Being at a national conference reminds me again about how odd the traditional panel discussion can be as a format for information sharing. You get four or five smart people and one moderator at a long table at the front of a crowded room. The moderator reads a long introduction to each. Then each talks for 10 to 20 minutes about the chosen topic, the moderator pontificates for 10 to 20 more, and there’s 10 minutes for questions and comments from the audience — just enough for the first grandstander to make a long and windy comment without a question attached.
Beyond the fact that the moderators aren’t actually trained for what they do (they are good-hearted and civic-minded association members or smart people who do wonderful work but make lousy moderators), it’s a strange approach to what could be a massively powerful moment of aggregated knowledge and experience. Worse yet, there are always people in the audience with brilliant insights and probing contributions to the subject at hand, but the structure of the event never gives them the chance to speak in depth.
It’s particularly frustrating at a professional arts conference (like Arts Presenters, where I am now), because everyone in the room is supposedly a specialist in presenting artists, connecting audiences, and leading the symbolic lives of their communities. You’d think a group of arts presenters would have focused some attention on finding a better way to stage and arrange this particular form of theater.
So, here’s my recommendation for whoever has the interest and resources to forge a new path:
Commission three or four artists (probably from the performing arts, and probably artists with a propensity to work with nonprofessionals as well as professionals) to rethink and reframe what a conference panel discussion should look like. You could consider it a cultural commission, challenging each artist to frame the space, the structure, and the rules of engagement to meet the specific goals (some moments to frame the issue at hand, open and free-ranging conversation, broad participation, a safe place for debate and discovery, with experts as necessary to inform the conversation). You could then ‘present’ these formats within the context of a national convention, as a series of social performance works in the time slots of the original panels they are replacing.
The results could be a catastrophe, of course. But these new perspectives and structures could also reframe how we talk to each other at professional conferences. Who knows, the arts could actually forge conference format innovations that would trickle to the rest of the professional convenings in other industries. They all must be in the same stupor as we are.
Even if the commissioned panel-discussion formats were a flop, they couldn’t be much worse than what we do now. So many wonderful minds in a single space, so much potential for the most broadband of all communication formats (face-to-face discussion), and so much wasted energy on droning biographic introductions, detached comments, and disengaged audience members.
Mind you, I’m truly enjoying the people and ideas I’m hearing in the many rooms of the Arts Presenters conference. I’m just frustrated by the gap between what I hear now and what I might hear if the panel format wasn’t so suffocating.
Does anyone out there know if some professional association has found a better way? If so, let me know.
