ming arts have been a powerful human ritual for millennia. The Washington Post recently published a beautiful, interactive online piece called “This is Your Brain on Art”. In it, the viewer is taken through a series of animations, videos and texts that demonstrate and explain the science of why performing arts have such a unique and important effect on the human brain. The conclusion? When people are en masse, sharing a highly controlled experience like performance, we create a form of collective consciousness that nurtures our needs for finding meaning, social connecting, and emotional processing. Pretty powerful stuff. Unlike its origins in open air amphitheatres, performing arts today is a very costly endeavor. Why? First, regardless of whether it’s theatre, dance, circus, or a hybrid genre, performing arts are forced to op...