By Lisa Richards Toney, President and CEO, Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP)
Over the past several months, I have been writing in these pages about three intersections where the performing arts belong, and are increasingly showing up: health, human-centred innovation and civic trust. Each column has been an attempt to name something our field already knows but hasn’t always said out loud. That what we do matters beyond our walls, beyond our audiences and beyond what our mission statements have traditionally claimed
But naming is only the beginning. The harder question, the one I keep returning to, is this: what actually has to change for any of this to take root? The answer, I’ve come to believe, is systems change. A shift in the paradigm of what presenting, booking and touring are fundamentally for.
Systems change theory describes transformation at three levels: the surface, which is structural and explicit – the policies, funding flows, booking practices and representation numbers we can see and measure; the middle, which is relational and implicit – about who holds power and how it moves; and the deep, which is paradigm and culture – the shared beliefs and mental models that generate the entire system, including what success means in our sector, and who the arts are for.
Our field has been working at all three levels, and that work matters. But the deepest level, the paradigm shift, is where we haven’t gone far enough. That is the next frontier.
Surface changes don’t hold unless the deeper levels shift too. You can welcome new artists into old booking structures indefinitely, but if the mental model of what a presentable artist looks like hasn’t changed, the surface work eventually collapses back into the familiar. Welcoming the new is the essential entry point, but becoming the next requires us to go deeper, to the level of shared belief and what we understand success in this field to actually mean.
That shift in belief starts with being able to point to what success looks and feels like. I was at Gala Hispanic Theatre in Washington, D.C. recently, watching Agua Caliente, a joyous musical about immigrant artists and the challenges they face getting work produced, and the perseverance to do it anyway. The message stayed with me and simultaneously with my stress lifted and my joy restored. The civic truth of the story and the visceral relief of experiencing it occupied the same moment.
Moments like that are what our field exists to create. The challenge is that the infrastructure making them possible is under real strain. The need for live experience has never been clearer, but the sector is experiencing an uneven recovery, and innovation is especially urgent when the scaffolding that held us is being dismantled. We must work to see the new opportunities. Defending the status quo is not a growth strategy.
Which brings me to the question I hear more and more: what are the new nuts and bolts necessary to realise this repositioning of the arts? And with it, more questions follow. What funding models make cross-sector work sustainable? What metrics do we use when the impact we are measuring is civic trust or public health, not just tickets sold? Who are the new partners – in healthcare, in technology, in philanthropy – that belong in the room, and what do we offer them? How do we augment our previous rubric for success to include these new paths and how do we bring our people along?
These aren’t rhetorical questions. They are the work. And the answers live at the intersection of the three pillars I’ve been exploring: health outcomes that open new funding streams; human-centred innovation that builds the tools our field actually needs; and civic trust that repositions presenters not just as bookers but as community anchors and infrastructure. Together, they represent the expanded paradigm of what the mission is for.
As APAP marks its 70th anniversary, that history is more than a milestone. It is a credential for leading into the next era. Seventy years of convening the people who move art from creation to community – through recessions, technological disruptions and cultural shifts – means we have seen enough cycles to know the difference between a trend and a turning point. We also know that the organisations that endure are the ones willing to reimagine themselves at exactly the moment it feels hardest to do so. This is that moment.
Registration for APAP|NYC 2027 is now open, and this year’s convening is where “welcoming the new and becoming the next” moves from phrase to practice and lights a path forward.
We have 70 years of muscle memory. Now it’s time to build new muscle.
