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The Scene Room
The Scene Room Podcast spotlights the movers and makers redefining the performing arts—focusing on innovative marketing, leadership, and the importance of collaboration. Hosted by Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman, with a keen eye on audience trends and cultural shifts, the goal is to explore how artists and organizations are connecting with communities, shaping the future, and redefining what it means to engage and inspire.
The Scene Room
Alex Sarian — Relevance and Leadership in the Arts
Join us as we sit down with Alex Sarian, bestselling author of The Audacity of Relevance and President and CEO of Calgary's Arts Commons. Sarian’s innovative approach to cultural leadership has not only transformed Calgary’s Arts Commons but also unlocked over $500 million in funding, reshaping cultural leadership across Canada. This marks the largest cultural infrastructure project in Canadian history.
In this episode, Sarian shares how he leads Arts Commons with a focus on community engagement and a service-oriented leadership model. Learn how his visionary approach has aligned Arts Commons’ success with Calgary’s civic ambitions, reducing government dependency through a social enterprise model.
Sarian also challenges conventional thinking on audience development, arguing that programming relevance must come before ticket price adjustments to truly build value. He reveals how arts organizations can achieve both relevance and financial sustainability by focusing on the needs of their communities.
Throughout the conversation, one key question emerges as central to Sarian’s success: “What does the world need right now that we are uniquely positioned to do?” Discover how this guiding principle has transformed fundraising, programming, and the cultural landscape at Arts Commons.
*Correction: Lizzie says in the video introduction that Sarian is a New York Times bestselling author — while we think he should be, he's a nationally bestselling author. So, here she is manifesting...so, go buy his book!
photo credit: Jeremy Fokkens
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Visit TheSceneRoom.com for more information.
Hi, I'm Elizabeth Bowman and welcome to the Scene Room. Today I have New York Times best-selling author, alex Sarian here. He wrote the Audacity of Relevance. He is also the president and CEO of Calgary's Arts Commons, a position he took in May 2020 after nearly two decades of leadership roles in New York City, most notably as the senior executive at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts . I was so excited to talk to Alex about all the things. If you are enjoying the Scene Room podcast, please like, share, comment, review, do all the free things you can do to show your support. It helps keep this conversation going. You can visit thesceneroomcom for any and all episodes and more information. Thanks for your support. Thanks for listening. Now let's get to the conversation. Alex, welcome to the Scene Room. Thanks for coming.
Alex Sarian:Thanks for having me, lizzie, it's exciting.
Elizabeth Bowman:I will disclose that reading your book the Audacity of Relevance actually was the catalyst to me starting this podcast in the first place.
Alex Sarian:I want to hear more about that.
Elizabeth Bowman:No, I just. I read your book. I was so inspired, and then I had been thinking about starting this podcast already and then I thought, oh my goodness, I should do this. And then I thought I'm going to write to Alex Sarian and see if he'll be on my podcast. And you wrote back right away. Of course I'll say this oh my goodness, I got to start the podcast now.
Alex Sarian:Now it's real Well, congratulations.
Elizabeth Bowman:Thank you. So what inspired you? To write that book.
Alex Sarian:Oh, my goodness. Well, first I should be very clear I never thought I'd be a writer. I don't even read for pleasure, if that makes any sense, which feels weird, admitting out loud. But there are two factors that really pushed me to do it. The first one was, you know, I just moved to Calgary from New York City.
Alex Sarian:We were advancing this really exciting project, the Arts Commons Transformation, which is building, you know, almost a million square feet of this cultural campus in downtown Calgary, the largest cultural infrastructure project in Canadian history. And it was important for me, as we were advancing the work and advancing the design, I wanted people to know that this was more than just a shiny new building, that it was a new way of thinking about the arts, it was a new value proposition for cultural organizations. And that was the driving factor behind a lot of our success, which people were paying attention to, because, you know, we were breaking so many records in terms of fundraising, in terms of the size and scope of this project, and I wanted people to understand why this was happening. Because it is replicable. The idea of experiencing this kind of success is replicable when you're talking about more than just the design. So that's one element, the other element, as I'm sure you've seen and noticed, and this was happening around the world with the pandemic and the restrictions that were being introduced, our sector was really being turned upside down and there was something very noticeable for me about organizations and leaders that would just sit back and say we're going to wait for this thing to be over, we're going to write it out, and that instilled in me such a frustration. You know we were working our butts off in Calgary at Arts Commons, trying to figure out how are we going to come out of this, looking completely different and having used this time to transform.
