Month: November 2006

As I promised yesterday, I have a couple ideas about the direction things could go in terms of interactivity in the arts. As I had said, I think the format and perhaps physical environment in which new events might happen will have to change. I can see them happening in smaller theatres, but it is difficult to have a really interactive event in a huge hall seating 2400 people.

A couple years ago I did an entry where I imagined at one time we would be able to plug in and experience a performance from the point of view of the performer. Among the many alluring benefits might be experiencing the performance opposite an attractive romantic lead whereby you saw yourself being kissed by the person.

Since then I have come to see possibilities in other areas that are more immediately achievable. With the rise in iPod ownership these days as well as the ease of processing and projecting video on computers I don’t think it is beyond the realm of possibility that in the next few years we will see performances where people are encouraged to bring music, images and video to a show in the iPod in order to contribute to it.

It might start out simple and small with people encouraged to go online to read a single scene and then either send in music/images/video that are appropriate for that scene. At the performance the audience might see or hear the submitted material underscore the action.

In time, as technology improved and performance groups refined their technique for assessing and integrating donated material into the performance, we might see events where people enter the theatre, download their offerings at the door and see/hear material being added to the show on the fly throughout the performance.

A creative team for a theatrical work may not only include the director and choreographer but a new position of technology integrator-a person who chooses among multimedia materials within the director’s umbrella vision to support a performance with new music/images/video every night.

This is the sort of practice I think would get people deeply involved if they were excited by it. People might get enthusiastic enough to go online and read the script, check out the costume sketches, etc., in advance so they could review their iPod library and then submit something along with suggestions about where it might best be included in the show.

What would really be fabulous, given copyright restrictions which would necessitate having an ASCAP/BMI license to cover music, is if people started composing their own music or shooting photos and video to contribute to a performance. The way things are going the lines of intellectual property ownership are blurring. The idea of directors and designers owning their work is probably going to morph into a communal ownership. Might be better to tap into this energy and involve the community rather than to let them appropriate it for their own ends.

Yes, it would be labor intensive as all get out at first for all sides involved until the whole process essentially got invented. You can certainly see this type of thing coming out of the smaller experimental spaces and then going mainstream. But there is so much potential for really connecting back with audiences by giving them involvement and ownership that they may become highly interested in participating even if the final product is presented in the current passive viewing state. (Though I bet that situation evolves by itself as a by product of new efforts.)

One of the most exciting things about art of any kind is that different people see it from different perspectives. The problem we have run into of late is that the general message people get is that there is only way correct way to interpret the art you see. By involving the community you can acknowledge the validity of these different visions and even recognize that someone touched upon an option you had never considered. There are some visions you may never use like the suggestion of zombies in the graveyard scene of Hamlet.

Other things you will use and little by little people will feel they have the capacity to understand and participate in the arts. Initial contributions may contain more dross than gold but as people feel more comfortable and familiar with the way design concepts are generated they will chuckle about the zombie ideas and make suggestions with real promise. (Of course, same qualification as yesterday, those who feel motivated to improve will do so.)

Yesterday as I closing my entry and was thinking about my promise to talk about this idea for interactivity, I knew I wanted to talk about how the great thing about art is that different things jump out at people as significant/appealing about the work.

Imagine my delight then when I received an email this morning that illustrated just that. Michael Clark at ShowBizRadio.net which features internet reviews for Washington D.C. area read yesterday’s entry and latched on to the paragraph about “Blogging on the internet is opening up new opportunities. It is allowing educated people who have never been hired by a newspaper to speak.”

The general topic about that entry wasn’t really about internet reviews. I didn’t even know I was going to even reference internet reviews until shortly after I realized what the question “How do you remember all those lines?” was indicative of. When I did write about internet reviews I was actually imagining the reviews I have read that said the show sucked when it was pretty clear that the cause was a friend/significant other had dragged someone to a romance/action/foreign film/symphony/ballet… that the person didn’t want to see to begin with.

