Back in December I wrote about the production of First Person: Seeing America we were hosting. I had described it as something of a live documentary with the narration, images and music all being performed in front of you rather than having the narration and music underscore the images as it might in a documentary on the History Channel.
The performance occurred this past weekend and it was just as terrific as I anticipated. They did an outreach service for the school today where they explained the process they went through in picking the text, music and images from the thousands of available choices. I was pleased that even with the limited exposure the audience had to the content of the show today, they experienced enough to realize how moving some of the pieces were even for the artists. One of the questions asked was whether the artists gave each other the time they needed to work through their emotions when they became affected by them.
But now that the show is over and the group has moved on, I can confess my embarrassment at mistaken assumptions. The production features NPR talk show host Neal Conan, actor Lily Knight and chamber music group Ensemble Galilei. I loved the concept of the multi-media production from the moment I first heard about it. I was disappointed that one of my consortium partners had managed to grab the show before me. Our geographic proximity precluded my being able to present them. I was pleased when he approached us to partner with him on the production. Yes, I wasn’t his first choice of venue, but who cares.
The mistake I made however was thinking that the production was brainchild of Neal Conan. I just figured the guy with the current affairs radio talk show would be the one who pulled people together to create a history based multi-media production. I mean, a group focused on performing something as staid as early music wouldn’t be creative enough to put a production like this together, right?
Actually, yes.
I spoke to group member Carolyn Anderson Surrick and she said that the initial idea came when she saw a phone card with pictures taken from the Hubble Telescope in a shop. She realized that the images were in the public domain and thought she could do a better job using the images than put them on a phone card. Their first project, A Universe of Dreams, brought poetry, music and images from the telescope together.
Their next project, First Person: Stories from the Edge of the World, used images from National Geographic in a piece about exploration. The current piece, First Person: Seeing America, deals with American history. While Conan has been involved with each of these projects, it was Ensemble Galilei which initially conceived of the idea.
I mention the show because this is probably a good example of how arts groups need to transcend expectations in order to make progress these days. Ensemble Galilei didn’t reinvent themselves or really compromise their identities to accomplish this.
Surrick said they played to the strengths of the ensemble which is early music and Celtic. She said people suggested they do a piece about the Works Progress Administration (WPA) but they felt it would be necessary to have more jazz oriented music to do it correctly. While they might be able to fake it, whatever they played wouldn’t elicit the same frisson experienced when the appropriate music and text came together.
I will acknowledge that one of the biggest drawback with transcending expectations is that you also transcend an audience’s familiar frame of reference. As I mentioned before about shows that shared this quality, you have to work all the harder to explain your new approach in the small window of attention people allow you.
In this instance, some creativity with the show description, the name recognition of Neal Conan and Ensemble Galilei with their respective fan bases brought in respectable ticket sales. But we doubled our sales in the 48 hours after a two page spread appeared in the weekend section of the newspaper. Once people invested enough time to read about the show and understood the concept, they really became interested.