Alex Sarian:And really the catalyst was there was an article in the Globe and Mail by Josh O'Kane, who I love, and he wrote this really fascinating article I want to say it was last summer or now two summers ago where he was listing every reason why it was becoming harder to run a cultural institution and he listed things that seem obvious to us inflation, escalation, evolving consumer behaviors, the evolution of philanthropy but nowhere on that list was there ever any accountability to the leaders that were meant to be running the sector and saying well, maybe the reason it's getting harder to run an arts organization is because we don't know how to lead the sector anymore.
Alex Sarian:And there was something so beautiful about what was happening in Calgary at Arts Commons as we were redefining our value proposition, and I wanted to share that story because it's a paradigm shift from arts leaders feeling like they need to have all the answers to arts leaders instead figuring out what questions to ask and building community in the answering of those questions. So it doesn't require us to be smarter than we were five years ago. It requires us to be humbler than we were five years ago and I really wanted to share that because we were experiencing such an incredible moment of community building and civic dialogue, particularly in times of crisis, that I really wanted to share that. So those are the two big catalysts and I'm grateful that, as I hear feedback, that's what people are really taking away from it.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, in the book you talk a lot about the importance of connecting with the community, really figuring out where you stand, what your role is within your specific community, and you talk about moving to Calgary and learning about the environment there. Can you tell us a little bit about that, because I really loved what you had to say in there?
Alex Sarian:Yeah, I mean one of the most humbling experiences for me. So when I was in New York City, I worked at Lincoln Center for seven years and one of the things within my portfolio was international consulting. And you know, I don't know about you, but, like when you live and work in New York, you're trained to think that this is the center of the universe, right? And it was very humbling to be going around the world and realizing, oh, what worked in New York City isn't necessarily going to work in Shanghai, or what worked in Shanghai isn't necessarily going to work in Mexico City. So that experience trained me to think about the idea of relevance as a topic that is hyperlocal and that nobody's entitled to knowing the answer, especially somebody from the outside. And so if we can figure out what questions need to be asked, then I think this idea of relevance is achieved, as I said earlier in answering the question. So it was interesting receiving this phone call about this position in Calgary.
Alex Sarian:I had never been to Calgary, I had never heard of Arts Commons before, which is embarrassing to admit, but we fell in love with all of the opportunities that Calgary presented and I think what's more important is the reason we're experiencing success at Arts Commons has very little to do with me and everything to do with the community that is around it and that is excited about seeing it grow.
Alex Sarian:And so to me, that was the greatest gift and Calgary continues giving us this gift is this idea that if you come in with really bold questions, then people will really galvanize in coming together around them. And you know proof of concept. We broke ground on the project in December, so it's happening. There's something very, very beautiful about the possibilities in Calgary. There's also something really ambitious about this sort of underdog mentality where you know, when I say to people, oh, this is going to be the largest performing arts campus in Canada, their chests sort of puff up. When I say that we've achieved the largest philanthropic gift to the performing arts in Canadian history, they get super proud, and so there's something very beautiful about watching that happen in real time.
Elizabeth Bowman:Can you talk about achieving those gifts, because you got the $103 million and then, following that, you got the $75 million donation from Dave Workland.
Alex Sarian:So the first thing was arriving at a value proposition that aligned the success of this organization to Calgary's success, and I think you know you mentioned the provincial investment, you mentioned that Workland's investment, but I think one of the greatest gifts that was given to us was the idea that this project, at the city level, municipally, was so interconnected with the future vibrancy of our downtown core. You know, when the pandemic hit, this was one of a handful of projects that city government outlined as core to the downtown revitalization of Calgary and, in fact, one of the most beautiful things. In April of 2021, there was a city council meeting where the city of Calgary announced an initial investment into the downtown revitalization of Calgary. It was a $200 million package. It included amazing things like office-to-residential conversion, which people around the world have been talking about in Calgary, but what people don't know is that the single largest line item of that $200 million package was for cultural infrastructure, was for Arts Commons, and that was the city's way of shouting from the rooftops. Arts and culture are important to the future of our downtown and if our downtown isn't healthy, then our city isn't healthy. So that was a beautiful way for us to align civically to our community, and then we were able to flex those muscles when going to the province.
