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Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice. I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/) My most recent role is as Theater Manager at the Rialto in Loveland, CO Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

New Toys For The Lobby

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The college has these new flatscreen televisions on rolling mounts deployed around campus as an experiment in mobile information stations. Fortunately for me, the woman who coordinated the purchasing effort decided there would be a need for a roving screen. (The others, while mobile generally don’t move much because they are networked for ease of updating.) The benefit to me is that I can borrow the television for our events.

We had an event this past weekend so I used the opportunity to create a looping presentation with information about the band for a number of slides. Then I had information about upcoming performances, workshops and master classes. I am hoping between the television in the lobby, the brochures, notes in the program book and posters in the restrooms, we will increase people’s awareness about our events. The other screens around campus have information about our shows on them, but that is laid out by someone in a central office. The screen in my lobby has our information exclusively and if I learn of something interesting during a performance, I can update the information and have it running at intermission.

In addition to our information, I also made up a little promotional ad for Americans for the Arts, “Arts, Ask for More” campaign using the print ads you can download via the social media widget they created. (You can see the widget in the lower right hand corner of my home page. My entry on the widget is here. The text on the bottom of the ads were a little hard to read so I rewrote the text beneath the image and used their phrase “For 10 Simple Ways You Can Get More Arts Into Your Child’s Life,” followed by the Americans for the Arts web address.

I felt it was important to add this information both on the general principle of promoting arts education, but because this Friday is the first day of statewide furloughs which will take teachers, and therefore children, out of the classrooms. I wanted to provide people with a source of ideas for providing an educational experience for their kids.

So now I am contemplating how to most fully use the screen. I know there are many performance venues who use flat screens to promote their events. If anyone has some suggestions for what sort of information we can include or how to use the tool more advantageously than just a substitute for multiple posters, let me know. I have already started including trivia information about the groups to help audiences understand them a little better. I would love to include video except that YouTube videos look awful at such high resolution. I would need to rely on DVDs which artists are moving away from in favor of online video.

Substitution Blues

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Ken Davenport posted some interesting information about the impact of absenteeism in Broadway shows on Producer’s Perspective. He was curious to learn if the need to have an understudy stand in was having an impact on audiences so he commissioned someone to study the question.

The impetus for this was the increasing rate of absenteeism in Broadway shows, particularly West Side Story. I had read the NY Post article Ken links to back in August and I couldn’t believe there was such a high rate of absences given that there are no lack of performers who are just as talented waiting to step on to the Broadway stage. Cameron Mackintosh did clean house on Les Miserables when he felt the quality was flagging so it seemed pretty risky for actors to appear to be slacking off. In retrospect, I suppose there is always the teensy little chance that the Post sensationalized the problem beyond the reality.

While some respondents to the survey liked the idea of an understudy having a chance to surpass the star, absenteeism was generally seen in a negative light. The perception was that it is becoming more prevalent and that the quality is not the same. Some respondents felt that they had to apologize to the guests they asked along or advise their friends not to attend the show. On the whole, people said they are becoming more cautious about their ticket purchases.

Davenport suggests the Actors Union and Producers get together to explore the problem. It should be noted that his survey results said people thought there was more absenteeism, but there was no study done on the question of whether there actually is more absenteeism over all. Though as a practical matter, the truth has little bearing if audiences have decided the problem is widespread and are acting accordingly. As Davenport suggests, better training of understudies may begin to reverse the perception that understudies are offering a vastly inferior product.

One of the commenters on the entry suggests that the understudy notice in the program book may have a psychological effect prejudicing a person against the show before the curtain rises. (Though I have attended a show where there was a small flurry of the notices falling out when I opened the Playbill. That certainly didn’t help my confidence.) Of course, eliminating proper notice probably runs afoul New York’s fraud laws.

While reading the entry, I recalled Holly Mulcahy’s September column on The Partial Observer about substitutions in orchestra programs. I wondered if the practice of changing up a concert offering was undermining confidence in orchestras as much as changes in casts are in Broadway shows. And has anyone ever done a study on that?

More Tales From the Furniture Store

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So last Thursday I had a really excellent dinner at a furniture store.

Long time readers will remember when I blogged about the opening of this store about two years ago. I was a little skeptical about a situation where a high end furniture store had a wine bar, high end restaurant and theatre in it. I have actually been to a couple events at the wine bar and theatre before but this was the first time I had dinner at the restaurant. It was really quite excellent. The highlight for me was an intermezzo of wasabi and apple sorbert. Just when you thought the wasabi was going to be too much, the coolness and sweetness turned things around and left your mouth with a taste of honey.

I was there lending my support for a fundraiser a performance group partner was having in order to raise money for a production we are premiering next October. The meal was preceded by a piece from the show we are putting together. It was my favorite situation. I got to have people tell me how wonderful and inspiring the show appeared to be and congratulate me. Followed by a really good meal. I didn’t have to worry about organizing the experience. I’ll find out how successful the appeal packets were in a few weeks.

But aside from that there was something that caught my eye about the activities at the facility. One of the women at my table mentioned her daughter said the bars and restaurants were a hot place on the weekends and there were lines out the door. I knew they kept the theatre busy with fashion shows and other events. One thing I didn’t realize until that evening was that they have a game night one Tuesday each month. They bill it as a “netplaying” opportunity. As an alternative to normal networking events, you attend and play board games or Wii video games at one of 12 stations set up around the theatre. (I should mention it is something of a black box theatre space with no permanent seating.)

It is free though you need to purchase at least one drink or something to eat. I am guessing the program has been at least marginally successful because they are advertising a new time and new sponsors. I am not sure if the sponsors help provide the games or the prizes (or both).

I saw this netplaying program and started thinking about the networking/attract new audiences type events that arts organizations sponsor. The approach has had mixed results from what I have read and thus has been of dubious value. My suspicion is that those who have had poor results have been doing it solely to increase their audiences rather than provide something that is needed and valued by their community.

I have no doubt that the social side of the building is designed with the intent of having attendees patronize the furniture side. I am not going to attribute high ideals to the business. The bars and restaurants are designed to appeal to young professionals. At the moment, they may be spending all their money on the clothes to wear to the bar and the wine they consume there while their apartment is a dump. It won’t always be that way though and when the young hipsters are ready to furnish an apartment, they are likely to at least look through the store there. In the meantime, they are in the building having fun and bringing their friends.

The arts organization which isn’t quite sure if it will make its budget from year to year may not have the institutional patience to take such a long view. In their heart of hearts, they may be whispering “If you build it, they will come and they will donate money” and hope it will all happen in the course of a season.

If you look at my previous entry and then look at the events they have running each month now, you will see that there is a pretty significant difference in how they are using their space. No jazz or film nights, not really too many family oriented events, few seminars on topics like micro-enterprise.

They started out with an idea of what might be useful to the community and then made adjustments over time. They built their facility with the intent of providing services to a clientele that would purchase their furniture. How much more difficult must it be then for an arts organization to do the same in a facility that wasn’t built to enhance the lifestyle of a demographic that isn’t patronizing events held there?

And since the purpose of the organization probably never included providing ancillary services to woo new audiences, there isn’t likely to be a staff dedicated to that purpose who have been provided the support and resources to adjust programming to find the combination of services which is most appealing. The fact that some organizations experience success at all probably has as much to do with luck as sincerity, devotion, excellent planning and execution.

Probably the best approach would be to contract with external vendors. While it would require staff to monitor contracts and process payment/revenue splitting with the vendors, at least staff isn’t faced with fabricating services whole cloth. You also have the opportunity cancel those services which don’t seem to be valued and replace them with new ones. Staff will still be needed to coordinate experiences that are appropriate to the tenor of the organization preventing them from working on something more directly related to the core purpose. Leadership needs to recognize this when committing to what is likely to be a long term development process.

Fun on the Fund Drive

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I was a guest on my local public radio station’s fund drive today. It was my second year, but as always I had a blast. I am sure it isn’t the same experience for everyone, but the time just flew by. I was ready to go another hour but they already had someone else lined up.

As a leader of a non-profit organization, these fund drives seem like such a win-win for both organizations. I was there offering tickets as premiums for membership and in return, I received the opportunity to raise awareness about my organization. I actually tried to be cognizant of how much I talked about us but the hosts kept feeding me lines opening new avenues of conversation.

I saw the whole experience as a game to see how I could turn something into a plug to become a member. The host commented on how adventurous and daring our programming was. Thanked her and talked a little bit about our philosophy and came back around and mentioned something to the effect of how supporters of the station were likewise adventurous and bold in that they were eager to consume programming that dealt with situations outside their daily experience.

I had been worried I would run out of things to say so I had prepared some notes in advance of my arrival making a connection between the tickets we were offering and the station. (Lead singer of a group voted among the distinctive voices of her country-the station is a distinctive voice in the community with few such alternatives–you can be a distinctive voice by declaring your support of the station.)

It turned out I need not have been so concerned. The program I was guesting on had fewer opportunities for pledge solicitations than the one I was on last year. I left the remaining tickets for the station to in future segments and then fed the host my notes so she could use them in future segments. No need for my ideas to go to waste, after all. (I have had interactions with her before so it the situation wasn’t akin to a waiter pitching his ideas to a film director.)

So I know this entry has mostly been about how cool and clever I am. I am, however, too lazy to make these same suggestions in a third person voice. “One should endeavor to be a gracious guest by preparing remarks that emphasize the desirability of becoming a member.”

Besides, I know that if I say I had fun playing word games, most of you will figure you are cleverer than me, (you aren’t by the way), and can do a much better job promoting your organization and membership to your public radio station and will help your local station in the (futile) attempt to do just that.

But in all seriousness, while I was sitting there waiting to go on air again, I starting thinking how much I wished there were other forums where the general public would direct their attention to hear arts people talk enthusiastically. There was an entirely different energy to our conversation than I have experienced at Q&As and performance talks. It might have just been the setting. Talking to each other without the immediate awareness of an audience likely changes the dynamics. If I could be sure I could translate at least some degree of the experience to our stage, I might consider asking the woman who hosted our segment to act as an interviewer for a show discussion.

Something for me to ponder.

Oh and if the idealism of helping out another non-profit in your community or playing clever word games isn’t motivation to go on a fund drive, how about economics. We saw a surge in ticket sales while I was on the air. One guy apparently drove to the theatre and began banging on my office door because he was afraid we would be sold out.

Hate Hazelnuts, Love Filberts

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In an illustration of the power of language in branding and naming, while having coffee this weekend a friend and I started having a discussion where he stated how much he hated hazelnuts and really preferred filberts. I ran with the joke and solemnly agreed that hazelnuts were over exposed. Witness the hazelnut creamer and syrups available here in the coffee house. Another friend was still up at the counter when we started the conversation so when she sat down and heard us seriously discussing how filberts, which tasted amazing, were being marginalized by the hype about hazelnuts, she sort of got pulled in. We did clue her in to the fact we were talking about the same nut, but not until we had a discussion about how the hype about the benefits of acai was selling smoothies of dubious nutritional value at that coffeehouse.

Of course, we all know that language is used to make things sound less negative. Like how there are those who refer to the dangerous chemical, Dihydrogen Monoxide as Hydrogen Hydroxide because the latter sound less threatening. But a little research will show that it is widely used as an industrial solvent and coolant, in the production of Styrofoam and poisons. Even in small quantities, accidental inhalation can cause death.

Of course, there are always people who will be smart enough to see through attempts to mislead them. When it comes to promoting our events and our organizations, a careful balance must be struck. I am a big proponent of avoiding trite phrases like those excerpted from movie reviews for the purpose of advertising the film. Yet if your language is too lofty, you run to the risk of creating an appearance of elitism.

I had a situation this season when writing text for our brochure. I described a show where a man must confront an evil force which has subverted the souls of better men than he. I later mention him having to resist the fell forces. A professor suggested I change subvert and fell because the students wouldn’t understand what it meant. Setting aside most of the reasons I thought that statement was wrong, I ultimately decided to keep the language because 1) our students aren’t the target audience for the brochure anyway; it receives much more use by the post-college age general public. 2) I didn’t think that given our educational mission I should be dumbing down a word choice that wasn’t that challenging to start with and could be derived from the context of the sentence.

Just the same, my concern about having language that might alienate people and pose a barrier to attendance made me think about the situation for awhile.

What If They DO End Up Loving The Arts?

