Diane Ragsdale.
“The willingness frequently to revise one’s personal location as a way to place oneself within the path of magnificence is the essential impulse underlying training.” —Elaine Scarry, On Magnificence and Being Mistaken
Some friendships start within the mind, some within the coronary heart. Some are born of shared tasks or frequent function. Typically you get fortunate and a friendship begins in every single place unexpectedly—thoughts, coronary heart, values, work—and radiates out from there, till you may’t inform the place the enjoyment of working collectively ends and that of pondering or just being collectively takes over. Diane Ragsdale was that sort of buddy to me and, when she died instantly at an incredibly younger 57 earlier this month, it grew to become clear that she was such a buddy for numerous others as effectively.
We met someday in 2004 or ’5. I don’t bear in mind the second, however I bear in mind the sensation. Twenty years into my profession, I knew that I’d discovered my work—main a middle for playwrights—however, as a lot as I liked and admired the writers at New Dramatists and colleagues throughout the sector, I hadn’t discovered my posse, the individuals who thought and felt about theatre the way in which I did—who acquired what I needed for all of it. Then got here Diane. She was working, typically alone, as a program affiliate, then officer, in Theatre and Dance on the Andrew W. Mellon Basis, earlier than Susan Feder and Katie Steger joined a yr later, as her boss and affiliate, respectively, each changing into her lifelong buddies. Diane understood me, joined me, and made issues occur. Most necessary, as she did all through her uniquely catalytic profession, she stored enlarging the circle.
Within the days since her loss of life, I’ve heard the identical factor time and again, practically verbatim. David Dower met Diane 20 years in the past when he was operating Z House in San Francisco and feeling ancillary to the American theatre. “As a result of she existed and since she noticed me, I knew I wasn’t loopy,” David instructed me. Philip Himberg, who headed up the Sundance Theater Lab on the identical time (early 2000s) echoes this: “She noticed me. She noticed us. She noticed the sector.” Diane was a visionary whose reward was serving to others refine and notice their very own visions. Her Mellon sister-in-arms Katie Steger credit Diane as information and mentor for nearly each profession transfer she’s made, an instance of the way in which she took everybody severely, ignored standing, and believed that every particular person had one thing to contribute. As Katie put it, “She’d convey everyone into these huge rooms to make shit occur.” Mind, coronary heart, function, work—multi function jackpot of an individual.
“Connector” is among the phrases folks generally use to explain Diane. On this manner she was a latter-day W. McNeil Lowry, the nonprofit theatre’s first patron saint, who infused Ford Basis cash into the embryonic resident theatre and made it a motion. In Zelda Fichandler’s phrases: “There was a ‘we,’ although we didn’t know one another. It was I, and him, and her on the market someplace.” That’s just a little like the way it felt to these of us operating new-play labs and developmental theatre packages within the early aughts: P. Carl (and later Jeremy Cohen) at Playwrights’ Heart, Dower (then Lisa Steindler) at Z, Himberg at Sundance, and myself at New Dramatists, in addition to others throughout the nation, who couldn’t get arrested by nationwide foundations as a result of we didn’t produce. We knew we had been central to the theatre ecosystem; we knew that the playwrights we sheltered and liked and made house, group, and residential for had been on the coronary heart of this free, fragmented discipline. When Diane discovered us, we grew to become a we.
We weren’t the one fortunate ones. She sought out others like and in contrast to our gang: presenters and competition throwers, multi-arts labs and far-flung ensembles, in addition to all of the distinctive, pressing theatres whose seasons weren’t seasons in any respect however relatively an ever-changing technique of creative manufacturing, like NY’s Foundry Theatre and the equally totally different “Heffalumps,” because the Foundry’s pioneering chief Melanie Joseph referred to as us un-categorizables. Diane roped everybody in, from the mammoth Oregon Shakespeare Pageant to that Wile E. Coyote of festivals, Below the Radar. Diane understood economies of scale and scaled the peaks of aesthetic philosophy. She by no means overlooked the artwork or artist, which is why you would all the time see the artist she was or had got down to be, why she might train administration abilities to musicians and theatremakers and performers of any stripe. Why, Physician Dolittle-like, she might speak to the Heffalumps.
As an activist-thinker, Diane understood the ecologies of tradition. She mapped them on the intersection of aesthetics, economics, and ethics, circling variations of the query of how, in every of those ecosystems, we worth what we worth. She was an mental magpie, snatching curiosities from in every single place and paying them ahead. P. Carl turned her on to Elaine Scarry’s On Magnificence and Being Simply, and he or she, in flip, made positive I learn it. I began educating it too, and have quoted it above, testomony to the way in which she’d take a flame she’d lit from the torch of one in every of her beloved co-conspirators and use it to ignite one other—or many others.