Alex Sarian:And you know, right now in Alberta there is a conservative government, and the assumption is and I think it's a wrong assumption that the conservative government rarely invests in arts and culture. They do, you know, I was a lobbyist in New York in the US, and one of the things we knew was that the arts community tend to do a lot better under conservative governments than under progressive governments, and so it was just a matter of us being able to speak their language, aligning ourselves to their metrics, and so we were able to do a lot of work around studying, you know, the impact of social enterprise on our business model. We were able to determine that our campus, once completed, would actually be less dependent on government funds than it is now A decrease of 26% year over year of dependency on government funds because we were embracing this social enterprise model, which I think is fascinating for everybody in Canada to pay attention to, because this idea of sustainability as a business model in the arts is something that people are really trying to understand. So we were able to speak the language of the province of Alberta and prove to them that they're not going to have to feed the beast that they're building for the next 50 years, which, of course, is any government's concern.
Alex Sarian:You know that was a huge surprise when we received $103 million from the province and then, on the heels of that, we announced the single largest philanthropic gift to the performing arts $75 million from Dave Workland. And that was really. You know, dave is such an incredible human being. It took two years I wouldn't even say two years to land that gift, because it wasn't about landing the gift, it was two years of getting to know him and being challenged by him and rising to the occasion.
Alex Sarian:One of the things I love about Dave is that there's no history of giving to the arts. You know, his background in philanthropy is in education, in social service, and so we were able to tell a different story around arts and culture that aligned with his values. So when people say to him now, dave, why would you give to arts and culture when historically you only gave to education or social services? His answer, which I found beautiful, is well, because Arts Commons, soon to be Workland Center, is putting the arts in service to those larger issues. And so I think it's because of that value proposition and being in service to others and a certain level of humility and defining our success by the successive communities around us, that we were able to land incredible gifts and funding municipally, provincially and privately, and now we're just working on the federal level.
Elizabeth Bowman:It's interesting that the narrative of the economic investment in the arts hasn't been more resonant with the governments, because, I mean, I've read several documents over the last 15 years and it seems like, for instance, there's the Lincoln Center document that talks about the value of Lincoln Center for the overall tourism community and the economic impact document I'm not sure what it's called, I'll look it up and then post it but it says something ridiculous, like for every dollar spent, $17 is put back into the community surrounding that organization.
Alex Sarian:Yeah, Dinner, parking, daycare, you know like it's. The economic impact is huge.
Elizabeth Bowman:The economic impact is huge, yeah, and also the education. It goes just beyond what you could even put into a document that you can't calculate.
Alex Sarian:Oh, the social impact. But here's what I find fascinating is we have all these stories to tell as a sector and for some reason we don't tell them, and it's not only hurting us philosophically but it's also hurting us economically. Pick a type of revenue earned revenue, contributed revenue. If we are not in service to the communities around us, if we don't lean into this idea of relevance from a place of service and humility, so like, if people don't care what we have to offer, then they're not going to come buy tickets. So earned revenue is going to go down, and we all know that impact is the currency of philanthropy and if we don't have those stories to tell, then philanthropy is not going to follow, you know. And then government. This is what I find fascinating.
Alex Sarian:You know, the nonprofit sector continues to grow at a crazy rate and the government support systems that are in place to support the nonprofit sector, whether it's healthcare, whether it's social services, whether it's arts and culture they're not keeping up. You know, one of the chapters in my book is around advocacy, and I claim that we were advocating for the wrong thing, because non-profit organizations, arts or non-arts, are entering the market at a faster rate than they're leaving them. So the pie is literally getting smaller. Government has said this is going to change and yet for some reason we continue fighting that fight and in a way that is not pretty anymore, it's not inspiring anymore. You know, in the chapter on philanthropy I start by saying you know, there's philanthropy that begs and philanthropy that inspires. I think we have gotten to a place where we are living in this world around, philanthropy that begs and it may work once, it may work twice, but if we're not inspiring people, if we're not leading the change, then that support will be very short-lived and ultimately detrimental to the health of our business.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, no one wants to invest in something unless they understand the impact of what they're giving for.
