Home Page

Meeting from Afar

August 10, 2005

by:

Joe Patti

Alright! With Andrew Taylor’s Artful Manager blog in reruns this week, I get to talk about a technological gizmo I noticed. (I just hate it when I find an article and he already blogged on it. I mean, then I have to find something else interesting to write about that day! The pressure!! Guess that is the price of living 4-5 hours behind him.)

Anyhow, while reading over at Salon.com, I came across a story about a company that provides people with the ability to discuss and organize projects on the web.

The software is called Basecamp created by a company called 37 Signals. The software is web based and hosted so it doesn’t matter what platform or versions of software you have (other than up to date browser software). You can use Basecamp to organize everything from weddings to building skyscrapers.

The software provides a secure central site for people to plan and discuss projects. Everyone can be aware of due dates, to do lists and contact lists. They can share and get feedback on the progress they have made and start fitting things together.

So what does this have to do with the arts? Well if you are starting discussions on an opera, ballet or play, your directors and designers may be working in places hundreds of miles from each other and in turn may be thousands of miles from the theatre the production will take place at. With this service, designs and concepts can be shared at great distances enabling progress even though one person may be going to bed when the sun is rising in the window of another.

Designers may actually be able to take on more commissions because they don’t necessarily have to travel to oversee some stages of development when digital photos will suffice. And when they do have to travel, they can be providing input on the next couple far-flung projects with which they are involved.

Travel and housing expenses will be lower for all involved because designers need not move about so much and be present at the theatre for so long a time as they have in the past.

The cost of this service is very reasonable, spanning from $12 to $99 a month. Given that the $99 rate is for 100 projects, I imagine a theatre would find that they could coordinate their entire season of 12-15 shows for a very reasonable rate. The first 30 days are free which takes a little bit of the risk away. Actually, you can set up one project for not cost at all so an organization could conceivably use it to complete an entire production as a test.

Actually, as I look back at the Basecamp website, I notice there is a link to suggested uses. They actually list theatre applications. Among their suggestions are using it for auditions storing headshots, resumes and audio files. I hadn’t thought of that! A director could actually provide guidelines for casting to someone at a theatre, have them weed out those who didn’t meet the criteria and then upload video recordings of the promising auditions for him/her to review from hundreds of miles away.

Granted, a poor quality recording could cheat many a good actor of a chance at fame if not chosen far a call back. Certainly, a camera would blunt subtle skill and charisma that is clearly apparent in person. The casting director would have to be really insistent that they really thought an actor should be called back if the show director wants to pass him/her by. But again, if the auditions are Wednesday and the call backs are on Saturday, that is time and money saved.

I would really be interested to see if arts organizations start using this sort of service. I am sure there are applications of its use no one has conceived of yet.

Arts in an Age of Technology

1 Comment

Ignorance or Idiocy?

August 9, 2005

by:

Joe Patti

Last Friday I had a stomach wrenching experience. I walked into the lobby of my theatre and saw what appeared to be a long scrape along the entire bottom of the 104 foot long Jean Charlot fresco mural adorning the wall.

The college maintenance crew had been painting the wall below the mural. In our work order to them, we specifically said not to paint the ledge below the mural for fear of damaging it. I initially thought the guy had used a wire brush or a sander on the mural.

However, when the tech director came out to inspect the mural, he pointed to the roll of 2 inch wide masking tape sitting nearby. The width of the tape matched the width of the damage. It appears the guy put masking tape directly on to the mural and unfortunately it wasn’t the low adhesive tape 3M puts out for the purpose of edging while painting. It was the regular sticky stuff.

As a result, when he removed the tape it took the paint and chunks of plaster off the wall.

I put in calls to his supervisors to halt further operations and notified the folks up the chain from me. The worst part was notifying the state office of public art which commissioned the work and has been responsible for restorations over the last 30 years.

Actually, I assume things will get more uncomfortable when they come out to survey the damage.

There were some questions that came to mind as a result of this incident. Was this guy a careless idiot or was he ignorant of the import of his actions?

My first impulse was careless idiot. Even if the mural had been painted on a cinderblock wall with plain old interior paint, chances are the tape he used was still going to remove the paint. The damage wouldn’t have been as bad, but he would still be defacing the work.

Also, when you start to remove the tape and chunks of the wall are sticking to it, why don’t you stop and reconsider what you are doing?

I honestly don’t have an answer for the second question, but the first I can give the guy the benefit of the doubt a little. When you are working in an institutional setting, there is more of a focus on the quantity of work you can complete in a day rather than the quality and precision of your work. If you aren’t familiar with the the fragile properties of fresco, you don’t know not to use the same tape you use everywhere else. Everywhere else, you remove the tape and a few flecks of paint come off, but the job looks decent enough and the scuff marks are no longer visible so it is a good job.

I also can’t help thinking this may be a result of the lack of arts in our schools. When faced with a work of art this size with detailed coloring and stylized figures, it is tough to equate it with a cinder block wall of institutional white. One should recognize that there are qualities about it that suggest approaching it with more care than usual.

I have a hard time believing that even a person who has not had formal arts classes hasn’t been enculturated enough to pick up on these cues, but perhaps I am mistaking my subjective world view as an objective reality.