Right after giving me permission to quote his email, Michael wrote that I must be talking about his website among others. He then continued to write a fairly long email that I haven’t had time to fully digest yet. Later in the day he sent me a link from The Guardian Unlimited dealing with the issue of newspaper reviewers vs. internet reviewers. (Though mostly book reviewers.)

I am not saying Butts In The Seats is a work of art. But what I thought was a minor theme to support my larger argument appeared to be an important point for someone else. In the next few days I anticipate we will be interacting a bit more. See, it is working already! Just as I said!

Only downside is that by the very nature of this interaction, I don’t anticipate that it will lead to us getting away from the screens in our homes which was the ideal of yesterday’s entry. But you gotta start somewhere.

For awhile now I have been pondering the 20/20 hindsight elevation of past practices in the arts as a yardstick by which we should measure the current situation. I often find fault with the reasoning, as do many others, when people start using the phrasing “if only people would do X” to propose that seats would fill as a result.

Recently though people have been using the same thought processes about behavior at arts events and I am just as uneasy about it. The example of the audience being rowdy in Mozart’s day is often called to justify why people shouldn’t be glared at when they clap between orchestra movements. Andrew Taylor had entries on his Artful Manager blog a couple weeks ago citing that people used to interact and talk more during performances before the 19th century placed the audiences in a position of being performed at.

I’m not saying that people should be glared at for clapping or that audiences should be passive receivers. I think the current situation is sitting at an extreme and needs to move toward a happen medium. I just don’t agree with wistfully looking to the past for guidance.

When I think back to the times people are evoking, I wonder how much respect the performer received. As an undergrad I did a research paper on Shakespearean actors and it was a testament to an actor’s power if he could make the audience and food vendors stop and quiet down.

I wonder how many great composers and musicians went undiscovered because their efforts were drown out by chatter in a concert hall or in a salon where they were providing background music.

It seems to me a good thing that audiences started to take a respectful posture toward artists. I do agree with the observation Taylor cites about the arts ending up being placed on too much of a pedestal. A middle ground between ignoring and enshrining needs to be found.

The fact that one of the most frequently asked questions at a play Q&A is “How did you memorize all those lines?” just proves to me that audiences are too far divorced from the arts and the process. That they marvel at memorization means they lack the tools or confidence to evaluate much of anything else happening on stage. The absence of that question would herald great things to me.

The irony is that the methodology for assessing works is fairly highly developed and thanks to the internet, becoming more democratic. When I was researching for that Shakespearean actors paper the one thing I noticed and still remember to this day was that the great actors of yore could do no wrong and could cure cancer with their inspired recitations. As time progressed the actors’ performances started to develop flaws until they became downright human. (Perhaps too much so in the case of the Barrymores.)

As time has progressed, some people have developed skills at assessing performances and were able to critique and criticize. While I think most people have an innate sense of quality, most don’t know what specifically about the performance is good or bad. People have relied on reviewers to tell them what is quality further reinforcing their isolation from the arts.

Blogging on the internet is opening up new opportunities. It is allowing educated people who have never been hired by a newspaper to speak. It is providing a forum for people who have never expressed an opinion publically. Most of what this latter group produces is godawful. And unless they are motivated to improve their technique by internal or external forces, it is going to remain godawful. They are taking the first step to becoming engaged though.

Ultimately, I think trying to go back and make the arts as we know them interactive is futile. The horse has left the barn on that one. I think it might be possible to make it more interactive, but not too much more so in the current physical environments. People have become used to the spectator format for entertainment. If they are fidgeting in their seats it is because they want their experience tailored specifically for them.

On surveys for attendance at movie theaters one of the top reasons people say they aren’t going to the multiplex is that there is too much noise in the theater. Now with a big screen TV at home, they have an alternative choice to the movie theater. Chances are there is a good bit of noise at home but they can shush the kids at home.

The same is true for experiences where you expect a lot of noise. A recent article in the local paper said attendance at the university football games has been dropping steadily while subscriptions to the pay per view for the games has been rising. People have cited the fact that it is cheaper to have a bunch of people gather around their big screen at home than to buy tickets. They also talk about the comfort and convenience of cooking at home and watching in air conditioning.