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Barry Hessenius is conducting a massive six week conversation about the future of the National Endowment over at Barry’s Art Blog. When I say massive, I mean it. This week’s entry is so large (and won’t be complete until tomorrow’s Q&A) that I feel guilty about addressing such a comparatively small section of it.

Truthfully, it may be too large an entry for its own good. Few that could benefit from it may take the time to read it. There were many people whose thoughts I value contributing to the entry, (even with Andrew Taylor’s absence), so I did take the time to digest it.

On the topic of arts education, Ian David Moss who blogs at Createquity.com fleshed out the recently oft repeated question about the long term value of an arts education in a way that seemed very compelling to me. (my emphasis)

Before you call me out as the Grinch who stole music classes, let me explain. I think that the conversation about arts education is inseparable from the conversation about the professional arts infrastructure in America. The reason is simple: the kids who fall in love with learning to play the tuba or do a pirouette today are the adults who are going to be competing with each other for gigs and grant money tomorrow. If we are successful in our efforts and ensure that every child has the opportunity to experience all the arts they want to during their formative years, what happens to them once they get to college? The arts are a powerful drug, as addictive as nicotine for some. The arts encourage people to dream big, and we’ve developed a post-Baby Boomer culture in America that tells children to follow their dreams no matter what obstacles they encounter. That’s fine so far as it goes, but there needs to be a pot of gold on the other side of that rainbow. When music conservatories, playwriting programs, schools of art—institutions whose ranks and capital budgets have been swelling apace in recent years—blithely charge marginal students tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and fail to offer them even the pretense of “real life” entrepreneurship skills, that’s as close to third-sector malpractice as it gets in my opinion.

[…]

Much of the literature that advocates arts education as a strategy for cultivating demand for the arts assumes that students who have invested thousands of hours of their lives in perfecting a craft during their formative years will happily set all of that aside as soon as they turn 18 and 21, become productive members of society with skills that they somehow picked up while practicing piano for four hours a day, and donate all of their expendable income to their local arts organizations. Really? Don’t you think that some of them might be a little bitter about having to leave their dream behind? Don’t you think some of them might continue on and spend their parents’ life savings on three graduate degrees in a quixotic quest for fame and glory that never materializes? Is this the best use of our collective human capital?

[…]

N.B. Upon visiting Ian’s blog, I happily found that he posted the above material with supporting links not available on Barry’s Blog.

I have discussed the idea of arts training programs graduating students into a glut market before. I certainly have to acknowledge Scott Walters and Tom Loughlin, theatre professors who often question their part contributing to this state. Scott Walters was part of the conversation on Barry’s Blog and alluded to Tony Kushner’s 1998 “Modest Proposal” to eliminate undergraduate arts degrees which he included at some length in a 2006 entry on his blog.

What I never really thought about was what the arts world would do if they realized their ambitions to engender an appreciation of the arts in a large number of young people. I don’t think his suggestion that the push for arts education is motivated by a desire to have more consumers rather than artists is completely fair.

Or rather, I don’t think operating on the assumption that not everyone will become an arts practitioner completely nefarious. No one expects every kid who participates in Little League, Pop Warner Football and various soccer leagues will go on to become a professional athlete after all the time they have invested in practicing. Though certainly a situation where a college athlete isn’t expected to devote themselves to their studies is not something to be emulated. And in fact, as Ian points out, lacking large scholarships to keep their debt down, artists have it worse if they leave college without any “real” skills to fall back upon. The purpose of all these youth athletic activities is to cultivate an appreciation of the various sports which translates into audiences for athletic teams throughout life. (Not to mention a lot of athletic apparel purchases if the national sponsorships by sneaker companies are any indication.)

Still, if we have trouble employing artists now with really crappy arts education, what will happen when we ignite kids’ imaginations and convince them the arts have value in their lives. Yes, there may be an increase in arts consumers if more people grow up valuing the arts, but young artists will be graduating and trying to practice their craft long before their fellow graduates acquire enough disposable income to support them. The one saving grace might be if the economy is moving toward creativity. In that case, the graduates would likely need much different training than they are receiving right now.

Not that it is okay, but the arts are not alone in misrepresenting opportunities. In the last year, I read an article that cautioned people about believing ads that say things like there are plenty of jobs in nursing*, computer programming, tractor trailer driving, etc. The piece evoked the Grapes of Wrath in noting that it was in the best interest of many industries to flood the market with many qualified applicants so they can keep wages low due to competition.

I am not suggesting that this is a situation the arts attempt to cultivate. Other than Hollywood or some of the old Broadway syndicates, I can’t think of any entities who would have both the perspective to recognize this and the influence to bring the situation about. If lower costs were a goal, regional theatres would try to attract more people to their areas instead of casting out of NYC and having to pay to house people locally. Though I suppose high concentrations of actors in NYC does keep prices down in its own way. In any case, given that Baumol’s Cost Disease makes producing art increasingly more expensive, the arts do benefit from having a surplus of talented people.

*Don’t mean to imply nursing doesn’t have the need given all the aging baby boomers. It is just one of those areas for which you hear there will be a lot of demand.

#@$#^%$#@%$# SPAMMERS!

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Well spammers recently co-opted a feature on our website for their own nefarious purposes. The result is, we have had to shut down a useful tool on our website until we can find a solution.

The feature enabled people to easily tell friends about a performance. A simple click of a link autofilled a form with the description text and a link to our events. It also allowed people to personalize the message with their own thoughts and remove our material entirely if they felt they could do the job on their own.

So you can probably see the opportunity for spamming. We recognized that it was open for abuse, including people looking to represent themselves as us, so we had all uses of the form blind copy us.

I had more than 4500 emails this morning. I was lucky there weren’t more, I am sure. Upon further investigation, we discovered that the measures we had put in place to thwart this sort of thing had been doing so quite well for some weeks now preventing spam from ever entering our mail queue. But the spammers found a way around it and so here we are being blacklisted by service providers.

This is quite annoying because while the feature wasn’t overwhelmingly successful, people did use it regularly to pass the word along to their friends. Now we have to find another method. Anyone have a suggestion? I imagine something with a RECAPTCHA challenge exists out there.

In the mean time, if you have a similar feature on your website but haven’t been monitoring its use, you may want to examine its recent activity.

Planning 2010-2011

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Had a meeting with my booking consortium today and learned some interesting things.

First of all, in relation to my post on advocating to keep our state arts council staff from being laid off. I was told that during the hearing, it came to light that the decision to lay the staff off came after all a consultation with all the unit heads–except the council’s executive director. Apparently it was felt the arts council was not an important unit and the grant administration could be accomplished by the general state accounting staff. Then it was decided that the grant administration was specialized knowledge the accountants couldn’t handle themselves so the executive director and one assistant should be kept to help the accountants. (So the restoration of two of about 10 people slated for layoffs.)

The final decision has yet to be made. It did occur to me that while we can recite the economic impact of the arts stats in our sleep, there are still people who don’t know the arts contribute to economic activity. The president of our group said he was able to easily point to a recent $10,000 artistic fee payment that yielded $150,000 in additional direct spending independent of any restaurant checks, parking fees and babysitter payments.

Second thing I learned is that with funding so uncertain, especially among universities, a lot of tour decisions are being made much later in the year. Apparently this was a topic of conversation at a recent regional conference. Because we depend so heavily on artists touring the West Coast to keep our prices down, we will have to make our own decisions for the 2010-11 season months later than we usually do because opportunities may never emerge. I am sure since four of our members are associated with universities this will just perpetuate the cycle of postponed decisions.

One of the positive things I noticed during the meeting was people were proposing many more artists I could afford to present. Last year’s cycle seemed to emphasize higher paid acts, but fewer of them. I haven’t quite analyzed how things resolved themselves this year to determine if artists are lowering their fees or if my partners are looking at a greater number of less expensive performers. If the latter is the case, they are either instinctively or intentionally following the Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser’s advice not to cut programming in tough economic times.

I am personally feeling less anxious than I was at this time last year when I was faced with the proposition of putting together a slate of performances without the benefit of as many partnerships as I had in the past. Of course, it also helped that I walked into the meeting knowing a show I started conversations about two years ago would be opening my season.

Another thing that came up was a desire to have much closer communication between those organizations that aren’t consortium members and those that are. Someone initially proposed Bela Fleck, Zakir Hussain and Edgar Meyers for the coming season unaware that they were playing with the symphony this year. This represents something of a missed opportunity for the symphony since they have played in at least one of our member’s venues before and could have partnered to take the performance there. (Though it ain’t cheap and given the symphony’s recent financial problems, it was probably more prudent to do as they had.)

Having heard how great the concert was, member organizations seem likely to pursue presenting the trio alone. People expressed regrets that the two weeks notice they received in speaking with agents didn’t provide the opportunity participate in the tour this time around. The problem of duplicating another local arts entity’s efforts has been an ongoing one. Any show that doesn’t have an agent or rights holder monitoring it for geographic conflicts, Shakespeare’s shows for example, has the potential of popping up more than once as a local offering. In some areas groups try to get together and alert each other to future plans. But even that arrangement might not be effective if groups need to postpone their final decision making until later.

That said, we all get tons of emails every day alerting us to routing opportunities. It is amazing that there are actually some acts touring whose plans we haven’t heard about.

Continuing Mystery Gets Me Chocolate

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Okay, some updates on recent posts!

I posted about the state furloughing teachers 17 Fridays over the next year. I was happy to see a local theatre immediately jumped on the opportunity to offer a Furlough Fridays program teaching kids about musical theatre. One of the things I liked was that they require you to attend all the classes emphasizing that student commitment to their classes was just as important as commitment to the classes they were missing.

Parents have actually started a movement to pay the teachers themselves on the furlough days. This raises a number of issues about the use of the school facilities, workman’s comp coverage and insurance. It also raises the question about why people are resistant to having their taxes raised a little bit to support the schools for the whole year but okay with paying a lot more to have their children taught on a few days out of the year. Is this going to reveal the gap between the haves and the have nots if parents in more affluent neighborhoods are able to pay to have their kids taught while the schools in poorer neighborhoods stay empty on those days for lack of the same funds?

One of the biggest impediments actually is a decade old ethics rule that prevents teachers from being paid privately to teach their students. The rule was enacted to prevent basic concerns like whether a teacher skimped on the instruction during the day in order to guarantee the need for additional instruction after hours.

The other update I have is to the situation I covered in my entry titled The No Sell Sales Pitch. Recent events, I am afraid, have done nothing but renew my curiosity about the approach being employed by the two dancers who visited in late August. Today I received a package with a 1 lb bar of Trader Joe’s Belgian Bittersweet Chocolate with Almonds, a bag of Trader Joe’s Trek Mix and a tea candle in a blue holder. There was a card thanking me for meeting with them, praising the work we are doing and hoping our paths will cross again. Still no material about their company which I am assured by others does indeed exist.

Maybe they just aren’t that into my theatre.

Advocating Under Pressure

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I received an email at 3:00 pm today “reminding” me that the deadline for submitting a letter of testimony to the state legislature about the possible layoffs of the majority of the state arts foundation staff was due by 5:00 pm. I use the quotes because I was entirely unaware that the hearings were today.

But this is a topic which really concerns me because the governor has sent lay off notices to pretty much everyone at the organization, including the executive director. The only people who were exempted were a clerk and a couple federally funded positions. Without any staff, the state is in danger of losing funding from many sources, including the NEA and federal stimulus funds.

What follows is the letter I managed to throw together in an hour and a half. It certainly isn’t perfect. At the same time, it is more than the notice I received asked for. The letter advised me to throw a couple sentences together because the legislature probably wouldn’t read it and was only interested in the total number of letters received on the subject.

I figured at the very least it would be good practice for advocacy letter writing under pressure to write something with more substance than being requested. I know a couple people intended to focus on the stats and economic benefits of the arts. However I remembered a talk I attended by Jonathan Katz of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies on the subject of advocating to decision makers. He talked about using concrete examples of how supporting your cause will show them advancing the public good. While I did mention economic value briefly, my main focus was on the arts valuing the history and culture of under served communities.

Aloha,

I am writing out of concern over the proposed staff cuts to the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts (SFCA). Though the arts represent a small part of the state’s budget, the impact they have are tremendous. Other testimony you have received speaks to the economic impact the arts have in the state leveraging $35 in ancillary spending for every ticket and entry fee paid. So much of that economic activity starts with the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. Without a staff to administer it, funding from regional organizations like the Western States Arts Federation, national organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts and federal stimulus funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is in jeopardy. The loss of this funding can mean a loss or diminished private funding from endowments and foundations which require their support be matched.

