NCTC Producing Gathering: Day 1

Triad Stage and the North Carolina Theatre Conference are pretty tight – which maybe isn’t surprising, considering NCTC’s state headquarters are embedded in our administrative offices on Elm St. in downtown Greensboro. But we are thrilled every time we get to welcome the entire NC theater community to Greensboro for the annual NCTC Producing Gathering. This year’s two-day conference (July 17 & 18, 2017) is our fifth time hosting the gathering of almost 100 theater practitioners, from companies of all sizes to board members, independent producers, educators, and volunteers from all over the state.

This year we kicked off in The Pyrle Theater with an opening keynote from Ben Cameron, a titan thought leader in the arts world and a native of the Triad. He shared ten meditations on theater in NC and the way forward. His “Zen Ben” presentation seemed to key up the audience more than calm the fears, which is exactly what you want at the start of your conference. Big takeaways: Change is already here, and theaters that can’t adapt are in trouble. Also, we could all stand to take a hard look at our values and how we’re reflecting them in our work and our wider actions in the community (more on that late this week in our reflection post).

After the keynote, NCTC Executive Director Angie Hays spent some time leading us through the process of generating unconference topics (for those who have never attended an unconference, it’s basically a giant brainstorming session where we share all the problems we’d like to solve and things we’d like to talk about, and then whittle that down to our sessions). Today’s sessions spanned a range of topics that included Creativity & Collaboration, Allowing Our Communities to Define Our Values, Sensory Friendly Performances, and Engaging Millenial Donors.

 

The afternoon carried us out into the communities for tours of The Forge, Greensboro’s burgeoning makerspace, and The International Civil Rights Center and Museum, a cultural touchstone for our city and state.

Day one is wrapping up with an extremely chic party at Proximity Hotel, which will still wind down early enough for us all to be back fresh-faced in the morning for what is guaranteed to be another challenging and rewarding day.

Tomorrow we’ll share the best news from Day 2, and later in the week we’ll also share some of our top line takeaways from our favorite sessions, and favorite general moments from the conference. Until tomorrow!

Photos and content from Opportunity Greensboro Fellow Alyx Bean and Marketing Manager Tiffany Albright.