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Where You Place Your Butt Is Important Too

September 26, 2005

by:

Joe Patti

An article in the September/October issue of APAP‘s Inside Arts caught my eye (alas, the article is one of the few not available online) because it began with those immortal words–Butts In Seats.

The article wasn’t about getting butts in the seats, but rather the seats in which the butts would be placed. While seating is an area that faces cost cutting when renovations or construction goes over budget, there is still plenty of demand for added accoutrement.

Among the options for seating these days are built in headphones and speakers, lumbar support, infrared data transmission capabilities. The only thing the top and bottom of the line seats have in common are that they are ADA accessibility compliant and are generally larger than previous versions given that members of the public are also generally larger than previous versions.

I was somewhat intrigued by the possibilities these options would offer a venue. Obviously, one would want to limit the internet access the dataports had during a concert so that people weren’t using laptops, PDAs, etc to surf or watch movies during a concert.

But if you were looking to feed information to audience members a la Concert Companion this type of seat might facilitate such a program. If the facility would be used for conferences groups might use the dataports to beam sales figures and other information to attendees.

Built in headphones could support everything from helping those hard of hearing to carrying audio descriptions for the sight impaired to audio commentary on an orchestra piece. (On channel 2, Michael Tilson Thomas discusses the influences on this piece.)

Of course, after I get over being intrigued, I think about the upkeep and support costs of the computer server for the dataports, the perils of food and liquids falling into data and headphone ports and the normal wear and tear on you have on seating. Any place with enough seating to generate income to cover this sort of stuff will have enough work to keep at least one guy busy fixing the seats year round.

The one thing I wish the article discussed a little more was the way seating contributed to a planned mood for a space. The project manager at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center was briefly quoted discussing how he chose seating with “pew-like back trim…designed ‘to increase the sense of a collective experience.”

I took a look at the image of the space and it appears that each person has an individual seat (unlike pews which are much more communal.) When I think of pews, I think of straight backed wooden, uncomfortable seatings. It is hard to see the seats up close, but from the coloration the seatbacks could be wood. (By the same standard, the seats look wooden as well. I can’t imagine that they aren’t cushioned though.)

While I can see where the space would lend itself to an ambiance of collective experience, I would attribute it more to the openness of the performance space than the seating.

Most new theatres promote how plush and comfortable audiences will find their seats. Since it tough to determine if these seats are cozy, I don’t know if the project manager, faced with a tight seating budget, was simply rationalizing why a stark, pew like seating arrangement was a good choice in the face of thrift.

I am sure there were inexpensive traditional looking cushioned seats since that is what audiences expect. So I go back to my earlier wish to have gotten a little more information on seat design theory.

But you know, I am kinda a geek so it may just be me.

General Musings

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You Should Be Better Fed Now

September 20, 2005

by:

Joe Patti

I have been receiving complaints about the fact my feed is not coming across very well for awhile now. I have been doing some deliberate research on a way to make a change with the least impact. I noticed when Artsjournal made their change to MovableType, a lot of the old archive links didn’t work anymore.

Finally, today I crossed my fingers and took the plunge and made a change that should straighten the feed from my blog.

It turns out, I need not have been so concerned. I went over to Technorati.com and checked out the links from other sites to my entries and they worked just fine.

Hopefully now more folks will be able to drink from the font of my wisdom more easily.

General Musings

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NALI Continued

September 19, 2005

by:

Joe Patti

My thanks to Philip Horn who was nice enough to send me the spreadsheets I referred to in my last entry.

As I mentioned in my earlier entry, the spreadsheets are a type of evaluation and planning tool that allows artists/agents/presenters look at where they are in their professional lives and where they want to be. I imagine the forms also would help the National Arts Leadership Institute decide what types of classes need to be offered, what regions they need to be offered in and perhaps, who they might tap to be future instructors.

Take a look at this Professional Development for Presenters sheet (Downloadable File in Adobe pdf format).They have the subject areas coded (artistic, business, leadership, etc) and allow the presenter to assess what their knowledge level is in each area and then presumably make plans for filling in those knowledge gaps.

They have a second spreadsheet which can help in making those plans. The Professional Development for Touring Artists (Also downloadable pdf) sheet is formatted slightly differently giving people a tool for planning when over the next few years they plan on acquiring new knowledge and skills, sharpening existing ones and taking action.

Certainly, these sheets are nothing you can’t find in any self-help book these days. However, as I mentioned, if NALI collects copies, they can be useful in planning courses and tapping into those individuals who claim they can teach the subject in their sleep. It is also of value to read the sheets if only to be aware of how much one didn’t know they didn’t know was probably worth knowing.

The Professional Development for Presenters sheet really struck a chord with me because there are a lot of similarities between it and evaluation instruments my college is developing in the course of its reaccreditation and assessment efforts. The big push these days is student learning outcomings which encompasses measuring and assessing beyond grading.

I don’t know how NALI intends to use these sheets, but in classrooms today a student would fill out the form before the start of the course showing where they felt their knowledge in the subject was, then at the end of the course they would get the sheet back and indicate where they felt their knowledge was. At this point, the teacher would also indicate on the sheet where they felt the student’s knowledge was. (In many cases, the teacher also marks the sheet at the beginning of the semester for later comparison. This wouldn’t be viable during a weekend conference though.)