Losing access to these funding sources will have a very tangible impact on the availability of culture and the arts for the people of Hawaii and will undercut attempts to disseminate Hawaiian culture nationally and internationally. The first thing people entering Leeward Community College Theatre enjoy is the 102 feet wide by 23 feet high mural by Jean Charlot entitled, “The Relation of Man and Nature in Old Hawaii.” It is a gorgeous work of art commissioned and maintained by the SFCA Art in Public Places program. I am pretty rabid about protecting this magnificent, but fragile fresco from potential damage. As the only major performing arts facility on the leeward side of the island, serving the Waianae Coast, Mililani and North Shore area communities, it is only proper that residents have such a beautiful work to remind them of the historical and cultural heritage of the state when they attend events. It is fortunate that the mural benefited from some minor repairs and restoration two years ago thanks to the SFCA.

The performances themselves benefit from the funding administered by the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. While the university provides a great deal of support, many of the events which the theatre presents depend heavily on the support the SFCA acquires. Leeward Community College Theatre works with partners throughout the state to leverage our combined purchasing power and secure favorable fees for artists to perform. However, it is still very expensive to bring performances to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Because of our desire to make performances accessible to people living on the Waianae Coast, Mililani and the North Shore, we charge a much lower ticket price than our partners on the other islands. The funding secured through the SFCA combined with a lot of hard work helps us end the year just barely in the black. We are committed to keeping performances affordable for our constituents. The SFCA makes that possible and we acknowledge that in our print materials, our website and in an announcement from the stage before most performances.

We use the SFCA funding to support performances that reflect the lives of the residents of Hawaii, celebrating their culture, history and engendering pride. We have had groups from throughout the Pacific from places like New Zealand, Easter Island, Samoa, Tuvalu and Tokelau.

We certainly haven’t been simply bringing in groups from the outside, but have also been instrumental in promoting Hawaiian culture and raising its profile nationally and internationally.

We presented Halau O Kekuhi’s “Hanau Ka Moku” which celebrated the emergence of the new island, Kama‘ehu, off the southeast of the Big Island of Hawaii. The show toured the state, the Mainland, including a performance at Wolf Trap, the National Park for the Performing Arts.

We also presented Maui’s Halau Pa’u O Hi’iaka’s performance of the life of Kahekili, who nearly unified the islands under his single rule. The performance also toured the state, the Mainland and Germany and has plans for going to Japan.

We brought Honolulu born Keo Woolford in to perform his one person show, “I-land”, a piece about Hawaiian identity that had multiple successful runs in New York and Los Angeles.

Leeward Community College Theatre and Aiea based Tau Dance Theater produced a contemporary opera entirely in Hawaiian in 2006 based on the Naupaka myth which toured the state. In 2011 we will team up again to produce a piece about Hawaiian snow goddess, Poliahu.

Finally, we are working with Honolulu based Monkey Waterfall to create a site specific show about what it means to be a celebrity that will range across the Leeward CC campus.

We have no hesitation when it comes to presenting events that resonate with the lives of the state’s residents because we know the theatre will be packed. People are voracious for these sort of performances.

Many of the events we sponsor have activities that go beyond just an evening’s performance. We have outreach performances for school children from the Waianae Coast, Pearl City, Mililani and North Shore both at our facility and in the schools. There have been workshops and master classes people can take to hone their technique. But the people of O‘ahu have exhibited aloha MANY times with potluck meals both at Leeward CC, in private homes and on the beaches. Visiting artists have been invited to jam sessions in bars where they have been astonished by the technique of slack key and steel guitar masters and left trying to master these new skills.

The people of Hawaii, (and those lucky artists), stand to lose all these opportunities if the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts is made ineffectual by staffing cuts. I urge you to consider all these issues in your deliberations.

Mahalo nui loa,

Joe Patti

The Uninvited News Release

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I think I may have previously mentioned that one of the local daily papers has started allowing people to submit stories to be posted on its webpage. I recently encountered a situation which that emphasizes the need to monitor and control your message and image on the web.

Last week I noticed a strange headline on a reader submitted news story for a local university theatre. The headline was poorly written and the word choice wasn’t the sort of thing you would use to promote an event. Even a mundane “Theatre performs X In October” would have been more suitable. Upon reading the whole piece, I figured perhaps the department was having the students write press releases to get experience. Then I realized the show it was spending most of the space discussing had opened and closed already.

I contacted a colleague in the department to discover what had happened. If the story was submitted late, that was one thing. However, since this was the same newspaper that had inexplicably omitted our events from a recent review of Fall Arts Events, I was concerned that maybe their approval process for web stories had a backlog that was delaying their release. If that was the case, I wanted to take that into account when submitting releases. Regardless of what the answer was, the delayed story damaged the organization’s credibility a little.

It turned out that a journalism student decided to be helpful and submitted a story unbeknownst to anyone at the theatre. (Though the student waited until her journalism professor reviewed and graded it. I hope the professor wasn’t aware this outdated story was being posted.) This news caused me some concern. Because there was no verification procedure in effect, someone who had no connection with the theatre was able to represent themselves as if they did and had a story published under the imprimatur of a major newspaper.

Certainly it isn’t news that the internet allows people to misrepresent themselves. About three years ago, Drew McManus bought up a number of alternative web addresses for orchestras around the country. It takes a lot less effort to submit a fallacious story to a newspaper than it does to create a spoof site that looks like that of the Asian Art Museum. This event represents a new variation on the problem because newspapers are still generally seen as a dependable source of information (at least in the non-political arena). People may not yet be distinguishing between the links to reported stories and those to submitted stories.

Furloughs, Arts Education and A Silly Song About Schubert

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In somewhat depressing news, the state teachers’ union approved a proposal which will require them to take 17 furlough days a year as part of a plan to make up a projected state deficit. This will translate into schools being closed two or three Fridays every month. Teachers are even more concerned about being able to meet required instructional standards than before. I can’t imagine this will be any good for what remains of arts education instruction in schools.

At the moment, a school outreach we have scheduled on a Friday won’t be pre-empted by a furlough day. Hopefully the school won’t decide they won’t have time to have our program when the time rolls around. The one thing about this situation that chafes a bit is that sports events are not canceled on the furlough days but plays, concerts and dances (not to mention instruction) will be.

At the moment, things look pretty good for us. We have been giving a lot of building tours to high school teachers and counselors the past few weeks and many of them are interested in our shows and outreach possibilities. We have also been asked to speak about arts related professions at two career days this Fall which is a good sign. One of the invitations came at the recommendation of a donor and the other as a result of a tour we gave last week.

I was listening to the first podcast of Inside the Arts comrade, Ron Spigelman’s Audience Connections class and he suggested that conversations about the arts in needed to happen in grocery stores and other public places. You expect these discussions in performing arts centers, when they happen spontaneously in public places the influence spreads beyond the choir (as in “preaching to”).

He uses the example of shopping and having people compliment him on a concert they recently heard so this isn’t the case of people breaking into song for no reason whatsoever. (I love Schubert! Joseph Schubert! Actor Heinz Schubert! And that Schubert named Franz!)

I will admit that having a captive audience of students at a career day lacks a little spontaneity, but now more than ever it seems to be important to have conversations about the arts in alternative venues.

Assorted Arts Candy

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Okay, some fun links from around the web today-

First off, you can have your big performing arts centers and arts organizations with multi-million dollar endowments and budgets, I would wake up happy every morning if I could say I worked here. (I wonder if they have 24 hour security to keep people from eating the building.)

Second, I wanted to point out an article on the always helpful Non-Profit Law Blog about common problems with organizational by laws. I passed the link on to an organization of which I am a member because we spotted some of the same issues with our bylaws and I figured there might be more still to examine.

The entry also includes potential problems when using another organization’s bylaws as a template for ones own.

Last, I wanted to direct people to an entry on Ken Davenport’s The Producer’s Perspective about a Hungarian immigrant who created a theatre ticket discounting organization in NYC that preceded the TKTS booth in Times Square by nearly a century.

Joseph Leblang received free tickets to shows in exchange for allowing posters to be put up in his shop. What he did was turn around and sold his tickets as well as those received by the neighboring shop owners for less than full price. The theatre owners weren’t happy but ended up turning their unsold stock over to Leblang because he did such a high volume business.

Davenport ends with an observation about keeping ones eye open for opportunity. There were many shopkeepers receiving tickets who could have started the same sort of endeavor but none did. Or at least none emerged to significantly challenge Leblang.

Next Time, Ravel On Tabla

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I went to see Bela Fleck, Zakir Hussain and Edgar Meyer perform with the Honolulu Symphony this weekend. I had heard an interview with Zakir Hussain about the project on PRI’s The World a week or so earlier and was intrigued by the description of the project. (There is another interview and video here. Scroll down a little.) When I saw they were coming to a concert hall near me, I hopped on the computer to order tickets.

It was really a wonderful performance and a lot of fun. There were some encounters I had and some comments I overheard that were illuminating to me. Most of them weren’t really about the Honolulu Symphony in particular. From what I have heard they are pretty much industry wide practices.

Actually, the first incident I never expected and I don’t think had any reflection on the symphony or industry at all. The first half of the program was Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 in A, Op. 90. Apparently there was more than just coughing going on during the piece because as soon as I exited the door into the side hall, I walked into two guys arguing. One suggested they take it outside and the other moved outside. The first guy’s girlfriend restrained him from going outside. I don’t know how that developed so quickly except the second guy said something about having a skin condition so maybe he was scratching a lot during the performance.

Maybe Mendelssohn just inspires violence. That final movement was played a little more energetically than I anticipated.

Anyway, having avoided a scuffle, I made my way to the Italian ice line. A group near me was talking about the performance and one person wondered where Messrs. Fleck, Hussain and Meyer were. He was a Fleck fan and came specifically to see him perform. From the way he spoke, he thought he was coming to a Bela Fleck concert where the symphony was contracted to back him rather than Fleck being the symphony’s invited performer.

Had you visited the website, you might get the impression the guest artists were performing first from the way the information was ordered. (see below)

fleck screen grab

A woman in the party noted the program listed the Mendelssohn first but she thought the trio would be participating in that piece.

I have to confess made similar assumptions. Even though the order in the program was reversed from the website, the trio’s names were listed so prominently, for a moment I thought maybe they were playing in the Mendelssohn. Then I began to wonder if there had been enough time for them to rehearse with the symphony to do a credible job. (Well, if I am really being truthful, I thought they were going to be playing Ravel. If you notice there is a Ravel quote on the screen capture above I had it in my head I might get to hear Bolero interpreted on the tabla, banjo and double base. You gotta admit that could be cool. )

Then I remembered something I had read on a blog this past spring/summer. I thought it was either an entry or a comment on one of my Inside the Arts compadres blogs, but I couldn’t find it. (Happily link to it if someone points it out.) In any case, someone wrote something to the effect that the common practice of Pops concerts was to make you sit through classical to get to the featured pops artist.

In any case, the people I was standing near didn’t sound as if they felt they had been hoodwinked, but did sound a little mystified about the experience. I am sure their concerns were forgotten in the second half of the evening. I am hardly an expert on the music, but I found the piece Meyer wrote for their three instruments very engaging. They played a couple more pieces, did their bows and then came back for four encores.

It was a conversation I overheard walking out to the parking lot that I hoped was not widely held. The people behind me pondered if the orchestra musicians might be angry about the recent financial difficulties because they were so stiff and emotionless compared to the guest artists which one woman described as looking as if they were having fun. One of her companions suggested the orchestra musicians were probably required to maintain a discipline like soldiers.

I imagine that isn’t too far from the truth. Bela Fleck nodded his head and mouthed the tabla beats as Hussain played and exchanged a look with Meyer that seemed to say “he is kicking butt.” Hussain grooved out while Fleck was playing. (Meyer was profile to me so I couldn’t see what he was doing as well.) Having an entire orchestra exhibiting their individual reactions to a performance is likely to get distracting if the focus is supposed to be on the music.

During the performance, I had some interesting conversations with the woman next to me. I think she thought I had some sort of expertise in classical music or at least the attendance experience because I correctly guessed that the people lined awkwardly along the edge of the stage and the walls of the seating area were there to perform “The Star Spangled Banner.”

