I thought I would bring up the topic of jealousy to no particular end other than the fact it exists but no one really talks about it. I am not sure I have any suggested solutions. I just wanted to throw it out there.
The jealousy I am talking about is the type felt by the staff and supporters of the lesser arts organizations toward the local or regional darling. Unless you have worked for the top dog all your life, you know what I am talking about.
Sometimes the envy is just over the choices audiences make-Why do people go to see that shallow tripe rather than attending our shows where we deal with real issues?
Other times it has to do with perception that funding is going to the wrong place–The community rallying around the financially mismanaged behemoth, securing emergency donations from the state, banks and individuals, eliminating the usual annual gifts to you.
The upshot is, you essentially develop an inferiority complex despite all your protestations about how much better your own performances are. It may keep you running lean and mean to stay competitive and thus avoids burdening the community with another mismanaged organization. On the other hand, by constantly defining yourself in relation to another organization, you can place yourself in a box of your own building and ignore opportunities for growth.
I have worked for both the top dog and the underdog. I have even worked for the mismanaged behemoth that was sucking the money out of the community. Even though I didn’t have anything to do with the mismanagement and was working 14-18 hours days to make up for the staff shortage, I felt guilty about the diversion of funding from other orgs.
It is great to be the organization with the most goodwill. It is easier to rebuild goodwill having lost it than it is to generate it from the start. Individuals may defect, but a community on the whole is fairly forgiving.
A lot of it has to do with the physical and social environment the organization is in. About a year ago I cited an Urban Institute study that said there were two factors that would immediately cause a person to decide not to return to your organization again- “not liking the venue and not having an enjoyable social occasion.”
A case in point- There is a newly renovated facility in town. It has new equipment, gold leaf, new marquee…the works. It is essentially a rental house and doesn’t program a balanced season like I do. Since people are pretty much making their entertainment choices at the last minute, the distinction isn’t apparent or important to them.
Everybody likes that place best even though there are a lot of one way streets to navigate and no free parking (and the garage next door fills up quick.) Once you get inside, the surrounding allow you to feel like you are attending an event of note. If you don’t, they have a liquor license so you at least numb yourself to the lack of that feeling.
It is hard not to feel a little jealous or inferior. We once had patrons go there for one of our shows despite the fact we had mailed them tickets two weeks before that clearly had our venue name on them. If the show is any good, it must be happening there is apparently the general feeling.
What really drove the popular sentiment about that theatre home to us was an article written a month ago about the world premiere show we did this past weekend. Two days in a row, in the Thursday newspaper and in the Friday Fall Arts Review, a columnist wrote that the show would premiere at my theatre in rough form and then a refined, more formal performance would be at this other theatre.
What lead him to write that? Well the company performing the show was thinking about renting this other theatre to do school outreach performances. They asked the facility to hold the date. The facility put it up on their website calendar, but because it was tentative, there was no time or prices listed and the description actually listed outreach activities. The company ultimately decided not to do the performance, canceled the date and the web listing came down 7-10 days after it went up.
The artistic director of the dance company theorized that people couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to premiere a show in my venue and rationalized the details from the scant evidence available.
In the end, since I sold out, the stories had no negative impact on me. There may be some who decided they would wait for the show to appear at the other theater who are going to be disappointed or confused when they show up since someone else has rented that date.
I really don’t think I am so much in competition with shows at the theatre as I am with the general perception and aura of prestige that surrounds it. Little by little I am trying to create an identity for us and carve out our little niche. While there are a lot of people who think the 8 mile drive to my place is WAAAAY out in the hinterlands, there are people who live even further out who think the 8 mile drive to my general neighborhood is civilization. There are fewer of them, but they deserve to be served too.
Mostly, I want to concentrate on keeping nimble and out of a box of my own construction. I don’t have a lot of advice about constructively dealing with envy to offer, but avoiding self-constraint seems like some small wisdom.
