The Future of the Performing Arts, July 2026

Phillip Cartwright, Ph.D. and Founder, HorizonVU Group

This is the fourth in our ongoing series in which we take a critical look at challenges facing the performing arts. From previous posts, we know that for most of the twentieth century, performing arts companies were built like small monarchies. An artistic director sat at the top; below them, a chain of command ran through administrative and production departments down to the dancers, musicians, and technicians who actually made the work. This top-down model borrowed its logic from industrial management: clear lines of authority, centralized decision-making, and a single point of artistic vision. It served the field well for a long time. It is now becoming a liability.

Three forces are converging to make the case for change.

First, the arrival of practical, everyday artificial intelligence inside arts organizations — not as a replacement for creative judgment, but as a set of tools that can absorb tasks previously requiring dedicated administrative layers: scheduling, budgeting scenarios, grant research, marketing analytics, even preliminary dramaturgical or musicological research. The layers of managers who coordinated activities in the hierarchical model weaken considerably.

Second, companies now require different qualities from their employees. Dancers, musicians, and performers often move across disciplines and organizations throughout their careers, bringing expectations shaped by this mobility. They seek a voice in the creative process, opportunities to assume choreographic, compositional, or curatorial roles, and collaborative working relationships. A rigid chain of command does not suit a workforce that already operates this way on most major stages.

The third factor is cost. Maintaining multiple administrative layers is expensive, and public and philanthropic funding for the arts has not kept pace with the expenses of organizations designed for a previous era. Management layers not directly involved in creating or presenting work are now subject to review.

Combined, these three pressures make a different organizational model not only attractive but structurally necessary: the heterarchical network. As suggested by the diagram below, a heterarchy is not the absence of structure; it represents a different kind of structure. Authority flows laterally and situationally, distributed across a network based on relevant expertise or project responsibility. For example, a dancer may lead movement research for one project and perform in another. Similarly, a production manager might direct a co-production negotiation one season and support another leader the next. Authority is tied to the task rather than the title, shifting as the work evolves.

In practice, performing arts companies often operate backstage in ways that differ from their formal organizational charts. Ensemble creation, devised theatre, and collaborative choreography have long relied on distributed authority, with dancers proposing material, musicians shaping arrangements, and designers influencing staging decisions in real time. The heterarchical model does not introduce an unfamiliar approach to the performing arts; instead, it formalizes and extends a working method that many companies already use informally and inconsistently, often without the organizational support needed to sustain it. AI accelerates the move toward a heterarchical model. It removes much of the coordination burden that used to justify centralized management. Shared digital tools can hold scheduling, budget tracking, and institutional memory, eliminating the need for coordinating management.

We do not suggest that companies should simply flatten themselves expecting miraculous outcomes. Heterarchical structures still require clarity with respect to the navigation of a network. The risk of heterarchy done badly is not tyranny but drift — decisions that no one quite owns. The compass is pointing in the direction of heterarchical organizations. The performing arts are collaborative at the level of the work itself. Organizational structures aligning with that work are only now catching up.