She told me the best place to sleep was in the orchestra hall. I suggested that it was an expensive undertaking to spend so much only to sleep and it might be better to buy music. She told me she could never experience the quality she was that night because she didn’t have an expensive stereo system.

I don’t know that she actually slept, but she did spend the first half with her eyes closed and her hand across them. I can’t imagine she comprises a significant untapped niche for orchestras. For me the encounter just proved that we can never entirely understand the nuances that provide people with enjoyment while attending events.

Near the end of the performance, everyone rose to give Messrs. Fleck, Hussain and Meyer a standing ovation. I didn’t stand because I was pretty sure they weren’t done yet and had held some great stuff in reserve. My new friend turned and asked, “Wasn’t that good enough for you to stand?” When they were done, and don’t get me wrong they did confirm my suspicions, I felt a little obligated by her earlier question to stand and make a comment that now I was ready to stand.

I felt a little insincere doing it. I generally have no problem keeping my seat and clapping enthusiastically while the world rises around me. But I have never had anyone looking to me for leadership and confirmation. In retrospect, I am not sure if they deserved it or I just succumbed to the pressure.

Learning Chinese To Sing In English

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Busy, busy, busy, busy these days but I learned something interesting today that I thought I would share.

I met a guy who is in the local university’s production of the Lady White Snake Chinese opera. The show is in February but they are starting rehearsals now because the group is learning the opera in Chinese first and then in English. Apparently, it is easier to learn the proper delivery if you learn it in Chinese first. Then they have three different English translations to choose from. Each person will be assigned the English version that suits their abilities best. One person may be singing translation one and the person responding may be using translation three.

I saw the last Chinese opera they performed and I have to confess that it took me ten minutes to realize they were singing in English because they were employing Chinese opera’s characteristic style of drawing everything out in a very high pitch. I knew the cast had an extended rehearsal period because they were learning an unfamiliar technique, but I had no idea how involved it really was.

My Incredible Shrinking Weekly

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In my mind, trend of newspapers have financial difficulties has been tied to purchases of the newspaper: People aren’t purchasing the papers to read any more, circulation is down and so advertisers aren’t buying space so revenues are down. It hadn’t really occurred to me that this would be as much of a problem for the alternative weeklies. Since they are free and usually have a high circulation, I figured they wouldn’t have ad sales problem to the same extent.

The recent issue of our alternative weekly made me realize this may not be the case. In truth, it may not be a readership problem but rather that people don’t have the money to buy ads. I gave up investing a lot of hope in the dailies a few years back when the entertainment editor told me their focus would be more on pop culture. We would still get some okay coverage, but the arts reviewers would complain about the way they were being asked to frame their stories. Then the entertainment editor took the contract buy-out and I became sort of nostalgic for the good old days.

The alternative weekly usually had my back. We would get decent mention of 85% of our stuff and calendar listings for the rest. There would often be some quirky spin on our shows. Sometimes it was too quirky and people rolled their eyes, but at least people read it in the first place and called wondering what the show was really about.

Last week’s issue for the weekly was the Fall Arts issue. Generally there is a multiple page spread of all the events up to the new year either listed by genre or venue. This time there was a note from the editor saying the listings wouldn’t appear this year because 1) Few arts organizations had the money to do anything and 2) The paper didn’t have the resources to write anything. Instead, they were doing profiles on four up and coming artists to watch. None of our events were listed.

The paper usually sells specially priced ad space so arts organizations can promote their seasons. Generally there are quite a few of these ads. This year it was just us and the local symphony.

This actually made up for the lack of coverage because we were conspicuous by the absence of pretty much anyone else. Our drama director called me and congratulated me for getting an ad in the issue. I pointed out it was no coup when you were paying for the privilege but it illustrates just how barren the issue was. I guess I could be congratulated on having the money to buy the ad space.

This development caught me a little off guard. I was ready for the decline of coverage in the dallies and have been watching for opportunities to capture names and identify opinion leaders. The has been a key tool in reaching a more hip segment of the population who aren’t necessarily deeply involved in social media networking. Since I suspect they buy their tickets at the last minute, I may not have captured their contact information in my database.

My next move is to try to figure out if the crisis at the weekly is with a reduction in readership or with advertisers. If it is advertisers, then my visibility can go up when I insert an ad. Of course, if the weekly can’t afford to distribute as widely or go out of business altogether, the benefits of standing out in a smaller crowd is likely to be short lived.

Arts. Widget For More

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Americans for the Arts have a widget available that can be easily placed on any website, blog or social media site. I put one at the bottom of my right side bar.

If you click on the share or embed link in the lower right, it provides you with the ability to either automatically insert the widget on your social media site (and many blogs) or copy the code so you can manually insert it into your blog, website, whatever.

If you click on campaign, you can see the television ads they have been running (my fav is Raisin Brahms), listen to radio ads or download some of their other logos like Elizabeth Barrett Brownies.

I think it is important to post this sort of thing just to make people aware of the lack of arts in schools by sheer numbers so please consider adding the widget to your webpages, blogs and social media accounts.

I have been critical of Americans for the Arts (or if I haven’t, I have thought it) for only allowing partners who had invested large sums of money have access to more than just a logo as a tool to promote the “Arts. Ask for More” campaign. Certainly, they had every right to place controls on how broadcast and print ads were used. It is just that the only way I could participate was by posting a logo. Now that there is something more, I am happy to use it everywhere I can and encourage others to do the same.

Wrong Words Can’t Describe This Film

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Since I am always looking for a situation that provides something of value for arts administration, I take my lessons where I find them. The latest was an illustration of how what you say about an experience matters. Intellectually, we know that if we want to convince people to attend an event, we need to employ compelling word choices. Execution often fails.

Around mid-July a friend told me he and his girlfriend had gone to see a movie called Departures. The way he talked about it, it sounded like Night Shift without the call girls. He describe it as a movie about a guy who loses his job and ends up working for an undertaker. He talked about it being funny at times and sad, but never used very strong terms. As a result, my image was of a guy who spent the night in the morgue reading, making some awkward mistakes in relation to dead bodies and perhaps learning something of the way these people lived to inspire him about his future. A nice story, but it didn’t make me want to see the movie.

About two times since then he mentioned it was a good movie, but didn’t really inject any particular enthusiasm above saying he and his girlfriend liked it. The thought that went through my mind was that he wasn’t certain enough about his own tastes to speak more confidently about the film. He thought it was a good movie, but he wasn’t sure if was actually a good movie.

I can’t necessarily blame him. The movie is only playing on one screen out of 115 in the county. Can’t be that good if it is only playing at one theatre, right? But the whole issue of feeling comfortable with your encounters with art is a topic for another entry.

Last week I ran into another guy who raved about the movie encouraging me to go see it. The image he painted for me was nowhere near what the first guy had. So I went to see the movie this past weekend.

Yes, it is only playing at one theatre in the county, but it has been playing there for about 80 days. I was near that one theatre Saturday morning so I went to the 10:45 am show. The word of mouth must be good because there were about 40 people ahead of me online and nearly all of them bought tickets to the film. I know this, because the people in front of me kept remarking when someone bought tickets to our showing. I think there were only about 75 people in the theatre, but that is pretty good for a morning show nearly 80 days after it opened.

I absolutely loved the movie. Arts people should especially take note given that the lead character loses his job when his orchestra goes under. There may be another career waiting out there for you! I am told you can watch the movie on line but it would be a shame to do that. It surprisingly hasn’t opened in some parts of the country so there is still an opportunity to see it. Hopefully it is experiencing a prolonged run in those places it has opened so others can go see it if they haven’t.

Watching it online, you would also miss the communal nature of film going. The audience for this sort of movie are not as likely to talk on their cell phones throughout the show as with many films so you can be reasonably assured of a good experience. This movie is about death so there are some heart wrenching moments. It is at these times that you are reminded you aren’t experiencing these emotions alone. I think you would also lose the impact of some absolutely beautifully composed shots, including the deft grace with which the lead character performs his new job.

The movie left me wondering if they still prepare the dead in Japan in this manner. I suspect it isn’t the standard practice, but perhaps it is still common enough. The lead actor learns how to prepare a dead body to be placed in a coffin. There is a ritual cleansing of the body which is executed before the family. The entire body is disrobed, cleaned and redressed in view of the family. It is all done under a cloth draped over the body so that the family does not see the unclothed form of their loved ones. The precision and artistry with which the ceremony is performed is beautiful and entrancing.

The movie makes the point that funerals are for the sake of the living when one of the characters points out the three coffin models they sell with widely varying prices and mentions they all burn the same in the incinerator. Still, I think you would have an entirely different view of death and funerals if you knew your loved one received such attentive care before they were placed in the coffin.

So anyway, that is my attempt to sell you on the movie by telling you why I liked it while avoiding press release language. It lacks the umph of vocal expression, (OMIGOD, THE MOVIE WAS AWESOME — which is close to how I have expressed myself in person), but hopefully people are at least intrigued. I have intentionally avoided linking to the trailer because I think it does a poor job of portraying the movie. Even after seeing the movie, my excitement is dulled by the trailer. If you need to watch something, visit this page and immediately click on the picture to the right of the actor playing the cello. The little bit that plays best represents what makes the movie so good.

Sometimes You Can’t Choose Why People Love You

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Arts administration blogs such as mine frequently chant the mantra of relationship building. Success, we say, is incumbent upon you getting your community invested in your organization.

There have been a couple incidents in the last few weeks that serve as reminders that you don’t always get to define the parameters of your relationship with your constituents. Sometimes what people value about your organization is unrelated to the product you think you are offering them.

The first is the boycott of Whole Foods for CEO John Mackey’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal stating the country can’t afford the Obama Administration’s health care plan and suggesting something similar to the way Whole Foods provides health care to its employees. You can find a summation of why people are upset on Huffington Post.

I am talking about this situation first because it is the weakest of the two examples. I could say that Whole Foods product isn’t health care and that most of the employees likely hold a view closer to that of the customers than the CEO so why boycott the store? However, it doesn’t take much effort to see that Whole Foods is selling a healthy lifestyle. In fact, Mackey pretty much suggests you won’t need health insurance if you patronize his stores. Even though Whole Foods’ health insurance looks to be fairly decent, health insurance for those who don’t have it is a hot button issue. Though I suppose there is some irony in the fact that people refused to shop at Walmart for denying health insurance to many of their employees and now they are going to boycott Whole Foods which pays 100% of the insurance premium because the CEO is encouraging everyone to follow his company’s example.

The furor over IKEA’s font change on the other hand, is a little puzzling. While font choice is part of the company’s brand identity, the font has no bearing on the quality or design of the furniture being sold. It is hard to understand why customers of a company whose products have been described as the vanilla choice of the furnishings world are upset because a more ubiquitous font has been chosen. And yet people are signing a petition urging them to change it back.

I’ll agree that font choice is central to creating an impression and identity for a company. Would you frequent McDonalds if their font screamed Soviet gulag? Short of a favored store making a similarly extreme change, I can’t say that my continued patronage hinges on font choice. I could perhaps understand if IKEA discarded their naming conventions for something generic like Mahogany chair style 3. The quirky naming thing is characteristic to them and kind of endearing. The font choice being central to the enjoyment of a furniture buying experience I can’t really see.

It’s almost enough to make you wary about making changes to any aspect with which people might identify your organization. There are a bunch of us praying we can replace our carpet some year soon. I would be bowled over if people found the worn out areas charming and objected to changing it out.

Breaking Ground On A New Building

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I went to the ground breaking for the Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center being built here. I had written about my experiences on the advisory committee for the theatre portion of the center a couple times in the past.

This is where the community center will be built.

Site of Kroc Center

The theatre portion will be named for Jack Lord who bequeathed $4.5 million to the project.

Theatre Plans

Here is a picture of the blessing of the grounds. Unfortunately, my camera shut down while I thought I was taking pictures of the actual ground breaking. That’s what I get for holding the camera above my head instead of looking through the view finder where I would have noticed the problem.

The women are holding a triple strand maile lei which is untied  indicating an opening which is more propitious in Hawaiian tradition. Cutting it as is practiced with ribbons  inaugurating new buildings is seen as negative gesture due to the severing that occurs.

