As my church
member Rosie and I prepared for the first meeting of our new theatre group I
was filled with anticipation. We had invited 22 people to the first pot-luck
gathering to discuss how we might change
the world through our love of theatre and doing theatre. Rosie, an
experienced director and mature Christian leader, peered at me over her
Starbucks cup and said, “Now, Cheri, as we lead this first conversation we need
to remember who we are dealing with. This is a group of really creative theatre people. They are going to have
ideas going in a million different directions. We need a plan to keep the group
on task.” I laughed because Rosie and I have a habit in our conversations of
jumping from one topic to the next at lightning speed. We are both dreamers. I
got her point.
So at the meeting,
rather than starting with “let’s do a play” and letting them take off in a
million directions with what show we might do, who could do the sets, the
costumes, what venue we might use, and then start casting the show….we tried
another tactic.
We started with
why. We asked the sixteen eager people gathered in a living room, “Why would a group
of church folks want to do theatre together?” Here are some of the answers we
got:
- To deliver a positive message in a creative way
- There is a place for everyone in the theatre, some are actors, some make costumes, some work behind the scenes, some take tickets, everyone can contribute;
- People might come to a theatre production before they would come to a church
- Theatre is a context that is free from judgment (unlike the way some of us have experienced church); everyone is welcome in the theatre community
- To expand our presence in the community
Starting with the
question of “Why do theatre?” helped us to find a grounding for what we are
going to do. Notice that we did not spend agonizing time crafting a perfect
mission statement. Yet we still got some great content by asking the question
“Why are we going to do this?”
Simon Senek in his
book, Start with Why, thoroughly explores
the idea of starting with why we do what
we do rather than starting with what
we are going to do. If you are not one of the 14 million people who have
watched his TED talk, you can see a 5 minute condensed version of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPYeCltXpxw. Our Village ARTS
(A Revolutionary Theatre Society) is off to a great start, in part, because we
started by asking “why.”
Why are you doing what you do? Do you know? When starting a new group, I encourage you to start with "why?"
Asking "Why?" will give great focus to your group as you begin.