Alex Sarian:Yeah, they don't want to bail people out, they want to invest in the future.
Elizabeth Bowman:So, in terms of Calgary and Arts Commons, you said you didn't know about Arts Commons before being offered the position. How do you change that international recognition while serving the local community at the same time?
Alex Sarian:So one of the things that I realized very quickly during the interview process is that Arts Commons was actually modeled after Lincoln Center from a governance perspective, and so, all of a sudden, the story of Arts Commons that I feel had been misunderstood for so long, became very clear for me in terms of its familiarity and so a lot of the work we've been trying to do over the past four years in terms of articulating our social impact, our economic impact, even this idea of collective impact as it relates to the resident companies that are housed within us incredible organizations like the Calgary Phil and Theatre, calgary and Alberta Theatre Projects and Downstage and the Rat Like it. Just there's so many amazing stories to tell and I don't think that we had figured out how to tell that story. Now, this idea of local and global reputation I find very, very interesting, because there's a phrase that I actually hate, but I'm going to say it anyways, which is glocal, and it leans into this tension between needing local approval but seeking global reputations, and there's usually this tension, and what I've come to learn over the past 10, 15 years is that organizations that prioritize a global reputation first will ultimately fail. I think the opposite is actually quite impressive. When you can build an international reputation based on your local impact, and so that's something that we've been leaning into quite a bit.
Alex Sarian:I mean, obviously, this project the Arts Commons Transformation has an international ripple effect. We have international architects, but we also have local architects, we have indigenous architects, we have female architects, so we're telling a local story on a global platform. This idea of breaking records in terms of fundraising and investment yes, it's reaching ears around the world, but it's ultimately elevating the profile of Calgary. So one of the things I love about this is that, yes, we are an internationally renowned organization, and we will become even more so when we have this beautiful campus, but what I love about it is that we're not doing it at the expense of being a Calgary-based organization. We're doing it because of it, and that's what I find beautiful and what I tell people all the time. If you want people from around the world to know you, then people in your backyard need to care first.
Elizabeth Bowman:That makes sense from a human perspective. Ultimately, too, as an individual, you have to know what drives you every day and who you are, and that will resonate through your work as well. Okay, so you talk about the ticket pricing. I just want to get into that a little bit, because obviously that's a hot topic right now, with Opera Philadelphia doing the $11 ticket experiment. Obviously, they've offset that with a donation to cover their bottom line there. But you talk about the lowering ticket price strategy in the arts as a potentially harmful thing in terms of attracting audiences. Can you comment on that a little bit?
Alex Sarian:So to me, the big question is when I see these programs taking place, my first question is why are you doing it? Because and listen, I'm going to preface this by saying that lowering the financial barrier is incredibly important. I am not somebody that is advocating that we should be passing on the increasing cost of producing or presenting arts to the patrons, particularly when those patrons are community members, and there are economic injustices in every city that you can go visit. My big issue with lowering ticket prices to the patrons particularly when those patrons are community members and there are economic injustices in every city that you can go visit my big issue with lowering ticket prices is that we seem to be very quick to blame others for our inability to program things that people value. So I'll give you an example, and I'm not going to name names, but there are plenty of organizations that you and I know of that program, a season or program, a show, and that show doesn't seem to be resonating with their audiences, does not seem to be resonating with their communities, and the first instinct is to say, surely it must be too expensive, instead of saying maybe we didn't program the right thing, and so then what happens is by not taking accountability for the fact that we may have not done the right thing which, by the way, is okay. Like before, I was at Lincoln Center, I worked Off-Broadway. The whole purpose of Off-Broadway is to throw spaghetti against the wall and experiment. So I'm okay with experimentation. I actually think we need to be doing more of it.