Blessing of the Ground

Presumed Disappointing

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Adam Thurman at The Mission Paradox made a great blog post yesterday pointing out that, unfortunately, when it comes to the question of whether they will enjoy an opportunity to interact with the arts, the default assumption many audience members hold is “no” until convinced otherwise.

“Most people, when given the option to attend a performing arts event, are more scared that the performance is going to be disappointing then they are excited that the performance is going to be good.”

He goes on to say:

“This is the thing we have to remember:

We are in the trust business.

Not the theatre business.

Not the museum business.

The trust business.

When you are dealing with a risk averse public the only way to get them to do a risky thing is by earning their trust.

How do you earn their trust?

By building a relationship with them.

My observation is that most of us in the arts are very good at putting up programming, but we aren’t good at building relationships.”

It put me in mind of an entry I did about three years ago where I cited an entry on Neill Roan’s old blog (oh why, oh why did you shut down that blog!), titled “How Audiences Use Information to Reduce Risk.”

In the entry I talked about the efforts I was going to inform people about performances since they often commented they hadn’t seen anything about the show. Reviewing the entry, I realize now that the problem we likely face is that people’s primary expectation is to receive notice in the newspaper or radio because that is where they traditionally have gotten the information. The problem is, people aren’t using those media in the same way they used to. Their expectations don’t align with their practice any longer.

In that entry I spoke of using electronic notifications, word of mouth and opinion leaders to help disseminate information about performances. One thing I missed that Adam speaks about is relationship building. It is true that people need to view the information you provide as credible, but they also need to believe that you will provide an enjoyable experience even if they end up less than thrilled about the performance.

Just last week Drew McManus cited a situation where the non-artistic elements of an evening combined with a partially disappointing/partially sublime artistic experience with the net effect being negative. Some of the non-artistic elements were entirely out of the arts organization’s control, others could have been ameliorated to some degree.

Certainly people aren’t coming for the parking and an easy ticket office experience. You gotta deliver the goods artistically. The relationship building comes when people know your artistic quality is pretty dependable and can trust that you will make an effort meet their needs and expectations and reduce problems that arise.

Valuing For The Sake Of Doing So

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By way of the Crunchy Con blog, I was reading Sharon Astyk’s blog entry on valuing education. She had recently come across the school books her great-grandfather used when he was a young man in Northern Maine. She reflects at length about the ways in which a formal education was valued in a time when children were needed to help with farms and teachers weren’t paid well at all. Among her observations are that while her great-grandfather left the farm to go to college, his ability to support himself as a teacher when he emerged was less assured than had he remained a farmer.

There has been a great deal of debate lately on the value of a liberal arts education. It is a conversation worth watching since the value of the arts is directly related to the value placed upon the Humanities. Astyk is pretty good at not overly romanticizing the education New Englanders received in the 1800s. The bodies of knowledge then and now were different as were the subjects pertinent to one’s daily life. Her main thesis is that education had as much value to the community eking out a living in Maine as it did the individual.

Except, that it didn’t get them nothing – the benefits were not remunerative, but communal. They were competent citizens. Quoting Virgil may have been of no actual use to a farmwife in rural Maine except this – that she knew she could, that she could teach Latin to her children were she to go west, far from schools, that she would have in her head forever the story of the founding of Rome, alongside Emerson on “Compensation,” “Barbara Freitchie” and the history of the rulers of England. We can quibble with what she knew – suggest that the history she learned might have better included different stories, that there are better poems. She would live her life in a community that had, if it had nothing else, a library, able to read fluently and enjoy when she had a few minutes alone. What we cannot argue with, I think is the value that communities found in education in these times was that education had value for its own sake, in creating educated citizens…

[…]

Despite the fact that that education cost people something, they went on providing it, because it was right, because farmwives who read poetry and fishermen who knew algebra made farmwives who wrote letters to the editor and gathered for literary gatherings and community theatricals, and fishermen who recited poetry to themselves as they drew in their lines, recited them to their children at bedtime, and stood for town council at the end of the day. We should not over-romanticize the role of education in ordinary, work-filled daily lives. Nor, however, should we understate how remarkable it was.

These days, it is what you are paying for your education and what it will yield you that matters more than the education itself.

As the cost of education continues to outstrip the economic value of education, it becomes more and more imperative that we return to valuing education in proportion to its goods – these are vast. I, the product of a liberal education, give enormous credit to mine. But I had the good fortune to have a college education much like the one my great-grandfather had, one not expected to get me much…. My friends were told that they could minor in theater but had to major in computer science or economics or something that would get them a good job, because after, all, the parents were not paying 20,000 dollars a year to let them major in the humanities…

[…]

At the lower levels, the emphasis is still on the economic value of education – but we are assured at every step that free public education has no value – you *must* go on to community college, to college, to graduate school, often at stunning cost (and the not-stunning costs are rising, as states cut subsidies to education). You must do these things because a free education cannot get you a job – simply having a high school degree is nothing. And we are so caught up in the economic value of education – and in the necessity of training students for higher education or blue-collar slavery, that we’ve entirely forgotten the value of education outside the economy – of education as a way of making people.

The emphasis above is mine. Now as the arts community starts to look at the intrinsic value of the arts and move away from justifying its existence based on economic benefits, I wonder if it is too late. Will the valuing of education for its practical career applications to the detriment of Humanities studies and even education for its own sake end up ultimately contributing to the devaluing of art for its own sake?

It makes me think that if we are going to fight for the arts, (and I don’t think we are ready to cede the battle yet), we ought to consider explicitly championing the value of the humanities and education for its own sake while we are at it. These things provide context and meaning for what we do, after all.

The No Sell Sales Pitch?

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There were some dancers who were vacationing in the area who contacted me via a local dance critic to set up a meeting for this morning. I was hoping it wasn’t going to be a hard sell about why we should book their company. What actually transpired I don’t even know if I can label a soft sell because we really didn’t talk about their company or what it did at all. In fact, the name of the company was only mentioned once at the beginning of the meeting in response to my assistant theatre manager’s query. But for his memory, I would have no way to check out their work because they didn’t leave any print or video materials.

You might assume from that description of the meeting that they were unprepared to promote themselves and advance their interests. Promoting their company and work didn’t seem to be their intention. Instead they talked to me about the local arts environment and made notes. They talked about some of the other geographic places they hoped to have performances and promised to submit a proposal for the sort of work they hoped to do.

I was somewhat bemused by their whole approach and pretty much let them determine the direction of the conversation. The whole situation intrigued me enough to give their proposal full consideration when it arrives.

I don’t know if the proceedings were part of some business model they had in mind. It is pretty labor and time intensive to visit and discuss things one on one with different performing arts venues so this will never be viable large scale. They said they want to move beyond operating in Los Angeles. It appears as if they have chosen geographic locales where they would like to work on the Pacific and Rocky Mountain regions and set out to develop relationships with venues in those places.

The benefit will be having a deep understanding of the needs of each venue so they can create performances and residency activities suited for those places. They mentioned they would have a home season too, so they probably aren’t looking for these partnerships to provide all their support.

Sales professionals will likely find a lot wrong with how they conducted our meeting, especially those from the always be closing school. It was all wildly inefficient and they have no more inkling as to whether I am interested in presenting their group than they did before calling to set up the meeting.

What really appealed to me about the portion of their approach I have seen thus far, whether they intended it or not, is that it places them in a more active decision making role. Instead of making a shotgun solicitation of people to present their work, they are choosing where they would like to work and approaching those places. I still have a great deal of decision making power, but if I do decide to accept their proposal, our relationship will be a more equal one because we both know we choose to work with each other.

Neither Carrot Nor Stick Does Creativity Make

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A couple links as complement to my entry yesterday on motivation, customer service and volunteers.

First, Americans for the Arts, hearing President Obama’s call for Americans to volunteer more has created a website at which people can share their stories, pictures and videos – United We Serve.

A newly posted video on TED.com has Dan Pink talking about motivation. He provides some interesting findings about motivation, namely that when it comes to performing creative tasks conditional rewards (if you complete X by Y, you will receive Z bonus) are not as effective as intrinsic rewards in obtaining results. The conditional rewards actually get in the way of creative thinking. This may explain why arts people are able to create in the absence of monetary reward.

I wouldn’t let this get around lest people insist that paying you more may rob you of your creativity.

He makes a link to our current financial difficulties saying that there is a disconnects between what science has known for over 40 years and what businesses does, which is essentially the carrot and stick approach.

Pink says the new operating model should be based on:
“Autonomy- Urge to Direct Our Own Lives
Mastery- Desire to get better and better at something that matters, and
Purpose- The Yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”

Sounds a lot like the way arts organization and non-profits have been running things for awhile. If the next wave of economy is indeed going to be Creative, then perhaps non-profits and those who work for them will have something of increasing value to offer. We just need to understand what we do, how to do it well and how to teach/model it for others.

A Folding Table, A Jug of Water and Thou Sweating In The Parking Lot

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I am reading a book about customer service right now. My intention is to report some observations on the text as a whole at some point. However, I saw an illustration of one of the points made in an early chapter today. The book had noted the veracity of “time flies when you are having fun” pointing out that a well designed wait that is 30 minutes long can actually seem shorter than a poorly designed wait that is only a third as long. Because human perception is involved, you can ruin a relationship with a customer in the latter situation even though you significantly reduced their wait time.

Our campus is in a situation with many strikes against it. Budgets have been cut so staffing is down but enrollment is up adding an additional 1500 student to our commuter campus. Alas, the heretofore un(der) used overflow parking is now inaccessible due to long delayed construction projects.

There wasn’t much to be done about the parking unfortunately, but someone got organized this year and had information tables distributed about the campus with all sorts of hand outs and big coolers of water. There were also large color campus maps that someone slapped up on the sides of buildings so people didn’t have to seek out kiosks to figure out where they were.

I looked around wondering why no one had thought to do this before. People had always volunteered to serve an hour or so on the welcome committee but it was never this organized or welcoming. People stood around smiling, answering questions and engaging people who looked lost. Now there is a table identifiable as a source of information from a distance that is stocked with information—and most importantly after trekking in from that parking space in the hinterlands you stalked for 30 minutes–water to drink.

While I walked around comparing what I was seeing to previous years, I realized that tweaking your customer service up a level or two doesn’t just help your relationship with those you serve. It also sends a message to other employees about the commitment of the organization. Memos about improving service are useful and identify areas for improvement. In this case, there were no memos that went out about how things were going to be done better—it was just done.

I am obviously someone whose business it is to think about improving customer interactions so I notice such things. But I have to believe that others noticed the improvement, how it fit in the context of other recent changes and what it all says about the direction of the organization.

I also had some insight into the issue of providing volunteers with opportunities to feel they are doing important work. I have never really had much desire to volunteer for welcoming slots before. Today when I witnessed the increased effort at hospitality, I had a desire to participate next time around. (Just have to remember not to schedule sending the brochure to the printer, interviewing a ticket office clerk and starting internet sales on this day next time.) In previous years, my impression of the job was that it provided a pleasant first impression of the institution and directions to buildings. With the addition of tables, maps and water jugs, suddenly it seems like an important contribution to relieving anxious new arrivals.

We are planning a volunteer luncheon/training in a few weeks so perhaps I am in a receptive mindset on the subject. We have been thinking about how to design the volunteering experience so people have a greater feeling of doing something of value. We have been discussing increasing volunteers’ scope of responsibility and authority. I believe we also have to consider if these duties will allow them to feel they are providing a service patrons find valuable. Though certainly, people volunteer for different reasons and more authority may be a bigger motivator than being useful.

Stuff You Can Use: Board Ponderables and Resources

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There were a couple board related pieces I marked on the old Google reader I wanted to share.

First was an excerpt from a talk Gene Takagi of Non-Profit Law Blog recently gave for an American Bar Association seminar this month. The portion posted on the blog site deals with common governance problems boards engage in. The six points he makes deal with how boards misunderstand their role in the organization and the laws governing non-profit organizations.

Part of the third point caught my eye because it is a common practice but I have really never heard it discussed as a problem. (My bold emphasis.)

A lack of attention paid to the internal laws of the organization. Is the organization operating in furtherance of the exempt purpose stated in their governing documents? Do the directors really know, understand, and govern consistent with their bylaws and other governance policies? This problem often results when a board adopts bylaws that it copied from another organization without careful thought and consideration about how they work under different circumstances. It’s far too common for nonprofits to ignore membership requirements they’ve inadvertently created, elect a different number of directors than is authorized, and not maintain officer positions and/or committees required under the bylaws.