Would more exposure to the arts in school prevented this from happening? I don’t really know the guy who was painting well enough to know. He may not have had classes in school, but there are strong cultural elements here on the islands that he could have been exposed to growing up that could give him a more intutive sense of beauty than a school could ever hope to.

He just might have just been mindlessly doing what he does every day of the week in building after building not considering that this instance was quite different.

I know this is getting into the whole “what is art” debate, but anyone have any thoughts?

General Musings

No Comments

Searching In Boxes

August 8, 2005

by:

Joe Patti

Well, as promised long ago, I have finally started to update my links section to list helpful arts related blogs and web resources. I have only gotten as far last March in my search for valuable links I have mentioned so there are more resource links, if not blog links, to come.

We have been cleaning out the technical director’s office these past two weeks because the clutter was threatening to consume students. We managed to free up about 400 cubic feet of space in the back of the office thus far. Since the piles of…valued possessions (*cough*) started migrating across the scene shop, the secretary started boxing books up to free up some maneuvering space.

It wasn’t until 2 days later I found out that the TD had told a student he would lend her his stage management book if he could find it at home. His book, of course, was not at home but in his office and I had been holding said book reminiscing about my stint as a stage manager years ago.

As I started searching through the boxes to find it, it occurred to me that it might be worth mentioning the book as a resource on the old blog here.

The book I was searching for was an old copy of Lawrence Stern’s Stage Management. It is the bible of stage management and was actually the first text on the subject.

Since it was first written, two other texts have come in to wide use, Thomas Kelly’s The Backstage Guide to Stage Management, and Daniel A. Ionazzi’s The Stage Management Handbook.

Now I haven’t read or used the Ionazzi or Kelly book, but about as many people swear by Kelly as they do for Stern. I know size doesn’t matter. But I have to ask–why the heck is the Stern book $60.00+ and the Kelly book with only 50 fewer pages is ~$20.00? I suspect it is because of the resources and forms in the Stern appendices, but still, geez.

All that aside, for those of you who don’t know, the stage manager is the linchpin of any performance. The director, designers, technicians, actors, etc create the product and the stage manager serves as quality control.

After rehearsals are through, the director and designers leave. The stage manager, having taken copious notes on everything that occurred during rehearsals, is in charge. The SM makes sure everything and everybody is where they are supposed to be, doing what they are supposed to be doing at the exact time it is supposed to happen night after night. If things get sloppy, they must take steps to tighten things up.

If the performance is happening in a union house, they make sure things are being run according to union rules. (Though there is often another member of the cast who monitors the sitation from a different perspective.)

Essentially stage management is one of the toughest, most thankless jobs in the performing arts. If anyone is going to be the target of pent up frustrations, it is often the stage manager. I have done the job so I know.

Some times the person can be a power seeking jerk and deserves the ire directed her way. Other times, the person seems so unperturbable it is a little weird. I fell somewhere in between.

I never did find that book tonight. I will have to go back tomorrow and root around some more. I want this woman to do well as stage manager because she has dreams of getting outta here and working on the Mainland. She has really set herself apart from other students with her willingness to commit to doing thing well. We will all be proud to have her claim she learned her craft here.

Terms and Ideas

No Comments

Things Are The Same All Over

August 3, 2005

by:

Joe Patti

Two articles shared the same webpage over a Artsjournal.com today. The first is one talking about Pittsburgh Ballet’s decision to perform to recorded music to save money. The decision was made to preserve the ballet’s budget. They aren’t the first ballet company to go this route and according to the article, they probably won’t be the last.

The move has Drew McManus worried that this is not only a harbinger of the rise of recorded accompaniment, but that mission statements will be used to justify gutting artistic value for economic reasons.

Which leads me to the second article I mentioned earlier. It seems our brethern in Australia are also facing the necessity of making A Better Case for the Arts, as discussed on Artsjournal.com earlier this year in response to a recent Rand report. (I have discussed this before.)

An excerpt from a speech Prof. David Throsby made in the last couple days was printed in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Throsby’s speech sounds much the same as the discussion on Artsjournal.com and the points the Rand report makes:

More and more do arts organisations feel they have to demonstrate their financial rather than their artistic prowess as a means of obtaining funds to support their existence. Arts festivals big and small commission economic impact studies to trumpet their success in creating employment, raising local incomes and encouraging tourism; understanding their cultural impacts often seems to take second place.

Actually, he cites the Rand report right after he cites a similar report made by a British policy group, Demos, titled Capturing Cultural Value.

…John Holden, takes up these arguments, writing that “the value of culture cannot be expressed only with statistics. Audience numbers give us a poor picture of how culture enriches us.” He goes on to argue for a reshaping of the way in which public funding of culture is undertaken. He suggests the need for a language capable of reflecting, recognising and capturing the full range of values expressed through culture, drawing on ideas from anthropology, environmentalism and the debate about “public value” in the field of public sector management.

I wouldn’t be surprised if similar articles started to appear in Germany, France, Spain, et.al. (Or perhaps it is the English speakers’ epidemic.) Looks like everyone is facing the same dilemmia about how to resolve artistic sensibilities with capitalist ones at about the same time.

State of the Arts

No Comments