Magnificence and justice had been her twin beacons, in every single place she roamed. And roam she did. Her ArtsJournal.com weblog was referred to as “Jumper,” a reputation advised by the journal’s editor Douglas McLennan when it grew to become clear she’d be “leaping the pond” to marry a Dutch man, Jaap Boter. The title match the sort of conversations she all the time had, Doug wrote me, “pushing concepts and ‘leaping’ typical pondering.” The title rings proper to me too—excellent for an individual frequently keen “to revise one’s personal location” to put herself within the path of magnificence and fact.
She traveled from her native dwelling of St. Louis to school in New Orleans, graduate college in Kansas Metropolis, a doctoral program in Rotterdam, persevering with MBA coaching in Palo Alto; she jumped from management jobs in Seattle to Idaho, New York, Alberta, and Minneapolis. She carried on a decade-long marriage, shifting backwards and forwards between many of those locations and the Netherlands, the place she joyfully leapt into the position of stepmother to 2 beloved daughters. Earlier than her tenure at Mellon and all of the educating that adopted, she jumped from premed to psychology, from appearing to directing to advertising and marketing for a small ensemble theatre to turning round struggling music festivals earlier than managing On the Boards, an necessary experimental efficiency venue in Seattle. From then on she slalomed the tortuous panorama of performing arts tradition like Mikaela Shiffrin on a tear.
Diane didn’t simply see her colleagues and lucky buddies. Pushed by the longer term, she created, launched, and/or led at the very least three superior diploma packages to assist up-and-coming generations make their visions actual too: “Cultural Management” on the Banff Heart for Arts and Tradition and, later, on the Minneapolis Faculty of Artwork and Design, and “Arts Administration and Entrepreneurship” for performing artists on the New Faculty. As a visitor lecturer on the College of Wisconsin/Madison, she piloted a course on aesthetics within the enterprise college, for God’s sake—“Aesthetics and Magnificence” for MBA candidates!
Typically she jumped in direction of—love and studying, principally. Her thoughts vaulted with the vivacious prowess of a brainiac Olympian with a case of mental ADHD. Should you go to her Jumper weblog, try her studying lists (scroll to close the underside of this web page). They’re countless and diversified, and he or she learn—then talked and taught—her manner by each e-book there. “Diane lived at her studying edge,” her colleague Tim Cynova rightly claimed on his podcast, Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. Typically she jumped from: The too-common petty feudal lords of academia have little tolerance for visionaries like Diane. They prefer to dictate phrases, and kickass world-changers like Diane don’t undergo dictation.
Diane’s distinctive brilliance was, I consider, this loopy combo of rigor and restlessness, which might make a dialog final for hours or days or perpetually. One subject she and I stored returning to: the intersection (her phrase) between industrial and nonprofit theatre, its historical past, current, and future. It was the topic of a now-famous dialog she facilitated between 25 producers on each side of the equation in D.C. in 2011, and about which she reported in a brief e-book, Within the Intersection: Partnerships Within the New Play Sector. She requested me to answer the report for HowlRound and thus spurred me to articulate a (kinda) (then-) manifesto of my very own, “What Worth Idealism, or Who You Gonna Dance With?” Once more, she impressed and incited. This uneasy, ever-evolving cross-economic relationship was the topic of her (now perpetually) unfinished dissertation, a draft of which just about everybody I spoke to for this tribute is making an attempt to get fingers on. I’d been engaged on a e-book of founding visions for American artwork theatres, and for years she needed to debate the nice regional theatre founders, notably Margo Jones, Zelda Fichandler, and that first funder, Lowry. I gave her many leads, spent hours hashing over shared texts, and now I’m determined to learn her dissertation—a need I’ve by no means had about anybody’s educational writing.
I would like you to know this about Diane, particularly when you’re a youthful artist, administrator, or funder: With out her, many people wouldn’t have made it. Two generations of “we” may need remained as her and him and them on the market. Complete coaching packages wouldn’t exist, nor would one main platform I need to shout out specifically: HowlRound Theatre Commons. There’s a direct line from Diane Ragsdale to the founding of, first, the American Voices New Play Institute underneath Molly Smith and David Dower in 2009, which begat the Allen Lee Hughes New Play Producing Fellowships, which begat, at Emerson Faculty, the HowlRound P. Carl had envisioned, which begat the Mellon Nationwide Playwright Residency Program, the Latinx Theatre Commons, and a lot else. These had been different folks’s brain-children, however she believed in them and fought to have them funded. With out her, these seminal tasks would have remained wishful. By way of them she helped additional the sensible careers of a bajillion playwrights and theatremakers, in addition to so many present discipline leaders who earlier labored in these packages, together with Travis Ballenger, Kevin Becerra, Jamil Jude, Ronee Penoi, Amrita Ramanan, Dan Pruksarnukal, Erin Washington, and naturally Jamie Gahlon and Vijay Mathew, each current at HowlRound’s delivery and now overseeing its adolescence. The record goes on, because it does in so many galaxies, from new-play labs to the Nationwide Efficiency Community to the Community of Ensemble Theaters. I title these names for these of you coming after Diane and me and all of the folks with whom she made group. One particular person could make astonishing change, even in a discipline that seems to be fractured and immovable, even with no dean-ship, presidential seal, or enormous establishment underneath her course.
