it.