Not knowing where to start with bylaws, a lot of organizations use those of others as a template. I suspect that people choose to leave in elements that sound important and potentially useful when they really aren’t that important to the organization. I say this because a board I sit on tasked one of the vice presidents with a bylaws review and he essentially reported this very situation. The bylaws had originally been copied from a closely associated sister organization and there were portions that really did not apply to our activities. Advances in technology made other portions unnecessary.

To be fair, it is likely a group starting from scratch would include rules dealing with anticipated situations in their bylaws that proved to be extraneous. Time and experience is about the only thing that will reveal this to be the case which is why it is helpful to periodically review bylaws.

The other bit of information I wanted to draw attention to was a entry on The Nonprofiteer noting the availability of BoardSource videos on “the ten responsibilities of nonprofit Board members.” She also links back to her earlier entry on the Board Member’s Bill of Rights which bears reading.

Admittedly, the entry I link to is from February. I hadn’t the time to review the BoardSource videos until now. The video’s short, episodic structure make them faster to review than I thought. The way I see it though, many boards have likely taken a hiatus over the summer due to a lack of enough members to establish a quorum. This is probably an advantageous time for me to urge people to revisit the NonProfiteer’s entry to review the materials in preparation for an increase in board activity.

Stuff You Can Use: Tech Soup

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Ah, technology! Today I was sitting in my theatre attending a meeting. A few rows ahead of me was a woman who I was supposed to meet in my theatre after the meeting. About a half hour before the meeting was schedule to end, the woman texted her assistant asking her to call me and let me know she couldn’t make our meeting. I am not quite sure why she didn’t just get up and talk to me. The room was only 1/4 full so it wouldn’t be hard to find me. People were moving in and out to use the restrooms so there was no unstated prohibition against getting up during the meeting. But I suspect this is the sort of technology use I need to expect in coming years.

With that in mind, I wanted to point out a webinar Arts Presenters held in June about non-profits using technology. Arts Presenters had a representative of Tech Soup, Becky Wiegand, talk about non-profits using technology.

Tech Soup is a non-profit which, among other things, administers technology donations and reduced fee programs to non-profit organizations for companies like Microsoft and Adobe. If a company has conditions like only wanting materials to go to health services and after school programs for kids, Tech Soup distributes the products to people who qualify. Registration with Tech Soup gives you access to these programs and require you verify your tax status and purpose.

Once your organization is set up, you can go “shopping” for software. Their web interface apparently advises you if are eligible to receive the software or not. If you don’t qualify or don’t see something you would like, you can make a request for a donation.

Tech Soup also offers articles and webinar classes to help you discover how to use technology and what the potential value might be. So you can learn about low cost donor management software and what an effective use of Facebook might be for your organization. The site also has forums upon which you can ask other members things like their experiences using software you might have or be considering.

I strongly suggest investigating Tech Soup’s site to learn more. It is probably worth listening to the webinar. It is an hour long, but this particular piece actually has a video of the slideshow/web navigation that accompanies the talk. You can see where to look on the Tech Soup site to find various resources. Ms. Wiegand also mentions a lot of other technology resources that provide information, services and software either for free or more affordably than generally available and visits some of those sites as well.

Waiting For Tickets And Healthcare

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This weekend I happened upon a few websites and stories which I felt were interesting enough to expound upon. However, under the harsh light of Monday, they didn’t really excite me much any more.

There were two tidbits I liked that explain themselves well enough without any help from me.

First was a letter reprinted on Producer’s Prospective by Ken Davenport from a woman who expresses her amazement that tourists go to NYC and stand online at the TKTS without an idea what any of the shows are about. “They were going to buy tickets and they had budgeted the money, so they were going to spend it. It didn’t really matter on what.”

She makes some suggestions about why tourists might not completely trust the young people who provide those in line with information and how things can be better handled. Probably some lessons there for all of our ticket office operations.

The second thing I wanted to point out in case it got lost amid all the other static on the topic is that Americans for the Arts was joined by a coalition of 20 arts organizations in advocating the federal government for better health care for artists.

We call on Congress to pass:

* A health care reform bill that will create a public health insurance option for individual artists, especially the uninsured, and create better choices for affordable access to universal health coverage without being denied because of pre-existing conditions.
* A health care reform bill that will help financially-strapped nonprofit arts organization reduce the skyrocketing health insurance costs to cover their employees without cuts to existing benefits and staff while the economy recovers. These new cost-savings could also enable nonprofit arts organizations to produce and present more programs to serve their communities.
* A health care reform bill that will enable smaller nonprofit and unincorporated arts groups to afford to cover part and full-time employees for the first time.
* A health care reform bill that will support arts in healthcare programs, which have shown to be effective methods of prevention and patient care.

One of my earliest blog posts was about artists exchanging their skills in a hospital for health care. The rancorous debate raging about health care should concern a lot of people because the plans being discussed in Congress represent the best hope for artists to get health care since Fractured Atlas came on the scene.

Will Artists Save The Motor City?

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NPR had a story on All Things Considered yesterday about people moving to Detroit lured by dirt cheap property costs and a belief in the potential the city has. (Listen to the story rather reading the text which doesn’t accurately reflect the audio.) Among those interviewed are a small group of artists hoping to establish a little colony that “are interested in working on houses but also interested in working in social ways. Be a part of the neighborhood themselves..”

It will be interesting to see if they bring vibrancy to part of the city…and resist being displaced by any gentrification they may inspire.

I haven’t really seen it as part of my career path, but I always thought if I had an opportunity like this and the resources to pull it off, I would buy up buildings or warehouses and turn them into spaces artists could practice their craft. Even though I am in the performing arts, I never really considered opening a performance space. I think I would have rehearsal spaces for theatre, dance and music as well as studios for visual artists. A good situation would also allow me to get an apartment building so that visual artists could be in residence a few months while they created and then move on. With other artists around, they might find inspiration and collaboration in the people and environment without actually having to move permanently.

While Detroit offers this sort of opportunity, I wonder if I have the energy to make something like this happen. I live a fairly spartan existence so the prospect of living in the back while renovating the front doesn’t bother me. I just don’t know if I can be a one man renovation squad for the time it would take to get things to a place where the project could start paying for the next phase. That is assuming enough artists move to Detroit interested in utilizing the spaces.

But as I said, since I never really saw this as part of my career path, I haven’t invested much thought in how I might accomplish it. The idea has mostly been idle speculation born of visiting many towns and cities that seemed to lack good rehearsal facilities for the individual/small group artists.

I figure it is worthwhile posting the idea here on the chance it inspires someone to explore doing it in their own town, say Detroit.

Human Touch Is Always Important

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Back in March I had mentioned that we were in the process of re-evaluating our emergency procedures and noted we had recently had automated external defibrillators (AED) installed.

If you aren’t familiar with them, AEDs are designed to save lives by essentially talking untrained people through the process of shocking a person’s heart back into a normal rhythm. The machine can detect a normal heartbeat so that you can’t actually use it on someone who doesn’t need it. (Such as part of a fraternity prank.) In fact, it is apparently mandated that the machine rather than a human make the decision as to whether a shock should be administered. The devices were first deployed around O’Hare airport and were such a success at saving lives, you can see them placed all over these days.

I was refreshing my CPR/First Aid training today in a session that also dealt with AED use. Due to my impression that the machines empowered an untrained person to save a life, I was surprised to learn that CPR training was an essential component of AED use and training. The AED isn’t of any use on those whose hearts have stopped but can help if your efforts at CPR have managed to establish a rhythm. (Our model at least coaches you on whether your compressions are deep enough and provides metronome cues to keep you on pace.) Of course, CPR should be started while you are waiting for the AED to be retrieved.

There are apparently companies that eschew the CPR training and insist only on the AED training depending pretty much entirely on its abilities and those of anyone who may be passing at the time. I don’t care if the machine gets to decide whether to administer a shock. Given how much arts organizations depend on the goodwill of that community, I can’t imagine eliminating human contact in favor of a machine is wise when it comes to life saving. It was a good idea to have some CPR trained staff before the AED came on the scene and it still seems prudent even with the presence of equipment that greatly increases survival rates.

Another interesting tidbit I learned, though I can’t attest to its veracity, is that most of the first AEDs manufactured were red. Given the association of red with emergency services, this seems logical. According to our trainer, lay people were less likely to use the AEDs because they perceived them to be emergency personnel only equipment. Seems reasonable, but maybe he was just trying convince us to accept ugly neon green AEDs.

While that little fact has nothing to do with the importance of training our staffs, it does illustrate just how important even the most subtle design choices can influence people. (And lends credence to the consultants who get paid to obsess over what tie a political candidate is going to wear.)

If The Postman Rings And There Is No One To Sign For The Check..

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Hawaii Public Radio reported last week that the state’s governor had sent layoff notices to 10 employees of the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, including Executive Director, Ronald Yamakawa. “That leaves only the Art in Public Places staff, one account clerk, and three federally funded positions to fulfill agency functions.”

The public radio story may be heard here. Given that the foundation’s state funding had already been cut, the lack of an entity to receive and administer federal funding from the NEA, especially ARRA stimulus funds, is causing great consternation in the state arts community. Even when there isn’t a formal federal stimulus plan, federal funds help secure other support.

I have lived in and read about enough state budget crises to know that threats to the state arts councils are often part of a larger political fight. (NJ’s willingness to go broke rather than fund the arts, for example.) I confess I was suspicious when a search of the local daily newspapers didn’t turn up any mention of this story. I wondered if the story was specifically aimed at the public radio audience which tends to have more political influence than many other demographics. The sad truth is that the omission may just be reflective of the state of newspaper priorities and resources.

Whether it is a political ploy or in earnest, the truth will be known on November 13 when all 1,100 layoffs the governor ordered become effective.

How Deep Is Your Brand?

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Neil Roan makes a good argument about the weak relationship between logos and branding in a recent blog entry. He talks about an exercise he conducted during a consulting interview where he challenges those assembled to describe the logos of Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then the New York Philharmonic.

In one case, one person – a communications professional – remembered one slight design attribute of the Met (lines and circles that reveal how the M character was drawn. She remembered it as DaVinci-esque in character). In all other cases, there were nothing but blank looks. Nobody – not one person, including a bunch of visual arts professionals and designers – could remember the logos for these household-word arts-brands.

Neill points out what I imagine is the obvious truth to most of us– all these organizations have world class brand identities regardless of anyone’s ability to recall their logos. Frankly, if you visit any of these organizations’ web pages, you will see that none of their logos are particularly remarkable that they would stick in the memory. I can understand why only the Met’s stylized M was the only one to elicit vague recall. (Yet I have this nagging suspicion they probably spent quite a bit of money developing those logos.)

The main thrust of Neill’s post is that branding involves much more than just a face lift or a new feel. Magazines and newspapers can project being more hip and modern by changing type face and layout, but superficial changes like that don’t work for organizational entities. Developing a real brand take commitment and a long view about how the organization will develop an identity which is embedded in its very bones.

Neill states that “It requires honesty when it’s easier to opt to look good rather than be real.” It took me a little while to think of an organization that has developed a strong brand being real rather than always being good. Then it occurred to me that the University of Notre Dame football team has developed a powerful aura and mythology that has endured regardless of the quality of the team. (Of course, it probably helped that Catholic priests all over the country would make a brief statement on the team’s behalf from time to time.)

Give the entry a read, especially if you are one of those being pressured to enact quick fixes and feel like no one values substance any more.

The Bad Makes Me Look Oh So Good

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Dan Ariely did a talk for the 2008 TED conference about how irrational we are when making decisions. The whole talk is quite entertaining. What really caught my attention comes around 12:30 where he talks about how a useless option can make other options look more valuable.

He uses an example of a mistake on the Economist.com. They were offering an internet only subscription for $59, a print subscription for $125 and a print and internet subscription for $125. After talking to the Economist and learning it was apparently a mistake, he did an experiment and offered the subjects these options. The web and print subscription option was overwhelmingly favored and no one wanted the print only subscription.

Seeing that the print only subscription was not valued, he got rid of it and did the experiment with the internet only option and internet and print option. This time, the internet only option was the clear favorite. He said the print only option was useless “in the sense nobody wanted it. But it wasn’t useless in the sense that it helped people figure out what they wanted.”