Diane influenced nationwide funding priorities effectively past her 5 or 6 years as an affiliate and officer (by no means director) at Mellon—touring her new boss Susan Feder, who got here from the classical music world, by the island of misfit toys that’s the American theatre, together with the scrappy components. She teamed up with different nationwide funders to rethink—repeatedly—the relationships between buildings and organizations, artwork and establishments, the industrial and the nonprofit. She supplied greater than concepts—she supplied knowledge, funding research like Dower’s Gates of Alternative for Mellon and abetting what grew to become Theatre Growth Fund’s Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Occasions of the New American Play, authored by Ben Pesner and me. These are the tip of the iceberg, as her analysis and studying (and all of the analysis and studying she instigated) would have made extra abnormal brains bleed.
Simply as powerfully, she influenced our understanding of this tradition we’re a part of. Wherever she roamed—and he or she confirmed at each convention that ever was—she’d pull up a bar stool and one arts chief or one other, one marketing consultant or co-conspirator or two, would turn out to be her pondering buddies, till we fell asleep in our beers, even whereas she motored on. You may learn proof of all that nonstop cogitation on Jumper in her quite a few keynote speeches and essays. I want this jumper had stayed nonetheless lengthy sufficient to put in writing books I might now maintain and reread. I want she’d lived an extended sufficient life to put in writing cabinets of them. Really, what’s already on the market might fill volumes.
When my household and I moved to Seattle in 2014, we sought out On the Boards, which Diane had made mythic for me. She appeared to have all the time gotten to one of the best locations forward of me, like a cool older sister with superb buddies and an infinite prepare go, although she was nearly a decade youthful. I needed to go the place she went—I’m nonetheless jealous of her years at Banff—and to know what she knew. Once we moved again to New York, and I wanted work and earnings to fill out my position as a program head of MFA Playwriting on the New Faculty, she organized a joint appointment for me to show within the start-up yr of her artwork entrepreneurship program there, sharing a cohort of artists from a number of disciplines with one other fortunate colleague-friend of hers, producer Mara Isaacs. We referred to as the foundational class “Dreaming and Constructing.” It might function a title for her complete profession.
Diane’s hearth coursed by the entire of her: thoughts, coronary heart, and physique. It animated her ever-ready chuckle and unstoppable stream of phrases. (She would joke that her sentences lasted two minutes, solely after which she breathed.) As soon as, watching her fingers, I seen the gorgeous new engagement ring she wore. I used to be trying to find one myself, so she confirmed me the little storefront on the Decrease East Aspect the place she’d gotten it. I proposed to the mom of our then-3-year-old on the bench exterior New York’s culinary surprise, Russ & Daughters, from which we might stroll across the nook to select a hoop. That jewellery retailer is gone now, as we found just a few weeks earlier than Diane too was gone.
In what I consider was her final revealed essay, from a yr in the past, she chews on a query by one in every of her favourite authors, Rebecca Solnit, who, like Diane, blends artistry, activism, and artistic thought and in whose dazzling firm Diane belongs. Solnit’s query “How do you calculate upon the unexpected?” leads Diane to a contemplation of “indeterminacy,” as theorized by composer John Cage. In a world of unknowable outcomes, aren’t the methods arts organizations usually plan and strategize restricted? In “recognition of the necessity to discover radically new and exquisite options to most of the methods of being, doing, and understanding” now we have beforehand embraced, she imagines a “technique of indeterminacy” to “arrive at locations we can’t think about, a lot much less describe.”
If this was certainly her ultimate public assertion, it’s a becoming one. As ever with Diane, it takes the type of a just about unanswerable query. And it’s a haunting one, as these of us who knew her, liked her, thought, and labored alongside her attempt to think about the unimaginable: a discipline, convention, dialog, classroom, competition, late-night brain-binge at which she shouldn’t be. How can we calculate this unexpected loss?
I don’t know learn how to make a phrase cloud, but when I did, I do know the phrases that might come out in majestic coloured letters, as a result of I’ve heard them in each dialog about Diane since I discovered she’d died: BRILLIANT, FEROCIOUS, CURIOUS, GENEROUS, CONNECTIVE, INTENSE, COURAGEOUS, ARTIST. In her self-doubt, which was actual, I think she would have used few, if any, of those phrases to explain herself. However she was all of this stuff. I want for everybody within the theatre a Diane Ragsdale of their life, somebody who sees them, offers them a way of belonging, and passes them hearth.
Todd London (he/him) is a former managing editor of American Theatre and the creator of quite a few books on the theatre, together with This Is Not My Memoir with Andre Gregory, An Very best Theater, Outrageous Fortune, The Significance of Staying Earnest, and The Inventive House, in addition to two novels, If You See Him, Let Me Know and The World’s Room. A protracted-term creative director of New York’s New Dramatists, he received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and was the primary recipient of Theatre Communications Group’s Visionary Management Award.
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