The muscle memory we haven’t built yet

APAP: A View from Here

By Lisa Richards Toney, President and CEO, Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) 

The Tony Award-winning Dallas Theater Center and AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas, Texas have announced they are to merge, combining marketing, fundraising and ticketing under one roof.

When announced, some gasped. I didn’t. I recognised the necessity of the shift.

AT&T PAC’s Warren Tranquada and DTC’s Kevin Moriarty made the case together in a joint interview. Moriarty said, “By coming together, we can move from maintaining the status quo to entering a period of growth and opportunity that would be nearly impossible individually.”¹

What history never asked us to share

Presenters and promoters have long occupied different corners of this sector, not because their goals conflicted, but because history never asked them to share a room. One builds relationships with audiences. The other broadens reach. Both, done well, are an act of care for the work and our patrons.

 Promoters know how to find someone before they’re looking. How to make a stranger feel something before they’ve bought anything. How to treat every show as a discovery problem, not an announcement.

Presenters know how to cultivate belonging and earn a community’s trust over time. They create places where audiences return because they believe the experience, the curation and the institution are authentic. That trust is civic infrastructure. Local institutions are still trusted significantly more than their national counterparts, a difference presenters have spent decades quietly earning.²

A few in our sector have built the muscle memory of holding both at once. But most never had to consider it. Until now.

What the future needs from us

For decades, public and philanthropic investment made prioritising access possible by offsetting ticket prices. That model is shrinking. Forty-four per cent of arts organisations ran a deficit in 2024, and working capital has nearly halved since 2021.³ Arts Council England’s (ACE) national portfolio deficits rose from 36 per cent in 2015–16 to a predicted 47 per cent in 2024–25.⁴ If we don’t address this, the gap will continue to widen.

We can no longer depend on building trust within a community as the strongest currency. This trust is hard to quantify against a ticket price that must now absorb all the real costs without subsidy. We can’t afford to treat pricing for access and pricing for production as trade-offs anymore. Building this new muscle memory is how the sector moves beyond operating in dichotomies.

Even beyond the current drastically reduced funding landscape, our patrons have changed. And so how we reach them must also change. Each of us is arguably a different person than we were even five years ago, carrying grief, disruption, fear and forms of fulfilment few of us could have imagined a decade ago – hello, 15-second reels on a smartphone!

We are not selling to who we used to be.

Re-learning reach for a new paradigm

I won’t pretend this is easy. A 2025 Nonprofit Management and Leadership study found that when non-profits lean too far towards a commercial approach, public trust drops.⁵ That is not an argument against studying the strategies that will help develop a new muscle. It is a mandate that we do it with the depth of care we bring to everything else we do.

Higher education is living a version of this worldwide, and pivoting. Japan’s 18-year-old population has nearly halved since 1990, causing most private universities to miss their 2025 enrolment targets.⁶,⁷ And the US projects 400,000 fewer university students between 2025 and 2029.⁸ Meanwhile, a Pew survey found only one in four Americans now see a degree as essential.⁹ Legacy built these institutions for decades. Legacy still matters. It’s no longer enough on its own.

Those factors impact our industry too. For the presenting field’s bottom line, this points to an urgent need to build new audience-development capability as the new muscle memory.

But can we be in the same room?

It means making real space – in our programming, budgets and how we talk about business models – for presenters to welcome what promoters know, without giving up what they also know and have earned. Deep trust. It means promoters embracing partnership over competition and sharing what works. This will take real work, from promoters extending relationships they didn’t build to presenters showing them they have every reason to carry that trust forward.

Change within a sector built on decades of precedent is rarely comfortable, but it is increasingly necessary.

Even so, we must remember what history already asked us: creativity and sheer will as the backbone for our pivots, comfort removed from the equation and relevance made the metric. That’s what this is, and it remains our path to survival. 

The new muscle memory we’re building

It takes a certain audacity to say that the trust we’ve built is no longer enough on its own – we must also find and earn the audiences who haven’t yet found us, and we must do it with fierce conviction. That isn’t a betrayal of the mission. It’s belief in it. Art worth protecting is art worth being found by new audiences.

The new muscle memory is presenting and promoting working as one discipline, not two. Building it is a choice, and one I believe will move the sector forward.