This reveals all sorts of dimensions in a class. A person may get a C but feel satisfied with the class because they acquired the knowledge they sought. (Often my experience as an undergrad) Another may get an A but might be dissatisfied because they didn’t learn anything new having mastered the material earlier.

The process can also help a school, or in this case NALI, realize that what they are teaching and perhaps how they are teaching it isn’t effective if people are leaving with little more confidence in what they know than they arrived. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If people think they need to sign up for the “basics” course but turn out to be fairly familiar with the material, NALI can plan future offerings accordingly and rejoice at having a knowledgable constituency.

As Andrew Taylor says in his comments on the previous post it will be interesting to see how well NALI develops.

Terms and Ideas

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The National Arts Leadership Institute

September 15, 2005

by:

Joe Patti

The first session I attended at the Western Arts Alliance conference actually made the whole experience worth it in terms of professional development. I actually didn’t learn more than I already knew so much as I discovered people are really getting serious and organized about teaching good leadership skills.

The session was presented by Philip Horn, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and Margaret Mertz of Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts.

Their purpose was to solicit feedback about how to make the developing National Arts Leadership Institute (NALI) valuable and accessible for artists, managers, agents and others. They were asking the question “What do we need to know and be able to do to make ourselves and our field more successful?”

They were also asking how the session attendees envisioned themselves participating in the institute and perhaps contributing to it.

Philip took our suggestions and observations on big tear off sheets which he took home with him. He also handed out some really great self-evaluation surveys for both artists and presenters which help people assess what they do and don’t know about the industry they are in. (I thought the spreadsheets were on the Southern Arts Federation website but I can’t find them. I emailed Philip in an attempt to track them down and hope to eventually feature them here.)

These self-evaluation instruments are important because, as was pointed out in the session, “there are many on ramps to presenting.” People in the industry range from those with formal training, (though apparently few management programs teach presenting), and/or long time experience in the field to amateur members of a community group who decide they want to present a performance and people in schools who get volunteered for the task because of experience in a tangentially related field.

There were a lot of great suggestions made and to my chagrin, I was so interested in the conversation I forgot to make note of half of them.

One thing that NALI is doing to make informational sessions at conferences more valuable is to require people on panels to communicate with each other weeks in advance (apparently they often don’t discuss what they will cover until ten minutes prior to the panel) and to essentially create an outline or syllabus letting participants know exactly what they should expect to be covered.

They have already put this into practice. The Performing Arts Exchange conference being held in Memphis this coming week features a section on their website where you can download the course outlines and bios of the NALI sponsored sessions and instructors.

One of the goals is to specifically plan a cycle of NALI sponsored sessions at the regional conferences so that a person could attend the same conference over a period of 3-5 years and ultimately complete all the coursework one would theoretically need for presenting.

There was some discussion as to whether NALI was going to be granting people certification of some sort, what the qualifications would be, if there was going to be testing, what happens if you fail the test, etc. Philip and Margaret essentially felt it was too early in the development of the whole process to say.

This seems logical to me since they are in the solicitation phase of developing the whole program. While people felt that there was a need for better education and information exchange to help move the profession forward, no one was actually suggesting the creation of a certifying authority. One woman actually liked the idea of the program because it would mean she could take classes and continue working (rather than quit and go to grad school).

In the discussion of delivery channels for supplementary or even core information, Philip mentioned that community colleges seems to have the flexibility and power to create and offer arts management courses much more quickly than 4 year institutions.

I brought up blogs like Artful Manager a place where links to resources may be found. (As I noted in yesterday’s entry, I didn’t mention my own at the time. I have started to rectify that situation.)

I also mentioned podcasting as a means for disseminating important information or lessons on a weekly basis. I didn’t realize the potential power of this form the way others like the Artful Manager has until I started to recently listen to a local arts podcast .

I sent the host of this podcast a press release one day and it was on the podcast the next day. Newspapers and radio stations are picky about what they announce and when, but I think getting your info announced on podcasts focused to a specific community can end up being much more powerful a tool than print and broadcast media.

Granted, this guy’s podcast has a small audience and a probably has a dearth of material to work with at the moment so I might get booted or have to compete for time in the future. But there are alliances and relationships to be forged!

In any case, I think using podcasting to send out weekly wise thoughts from arts professional on issues of the day can become a powerful tool and be especially helpful for those managers who don’t have the money to attend conferences and the professional development sessions contained therein.

I also mentioned the way Annenberg/CPB delivers their Arts in Every Classroom programs over the web as another potential delivery medium. (I wrote about these great programs earlier.)

One thing another participant in the conversation touched briefly upon (and I expanded on with Philip after the session broke up) was the need to not to move the profession forward by educating presenters, artists and agents, but also educating organizations and municipalities.

There are a lot of cities and groups out there, perhaps driven by the idea of attracting Richard Florida’s Creative Class, who are building arts facilities without really understanding the calibre of personnel and annual infusion of resources necessary to do justice to the $50 million it took to construct the facility.

I am seeing such a case on my local horizon, but they are living it in Madison, WI. Andrew Taylor responds here.

Whew! Covered a lot of ground today and wandered a little, but this is heady and exciting stuff. I hope NALI continues with their plan and becomes a going concern. Watch this space for more coverage!

Arts in an Age of Technology

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