He goes on to say that because we really don’t know our preferences that well, we are susceptible to all these influences.

He offers another amusing example where he has computer generated pictures of two men, Tom and Jerry and he asks people which one they would prefer to date. In half of the cases he adds a third picture with Tom’s face Photoshopped to look less attractive and the other half where is the third picture is Jerry’s face altered to look unattractive. In those cases with the ugly Tom, people preferred regular Tom over Jerry and those cases that offered ugly Jerry, people preferred Jerry. The less attractive option actually made the choice it most resembled appear more appealing than a dissimilar option.

These revelations made me wonder if these behaviors could be used in subscription and ticket sales. Offer people options that don’t have value to nudge them toward purchasing more a bigger subscription package than they might have. I don’t know that it would transform a lot of single ticket buyers into subscription buyers unless we are wrong about flexibility being more important than price. A mini-subscription that offered flexibility and appeared to be a great value might have some success in getting single ticket purchasers to commit.

I also wonder if offering non-premium options with your show helps make them look more attractive than your competitors’. Ariely talks about another experiment where they offered people the option of an all-inclusive trip to Rome or Paris. In this case it is really apples and oranges since the two cities are in different countries have have so many different attributes to value. Once they add the option of going to Rome but having to pay for coffee in the morning, suddenly people preferred Rome over Paris by a larger degree due to the lesser option being available.

It doesn’t seem logical to me to think that given the option between the symphony and a free cocktail at intermission and the opera and a free cocktail at intermission, that people would flock to the orchestra if a no cocktail option for the same price was offered. But as Ariely points, out the decision being made are not entirely rational.

One other element that gives me pause is that all these results seem to be theoretical. No one had to commit time or money to their decision. Still, it is an interesting thing to consider since being theoretically more attractive will help your organization remain in people’s minds if they don’t necessarily commit. Those who see your brochure this year may be struck by what a good deal your shows are. Even if they don’t commit to buying tickets this year, that positive impression may keep you near the fore when they are deciding to attend next year.

Imagine The Kids After Salvador Dali Watched Them

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I recently became aware of a company that is offering artists in NYC and Chicago a flexible alternative to the waiting tables option. Sitters Studio provides babysitting work to performing and visual artists. The parents get a babysitter who offers creative activities to their children. The artists get an opportunity to employ their training and perhaps hone their skills and approach if they have any plans for bringing arts and arts education to children and families.

Sitters Studio trains their people in CPR, does background checks and bonds them but then appears to act as a clearing house for jobs. The sitters get a minimum of 4 hours pay in cash at the end of a session and help with cab fare after 9 pm. Rates start at $18 in NYC and $15 in Chicago. The interesting thing about the NYC side is that they seem to offer their services on something of a subscription basis. For $200/year you get priority service and a better rate than single time callers. They also offer cancellation forgiveness and bulk purchase and referral incentives.

All in all, it sounds like a great idea for all involved, especially if it results in kids growing up to appreciate the arts. The company provides their babysitters with a “Tote of Toys” that according to this story, serves as an ice break and source of ideas for the babysitting experience.

“We’ve given the sitters something from every art medium,” says Wilson. “We give them something that’s from a visual art, a theatrical art, a dance discipline and also from the musical discipline and we really find that it’s a great starting off point for the kids to engage in play.”

There seems to be a fair bit of potential in this company both as a business and as a way for advancing the interests of the arts community. There is certainly always an opportunity for conflicts of interest with people taking advantage of their close relationship with a family to sell/promote their personal work. But there is also opportunity for unified action. Last December all the babysitters had their charges working on cards for the armed forces overseas. I imagine that periodically Sitters Studio could sponsor some other unified initiative that reinforced the value of the arts in people’s lives without being pedantic.

Manufacturing Spontaneity

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Via Marginal Revolution, the Wall Street Journal has a story about a girl who was paid $1,800 to reference an upcoming movie in her high school valedictory speech. The movie did rather poorly and the “amateur” video of the graduation the movie studio posted on YouTube failed to achieve viral status. I doubt that will stop anyone from trying something similar again.

One of the things I wonder is if this sort of thing might not be pursued as a funding source for cash strapped non-profits. Will it really be in the non-profit sector’s best interest to engage in something like this? We bill live performances a authentic experiences with an opportunity for the sublime (as well as screw ups and catastrophes) that television and video don’t provide. If people discover the evening has been peppered with scripted “candid” moments, will we risk losing credibility and what’s left of our regular audience.

The counterargument might be made that if we don’t cash in on the eyes and ears we have assembled, someone else might just hijack our events to do so. The school district in the story had no idea their graduation ceremony had been co-opted for this purpose. In truth, there is nothing to force marketers to deal with you at all. In fact, it probably will be less trouble to circumvent you since an arts organization will want to draw up contracts and have lawyers involved.

It would be so much easier to arrange for an elderly person to disrupt a sold out performance and have a concerned adult child wring his/her hand over the fact the parent had neglected to take their Aricept. The visceral concern your audience feels having witnessed how Alzheimer’s can cause social disruptions is a much better selling point than any television ad and pretty much guarantees dissemination by word of mouth which I suspect has a higher trust ranking than a YouTube video.

It would be much better if non-profits didn’t get involved in these efforts in the first place. Then at least if people have a negative reaction upon discover an occurrence had been planned, they won’t automatically suspect the collusion when there wasn’t based on past revelations of the organization participating in such efforts.

Bean Counter Hero For A Few Days

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As the guy controlling the budget, I often have to either say no or ask people to scale back their plans. Therefore, it gives me great joy when I am in the position of telling artists that they are limiting themselves and need to think bigger. I had that opportunity about a month ago when I was discussing the site specific performance we are developing with a local performance group for next Spring. One of the artistic directors was telling me a board member was encouraging her to limit the action of the show around the theatre building.

My whole intention in approaching her about a site specific work was to get away from the building and exploit the potential in other nearby locations. Also, given that the show is about celebrity and achieving that status is divorced from formal performance settings these days thanks to our ability to record and distribute events from practically anywhere, it seemed counter intuitive to have everything happen in the theatre environs.

Given that we are about nine months out from the performance, I told her I felt it was premature to start eliminating some nearby locations that ignited both our imaginations. It felt great to be telling someone to keep dreaming about a performance.

I did feel a little bad for the nameless board member I was contradicting. Perhaps this person has made valuable suggestions in the past, but for a little while in my mind I was relegating them to the clueless board member bin. While I was feeling the hero, I was envisioning this faceless person as the stereotypical board member who valued the product, but didn’t quite understand the process of the organization which he/she served.

I didn’t think it is was particularly fair that board members end up playing that role in so many organizations. And let me be clear, since I was envisioning a theoretical board member, I certainly can’t say this is the case at all with the board of our partner organization. Let me also say that I realize this little fantasy is not only unfair to the anonymous board member, but likely short lived since the time will come soon enough when I will begin tugging on the reins and conform to the parsimonious administrator stereotype. Allow me this short time in the sun, eh?

There have been many discussions about how board members do it to themselves by not involving themselves enough. It is also true that organizations work to marginalize involvement so that the board is little more than a rubber stamp for their activities and then stays out of the way.

It seems this might be another argument for arts people not the subscribe to the notion that you have to be poor and suffer to be true to your art. In the nascent stages of some arts organizations, boards are comprised of fellow artists who understand and are invested in the work. At a certain point, it becomes clear that if the organization is to expand, it will require people of influence and means. If financial success were frowned upon less in the arts world, there would be less of a need to choose between those who get it and those who got it because they wouldn’t seem so mutually exclusive.

There Really Is A School of Rock

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When I was visiting my sister on the East Coast this summer around the July 4th holidays, I attended a community festival where kids from The Paul Green School of Rock Music were playing. I initially thought this was an effort to cash in on the Jack Black movie, School of Rock, but the organization predates the movie and apparently served as an inspiration for it. I was actually surprised to learn there are franchises all across the country.

In a time when kids aren’t getting interactive opportunities with music in schools, (not to mention the woeful state of the current rock music scene), this school of rock’s approach may bear consideration and examination.

From their Manifesto:

“These are not your old fashioned wait -through-fifty-other-students mangling-their-songs- until-your-child’s- turn-arrives recitals, but real rock concerts at real rock venues in front of real rock audiences.

Shows are picked for their educational merit and content (for example: Queen teaches harmony, punk develops performance and stage presence and Zappa offers a crash course in musicianship). Thus, if they fail, they fail at aiming at the best. And, when they succeed, which is more often than not, they have accomplished something extraordinary.”

I wish I could remember who it was, it could have been in a movie I was watching, but I recently heard someone urge a person to consider if they wanted to be a musician or wanted to be famous. Thinking of that, I was going to suggest that these school were selling the allure of fame to kids. It may be that kids should be allowed to have fun. But there 8 year olds who may dream of being the next Yo-Yo Ma, but are already making a serious commitment to the cello.

Upon further thought, I wondered if there was any significant difference in what a school of rock and a school of cello are selling 8 year olds. Whether an 8 year old performs in a rock concert or a cello competition/recital, there is a sense of accomplishment and recognition. The cellist may have more pressure placed upon them to perform and practice, but that is based on a concern they reach a level sufficient to obtain a position in an orchestra. Few people push an 8 year old to practice out of fear they won’t gain a position in a rock band.

All things being equal in terms of their talent. If a guitarist and a cellist both give up their instrument at age 9 and pick it up again at 18, practicing assiduously, will one be a better performer than the other or enjoy performing more based on the instrument they play? If both practice equally hard from age 9 to 18 becoming excellent with their instrument, is either one guaranteed a better living than the other even though the barriers to entry are much lower for rock bands than for orchestras? The guitarist may have no problem getting into a band, but does that provide him/her a career?

Up until recently, I would say the one landing an orchestra job had a better guarantee of steady income from a single source than did a rock musician. At this point in time, I would say either is equally likely to be able to cobble a living together from freelance gigs –at least in metropolitan areas. The guitarist who devoted 10 years to practice has a much better chance of being supplanted by someone who has practiced two years than a cellist faced by the same scenario because the skills developed over that time aren’t valued as highly in rock music.

Music is a tough career choice, even if you are performing more popular music styles. I am sure along with the dream of fame, this School of Rock is mostly selling the fun and excitement of rock music to kids (hopefully sans drugs) while including some of the rigor required to master the instruments and music. One lesson the schools of cello might learn from those of rock is one of exposure. If you check out their website, the schools have their students playing at every available opportunity. It helps disseminate information about the schools and gives the kids an opportunity to play before audiences. The gig I saw them play was a mixed bag in terms of quality. The good performances did a credible job at rockin’ out.

Rewarding Any Bit Of Intiative

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I have been thinking about performance awards for employees a fair bit lately in the context of our cleaning staff. Our building has three different people assigned to clean it. One guy is responsible for my office, another is responsible for the basement and another takes care of the lobby and seating area. The shop area we have to clean ourselves since there is just too much potential for the wrong thing to get tossed out.

What seems to reinforce the low status of theatre in the Great Chain of Being is that the newest person hired is assigned to clean the lobby and seating area. Yes, that’s right, the person with the least experience is assigned to clean the area in which my organization interacts with the community. I have no idea why this is but I have been cautioned against pushing too hard in getting it changed.

The technical director’s theory about why we are a training ground is that perhaps each person is expected to clean X square feet a day and it is easier to gain experience cleaning the wide open space of the lobby and aisle versus the same square footage across individual offices.

Whatever the case may be, the results are inconsistent cleaning job except in one unerring activity. I haven’t been able to get any of them to regularly dust even the most obvious spots like the tops of the banisters and the 100 foot ledge in front of the mural. I know they are instructed to keep the area clean. It just never happens as it should.

In the last few months, the building supervisor told me that the guy newly assigned to clean the basement is excellent. Given our past experience, that didn’t seem like it would be hard to achieve in comparison so I was pretty skeptical.

But I happened downstairs just before I went on vacation and saw the guy was cleaning the dirty fingerprints off all the doors. In all my time here, that has never been done by the cleaning staff. Since my return I have wandered around the basement and noticed that nooks and corners are now looking neater and spiffed up.

Finally we have a guy who sees things that need to be done and is doing it. He is also making note of things that are broken and suggesting they be fixed. This proactive approach is no small matter because the basement contains our green room, dressing rooms and dance studios. These areas get the heaviest daily use and are the fastest to become soiled. So having these rooms look good when guest artists and renters use the facilities goes some distance in creating a good impression.