Alex Sarian:However, when we do things that are not successful and we don't hold ourselves accountable to that and instead we say, oh, let's lower the ticket prices, I think we're shooting ourselves in the foot twice the first time because we're not presenting things that value and learning from that, and the second because now we're offering it at a discount. So I encourage people that are quick to talk about the financial barrier to truly understand why it is that they're doing it. You know, I always talk about the case of Hamilton on Broadway in New York. Hamilton, first and foremost, established its value to the consumer. You know, before they started talking about ticket discounts, they knew that they had the hottest show in Broadway history, as could be explained by their ridiculous ticket prices. But because of that, a foundation came in and said we're going to pay so that every New York City public school middle schooler can attend Hamilton as part of their social studies curriculum.
Alex Sarian:So that, to me, is a perfect example of putting something out into the world which has value and then saying okay, because it has value and because it has become so competitive, we are going to jump in there and lower the financial barrier for people that actually want to see this but may not be able to, as opposed to having a mediocre show that's not going to sell. I think it's a slippery slope of an argument because, at the end of the day, not only are you not taking accountability for your own choices, you're actually putting the blame on community. And then I have a lot of issues with well-intentioned organizations going into communities of color predominantly and saying oh, we're going to lower the ticket price because our assumption is that, because you are a community of color, you don't have disposable income. That is a very dangerous assumption and generalization to be making.
Elizabeth Bowman:Right. Also, if larger organizations are cutting their ticket prices to such a huge degree, then the smaller companies are going to have a really tough time competing with those bigger companies, even if they have a good product, because automatically those bigger companies have brand loyalty established and so that just busies up everyone's calendars.
Alex Sarian:So there's an example that happened here at Theatre Calgary. As pandemic restrictions were easing, they came up with this $39 ticket program. It wasn't just a flat program that said, okay, $39 tickets in perpetuity. They had this fascinating and really smart model where they said this is an exercise in rebuilding our audiences post-pandemic and getting them back up to a full-going theater experience. So their plan started at $39 tickets in orchestra only.
Alex Sarian:So there were people that were still paying $50, $60, $70, but for less desirable seats, and their plan was to always, over the course of three years, slowly take those training wheels off so that by year four you had a full-grown community of theatergoers that were back at paying more competitive prices.
Alex Sarian:And I find that fascinating, because Theater Calgary took accountability and said we have three years not only to lower ticket prices but to present the highest quality of theater that we can, because by year four it's no longer about acquiring new audience members, it's about retaining them. And if we've invested $10, $15 million over the course of three years to subsidize ticket prices and we don't have audience retention, then we will have failed. So there's an incredible strategy there around lowering ticket prices, not because of theater being undesirable, but in parallel to that they were punching above their weight in the shows. They were picking the production levels. So that was a really smart, strategic, intentional way of lowering the financial barrier to get people to fall in love, because, at the end of the day, what we do know everybody, is that people will pay for things that they value. So let's get them to value it first.
Elizabeth Bowman:Can I hear about what you would hope would be taught in these arts management programs or arts administration programs right now?
Alex Sarian:A sense of service, a sense of understanding that you know these programs are going to create leaders that are going to go into every corner of the world, and I wish they taught us that success is defined locally and it doesn't matter how smart you are, it doesn't matter what strategies you think you may have access to. It's ultimately about are you doing good for the community? And it's funny because 20 years ago that was a nice to have, right. 20 years ago you had people thinking this way, but that was not the norm and, by and large, people that thought being an arts leader meant that you got to walk into rooms and be the smartest person in the room and have all the answers. They could get away with it 20 years ago.
Alex Sarian:What I appreciate about this moment in time is that the fragility of our sector is so high, sadly, that we can't afford to do that anymore, and so what used to be a nice to have 15, 20 years ago is now one of the highest competitive skills I think we could be teaching people is how do you develop a value proposition that is in service to the communities that surround you? How does that value proposition then inform your programming? How does that programming inform your ticketing? How does that philosophy then inform your fundraising? And what I hope my book conveys to people is that it's no longer the right thing to do anymore. It's the only way to do it now, and not only is it a nice to have, if we do it right, it can actually have this domino effect throughout every corner of our institution. Where our fundraising is more successful, our employees are more fulfilled. I find that it's such a small shift to make, with such incredible rewards to be had socially, financially, artistically and I still don't know why most people can't do it.