I have some ideas which I will share tomorrow about how to get people interested in leaving their homes. As I mentioned before, I think the future of live performance will be found in different physical surroundings which are more conducive to interaction. I also think the performance space and discipline may be called by a different name to avoid negative connotations that terms like “theater” might present when trying to convince people to leave their big screen TV.

If you haven’t run into this new trend in hiring, you may find this interesting as a sign of things to come. If you have ever sat on a search committee, you know that sometimes some folks divert from the rest of the group in their assessment because they didn’t like something about the way a question was answered.

Apparently, other people recognize this situation as well and have sued companies suggesting that some committee members were prejudiced against them due to their appearance, the ethnicity suggested by their name, their voice, etc,.

To stave off any accusation of subjectivity in the hiring process, companies are trying to make committees stick to strict criteria in hiring. I recently had to adhere to these new standards in a search we did.

What the Human Resource office is having us do is not only submit questions for them to review but also the answers we expect. For each question we have to suggest a five point answer, a three point answer and a one point answer. This leaves a little bit of gray area between answers for people with experience sets you didn’t anticipate that fall somewhere in between.

Now I will admit, the Human Resource folks have been pretty good in the past with weeding out irrelevant questions. For example, if you are a rental house which has broadway shows, opera, ballet, rock and country concerts come through every year, where on your scale does person who likes broadway and rock, doesn’t care for opera and ballet and likes some country acts rate? Will these answers really offset years of intensive experience? And do you really think this answer will have any bearing on how good a job someone does focusing lights?

While it is annoying to have people scrutinizing your answers now as well, I guess it does help to clarify what you value in a candidate when you rate what answers make a person more valuable to your organization than others.

What this process doesn’t allow is the awarding of extra points to people for unanticipated answers that are discovered in the course of an interview. Most of the committee might ignore the mention of a kid friendly attitude, but the education director might latch on to it as a positive sign for a newly implemented mentoring program. The candidate is therefore more valuable to the education director and might rate higher if not for the rigid guidelines of scoring.

The other danger is that this process rewards having all the right answers. I was once on a search committee where I thought the most promising candidate was spouting a little too much of the latest jargon and theories, but was pretty good for the most part. Almost everyone rated him high based on his answers, but one guy was skeptical in the face of what he admitted were strong answers.

His suspicion lead to some specific questions of references and others that revealed a person who talked a good game but wasn’t very substantial (and perhaps a little deceitful) otherwise.

In a system that placed a heavy value on scores only in an attempt to be objective, I wonder if his intuition would have been heeded. If it hadn’t our company might have ended up trying to find a way to get rid of an undesirable employee which is a lot tougher than not hiring him.

I apologize for falling down a little on my entries last week. My writing suffered a little from the need for crisis management and the onset of a cold.

The cold still has its teeth set in me so I am going to tend toward some lighter observations rather than deeper musings. Mainly, I thought I would share a little bit of my experience this weekend because the confluence of events is a reminder of just how interesting live performance can be.

We were just entering the final weekend performing Mary Zimmerman’s The Arabian Nights (great play) when we got word that the woman who does the opening lines of the show was rear ended by a large truck and taken to the hospital.

The difficult decisionmaking process involving the director, choreographer and I discussing whom to replace her with throughout the play was made even harder by one of the actors. She took it upon herself to decide who would be the replacement, discussed this among the other actors and called the fight choreographer and asked him to come in to re-block the scene.

A cautionary tale I guess against casting people who REALLY want to be the assistant director.

The other thing that happened was that we got a review that was something of a mixed blessing. It was the best review we had gotten from this particular critic ever and was especially gratifying given that the shows reviewed in the paper the day before were awful. We had gone to great lengths to warn the public via various media that there are mature themes in the show and make it clear there the tales of Aladdin, Sinbad or Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves were not included.

Alas, the review talked about how much great fun there was for kids in the show in the story of Abu Hasan’s fart. This was echoed in the newspaper’s Saturday theatre round up. Apparently he felt this mitigated the sexual content and graphic violence that bookended the story for an hour before and hour after.

We did have people walk away from the box office with their children when we warned them and a few people who asked for refunds after thinking better of their decision while awaiting the start of the show. To date we haven’t had any complaints about the content.

My last little observation is about the fart joke. The story about Abu Hasan is that he eats a lot of chickpeas and then lets loose a great fart at his wedding. Mortified, he goes to India for 7 years and then returns thinking no one remembers him. As he passes a woman and her children, he hears each one asking when they were born. Most of the answers are mundane but to the last, the mother answers she was born the year of Abu Hasan’s great fart.

Funny, yes, but not worth note, eh? As far as I can tell from my research, the story has been a part of the 1001 Arabian Nights collection since before the European translations. What is interesting though is that it bears a striking resemblance to a supposed true story about the Earl of Oxford and Queen Elizabeth I recorded by John Aubrey in his Brief Lives:

“When the Earl made a low obeisance to the Queen, he happened to let go a fart, at which he was so ashamed that he left the country for 7 years. At his return the Queen welcomed him and said, “My lord, I had forgot the fart”

I am just interested in the origins of the story and the direction it travelled. Certainly, fart jokes are universal but these are so similar that I wonder if Aubrey made it up or was repeating an anecdote he had heard originating in the Arab world. Likewise, I wonder if the story moved with merchants to the Middle East and got incorporated into the collection of stories there.

It may seem silly to wonder about such picayune things, but it is upon these sort of musings that books and plays get written.
(Though if someone knows the true story, I wouldn’t mind having my romantic notations dissolved.)

About a month ago I was at a meeting of arts people hovering on the edge of a conversation discussing the creation of a consolidated database of arts attendees or some sort of limited sharing of lists.

My first thought wasn’t about jealously guarding my list from their greedy grasping hands. There are quite a few people with whom I wouldn’t feel threatened sharing my list.

My initial concern was that have I gone to great pains to assure my ticket buyers that we will not sell, trade, etc., their information. There is such a concern about spam, phone calls and identity theft, that audiences need a high degree of assurances about the use of their information before they provide it to you.

In fact, we often have people who have signed up on our mailing list sheet in the lobby at intermission upset that it is still out at the end of the performance. Considering there is no information that can’t be acquired from the phonebook, their fear is a little irrational. It is difficult to steal someone’s identity with their address and the added information that they attended a show at the theatre. People usually feel a little silly when I point out the reality of this.

Which is not to say that we don’t handle information with which a person could steal someone’s identity. We are very careful about getting proof of ID before handing out credit card receipts at will call. Even if people act a little irrationally about their personal information, it only goes to show how important protecting it is to your relationship with them.

But back to the mailing list issue.

When I am signing up on a website that collects information, there is often a opt in/out box where the company asks permission to share information with their partners in order to offer the widest range of options and the best customer service.

Now I don’t buy for a moment that I will benefit from whatever their partners have to offer. I wonder if a similar approach could be applied to ones patrons though– “As an arts lover we would like to offer you information on the widest range of activities in town. May we share your information with other arts organizations?” I guess as an arts person, I would have a less cynical view of that approach coming from a theatre than I do when my credit card company uses it. I don’t know how the average patron who already gets appeals from a theatre, the United Way and college alumni association around year end might see it.

I was wondering if anyone had dealt with the issue of sharing names in the last year or two. Did you ask your patrons if you could share the info or did you just do it? If you did ask, how did you go about doing it? Did people know in advance that you might share their information?

When you did share your list, did you place stipulations on its use? For example, one brochure mailing and then the list is destroyed so that the only way to capture the information is if the person buys a ticket. I once had a condo association give me a list with the provision that they send it directly to my mail house who had signed a promise to immediately destroy the disk.

If you did share the list with such restrictions, did your partner abide by the rules or did your planted address get appeals and mailing beyond what you had agreed to? (Common trick when sharing lists is to add the names and addresses of employees with a low public profile or friends/family members who have agreed to help you keep an eye on how the list is used.)