Elizabeth Bowman:This community-first approach reminds me very much of the late Richard Bradshaw, who got the Four Seasons Center built in Toronto. He was a mentor of my husband's, who is a violinist, not an arts administrator, but I actually ended up working at the Canadian Opera Company shortly after he passed away. So I didn't ever connect with him, but followed along with the building of the house and know that he spent many, many hours connecting personally with various levels of government and people and individual philanthropists and really connected on a person-to-person level. So this really brings me back to hearing about him and also seeing what you're doing in Calgary. There's definitely a similarity in the approach.
Alex Sarian:That's a beautiful thank you, for I'm very humbled that this conversation led you to think about him. But there's also a phrase, there's a question that I ask all the time, and this question can be asked anywhere in the world, can be asked by anybody, no matter the organization or their place in it. The question that I always ask is what does the world need right now that we are uniquely positioned to do? And the reason I love that question is because it forces us to reconcile what the world needs with what our mission empowers us to do right. So if we only ask the question what does the world need right now, I think we'd be faced with a slippery slope of mission drift, and there are lots of organizations that either chase the money or chase the need, and before you know it, they're completely unrecognizable. But if you ask the question what does the world need right now that we are uniquely positioned to do, it forces us to really look at our mission statement as being in service to others and maybe, if we're doing it right, it might actually force us to stretch our mission statement a little bit. And I think that question you know, I pose that question to every department at Arts Commons and they each come up with a different answer, but ultimately it drives the organization in a common direction and that's.
Alex Sarian:You know, that question gets philanthropists excited, that question gets government excited, that question gives our patrons that have a sense of agency. It gets them excited and it gets our staff excited because they feel like they're coming into work and truly making a difference. And again, this is not new. There are sister sectors to us that have been doing this for so long Postsecondary healthcare, this idea of cause-based philanthropy or impact-driven investments it's not new in the world. And yet, for some reason, the arts sector has been very either shy or stubborn, I don't know which yet, but we have not been keeping up, and that's on us.
Elizabeth Bowman:Can I ask how you got into arts management to begin with?
Alex Sarian:Yeah, it was not a straight line. I loved performing as a kid I performed theater and music and then I moved to New York, because you're taught to move to New York if that's what you want to pursue. And when I was in New York I fell in love with teaching and for a hot second I almost became a first grade teacher, which I was told I would have been very good at and it was being in a room with first graders that taught me about relevance in practice, because the first thing they teach you in education is if your student isn't learning, it's not their fault, it's yours. And what a powerful message to just carry through life. So my undergrad was in education. But because I was an international student living in New York at the time and the New York City Department of Education had a hiring freeze, I remember getting a letter from NYU saying you know you need to find a job that will sponsor your work visa or you need to get ready to leave the country, and I had moved there from Argentina. So the thought of going back to Argentina was terrifying and I had an advisor that said to me listen, you can still do arts education, but through the lens of arts management and instead of your career path being a full time classroom teacher, why don't you start going on this director of education path? Because most arts organizations, certainly in the US and in North America, have this director of education path. So I did that.
Alex Sarian:I enrolled in a master's of performing arts administration and my career path was to be a director of education, which I was for several years, and one of my mentors and I always teased and we always asked this very provocative question which was what would happen to the DNA of an arts organization if the person occupying the CEO's office had a background in education? This was maybe 10, 12 years ago. There weren't a lot of those people filling those offices, and so it was a very provocative question because we were able to daydream about oh, it would be a much more civically-minded institution, it would be a community-based organization, and not at the expense of artistic excellence, but because of it. And so in many ways I see my role now as being sort of a proof of concept to that provocation. So that's my windy answer to your beautiful question.
Elizabeth Bowman:Thanks for being on the podcast today. It's been really, really lovely to talk to you.
Alex Sarian:Thank you for having me. It's really a pleasure.