I know that there are awards given out to buildings and grounds people. While I can’t submit a nomination, I am resolved to talk to someone who can about putting his name in. As I have been thinking about doing this, it occurred to me that saying someone got the award for excellence in janitorial service at the ceremony doesn’t really provide an example for others to emulate. I’ll admit, getting an award for wiping the finger prints off doors doesn’t sound like a behavior you would strive to model either.

I am discovering that taking that sort of initiative is a rarer thing than I imagined among people at large. Janitorial staffs are hardly deserving of being singled out in this regard. When I was growing up, I thought only people who performed extraordinarily and heroically got awards. Now I realize there is a great deal of worth in doing the mundane very well.

In fact, I think this is one of the lies our educational system perpetuates along with the destiny altering power of your permanent record. Throughout your childhood and higher education, those who have made the most extraordinary achievement receive awards. Certainly, there is value in this because you don’t get to the moon by mediocrity. But generally once you graduate and are in the real world, the grades you got in school are an invisible factor in relation to how valuable you are to your company, family and friends.

There is certainly no substitute for brilliance, but making the choice to take the initiative is within the power of pretty much everyone. In school, it is often the people who added hard work to a special quality who get rewarded. The vast majority were never in the running despite hard work because they lacked that special quality.

It is becoming increasingly clear to me in the professional setting, it is extremely important to reward those who make the choice to go beyond the minimum expectation because this is a reward the vast majority can obtain on their own merit. I am not referring to a feel good reward for everyone, I am talking about providing incentive in order to receive a higher standard of service that everyone can provide.

I will say, there is a part of me that is disappointed that I even have to suggest this. I mentioned earlier that I am recognizing that doing the mundane well is commendable. That is because I have been coming from a place where I expected a certain standard of behavior as a norm only to realize that standard was actually abnormal. Frankly, I wonder if I am not making this suggestion out of a mild sense of desperation to raise thing to a place I consider normal before it sinks any further.

Prior to visiting China I remember reading that saying thank you when receiving some service or polite gesture might be seen as insulting because good service is expected and expressing appreciation implies otherwise. So I wonder in contrast about the United States. Are ubiquitous statements of thanks and tip jars on every counter creating an environment in which expectation of more than the minimum requires some sort of recognition?

Merging Administrative Functions

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On occasion I cite consolidation of administrative functions as a method by which arts organizations in a community can cut costs by cooperating with one another. However, if pressed, I would have to admit that I wasn’t aware of any examples of such a thing working in practice.

So I was extremely pleased to see that the Nonprofit Law Blog has been running a series on this very subject. They cite four options that can be pursued, “an administrative collaboration, administrative consolidation, MSO (Management Service Organization), or external service provider.” The most recent entry gave an impression the series was finished but it hadn’t covered external service providers. If it does continue, I will post an update link here.

The first entry, Administrative Consolidations and Management Service Organizations covers those structures and outlines what situations they work best in.

The second entry, Joining Forces in the Back Office – Administrative Collaboration and Consolidation, talks about the collaboration and consolidation formats and presents some case studies. This is also the entry in which they define the different structures.

“According to La Piana Associates, Inc., an administrative collaboration is an informal, not necessarily enduring, arrangement to share services or expertise while each organization retains its individual decision-making power; an administrative consolidation is a more formal agreement that involves shared decision making (without changing the corporate structure) and the sharing of specific functions; an MSO is a newly created organization for the purpose of integrating administrative functions; and an external service providerinvolves the outsourcing of certain administrative elements.”

One thing I found interesting about the case study presenting in this entry was that the organization, Chattanooga Museums Collaboration achieved things you might expect- cut costs, leveraged their purchasing power, improved productivity and increased unearned income through joint fund raising activities. But the partnership also made them more competitive in the larger business landscape.

“Although the “immediate reaction is that it’s the smaller guys who are getting the benefit,” Kret corrects this misconception stating that through CMC, the Tennessee Aquarium benefits as well by generating revenue from typically nonrevenue places like accounting, increasing retention by offering key employees a higher level of compensation, and offering their employees a much more rewarding and challenging work environment.”

The third entry, Joining Forces in the Back Office – Management Service Organizations, contained a case study of an MSO formed by five social service organizations which now serves 13 groups. While MSOs are separate organizations formed to provide these services, unlike commercial payroll and human resource companies, MSOs are formed for the benefit of specific entities.

The MSO in the case study, MACC CommonWealth, has an auditor appointed by multiple boards. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, you will want to read the case study which acknowledges that serving the interests of multiple boards and CEOs is potentially fraught with peril. So far, it seems to be working.

The most recent entry notes there are many successful collaborations among non-profits across the country. The main thrust of the entry are observations of why a cooperative effort funded by the The Lodestar Foundation, was unsuccessful.

The Lodestar Foundation provides grants for collaborative efforts and their website can give you a sense of the scope of the efforts being made in this direction.

Emily Chan who wrote the series on Nonprofit Law Blog cites a number of studies and books on the subject so the entries themselves provide a good starting place for exploring the possibilities offered by one of these avenues.

Irish Vacation

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So I am back from my Ireland trip. I really had a wonderful time. The natural beauty was stupendous. The food was great. It rained more than I would have liked, but sunbeams through the clouds made for some dramatic pictures.

As promised, I visited a number of theatres and arts centers while in Ireland. Because of our travel schedule, I didn’t get to go to everywhere I had originally planned. Though I did go to a number of places I hadn’t.

Something I noticed was that many theatres were in buildings that placed them as a center of activity for the community. The Carnegie Arts Centre in Kenmare is in a building with a library and art gallery.

kenmare ext

Likewise, The Source Arts Centre is also attached to a library.

source sign

The Tipperary Excel has 3 movie theatres, one of which is also the live performance space, a gallery and a desk to do heritage research.

excel desk

You walk into any of these buildings and there is a bustle of activity all around you which I would guess helps raise the level of awareness about the events in the theatre. Looking around, these were certainly organizations that were serving their communities.  I had to wonder why performance facilities in the U.S. were so often divorced from other community resources. Granted, none of these facilities were very large. You could never dream of presenting some of the shows you can in the U.S. The buildings would have had to be a bit bigger to fit a larger theatre plus these services.  I didn’t get a chance to speak with anyone about the ratio of earned vs. unearned revenue in the theatre budgets so I don’t know how self-supporting the theatres and the other services under the same respective roofs are.

At least one place was realistic about the needs and interests of the community they served.

source sorry

This sign at The Source box office announces the cancellation of an event due to the regional hurling finals occurring in town the same day.

I arrived in Galway just as the Galway Arts Festival was getting underway. In fact, the festival proper hadn’t begun. They were still erecting the big top tent.

tent up

I did get a chance to swing by the Galway Arts Centre to see some of the video exhibitions and walked by the Druid Theatre, which wasn’t open at the time. I went looking for Nuns Island Theatre, which is a program of the Galway Arts Centre, but apparently walked right by it. Sorry I didn’t get a picture in here.  I did get to see a performance by a New Orleans Brass Band taking part in the Galway Arts Festival. They made a bit of a faux pas referring to Ireland as part of the UK which elicited some grumbling in the audience.

galway artsdruid

Galway is a very walkable city, especially in terms of being able to access many of the arts venues. I would recommend taking advantage of that fact if ever you find yourself in Galway.

As a little aside. As I mentioned, the food was really great in Ireland. While I did see quite a number of American food products on the supermarket shelves and advertised all around, I was somewhat pleased that I didn’t see too many McDonalds making in roads in Ireland. One that I peaked into in Galway seemed to reflect the need for greater effort to attract the Irish consumer. It was a lot nicer than the ones we have around here.

mc donaldsmcdonald2

Is The Shift Coming?

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Back in 2004, I made an entry on an interview then TCG President Ben Cameron gave on Smart City. In the interview, he talks about a book in which the “the authors noted that historically when there is war, technological change and a shift in rural-urban demographics (Civil War, Depression-WW II, etc) the tendency for the American people is to alter the social compact.”

Given the economic upheaval these days, there seems a possibility of another shift so revisiting the entry seemed in order

So Do They Learn From You

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One of the articles I loved reading was a Fast Company story about how a Duke University professor takes his class to NYC for a semester to learn the lessons the arts have to teach about leadership. What makes me appreciate the story so much is that the class is a business class. Long has it been said the arts need to learn from business so I think we can all appreciate the reciprocity. Check out my entry for a quick summary and my reflections.

Ballet That Revvs Your Motor

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On the question of dumbing down the arts, one entry sticks out in my mind- Ballet of the Speedway. Roanoke Ballet Theatre presented NASCAR Ballet five years ago. I had a number of conversation with arts managers over this–whether it is pandering or a frank acknowledgment that the arts must serve their community. I am still not sure I have a definitive sense of where I stand on this.

More Roused Passion

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Well I am pleased to learn that my “best of” revival of my April 2005 entry about Neill Roan’s handling of the antisemitism in Bach’s St. John’s Passion has moved Neill to repost the talk he had given on the subject. If you were intrigued by the coverage I gave the incident in my entry, you will likely find it worth your while to read the entire thing. It is really an excellent study in engaging your audience amid controversy.

Still Wondering How We Got Into This Mess

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One entry I have consistently linked back to over the past 5 years is a summary I did of John Kreidler’s “Leverage Lost: The Nonprofit Arts in the Post-Ford Era.” Kreidler’s piece provides a great history of how the example of the Ford Foundation shaped the way the current model of funding of non-profits emerged.

Read my reflections in How Did We Get Into This Mess and maybe you will want to take the time to read Kreidler’s longer piece.

Keeping The Passion Alive While I am Away

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Because the conversation on my last entry has been so active, I have been reluctant to make any more entries and remove it from the top of the page. The fact that I was making entry sized responses contributed to the lack of additional material as well.

Now that things have calmed down, I am on vacation and don’t have time to write much. I don’t want things to settle too much in my absence so I am providing a link to some of my “best of” entries. The first, appropriately enough entitled “Rousing Passion.”

Neill Archer Roan gave a speech, unfortunately no longer available on line, where he talked about his experiences presenting Bach’s St. John’s Passion and the complications surrounding the work’s perceived anti-Semitism.

There is a lot to think about.

Enjoy!

http://www.insidethearts.com/buttsintheseats/2005/04/19/rousing-passion/

Question For My Inside The Arts Family

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Here on Inside the Arts, I am surrounded by orchestra professionals (or professionals closely related to orchestras). There are two conductors, a consultant, three musicians, some radio broadcasters and an opera administrator. I figure this is a good cross section of views and experience. There has been a question lingering in my mind for some years that I have wanted to ask so I thought I would toss it out there for some cross blog discussion, if my confreres are so inclined. (Certainly, readers are always welcome to chime in.)

My question is this- Orchestras have some of the best trained and skilled musicians around. Why do they primarily confine themselves to a certain genre and periods of music? Why aren’t they playing all the best music out there? I know most groups have a pops series, but that still barely scratches the surface of the available material and it is separate from their main product. And really, why are the pops separate?

This is my thought- Have an evening of music around some theme like romance. One of the pieces is Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker” (or some other selection, I am just trying to stay away from the obvious “Stairway to Heaven”), maybe there is another contemporary rock/pop/blues/jass piece as well and interspersed between them are pieces of the regular repertory (or vice versa.) I am not suggesting getting rid of the current programming, just enhancing it with other works. The concept of great music being part of a continuum of excellence that didn’t stop at a certain year.

The only compelling reason I can think for not doing this is artistic unity of an evening. But I wonder, does it really matter to audiences? If you do the beginning of Hamlet set during 1920s flapper days and then shift to steampunk, audiences will find it jarring and perplexing. Would there be the same problem going from orchestrated classic rock to a baroque piece of a similar energy in the same evening?

Since many potential pieces weren’t written for orchestras, I imagine there would be some cost involved in arranging songs for a larger number of instruments. That could certainly prove an impediment for some organizations, as might royalty payments where required. It might prove a boon for lesser known ensembles if one group’s arrangement was recognized as superior to another’s. Given that the music may be more widely known, a larger segment of the population would have the discernment to make that judgment.

I know that not every piece will lend itself to adaptation for orchestra performance. Those who do not recognize that may shout “Play Freebird!” or the equivalent. But I have to believe there is potential in a lot of works.

I guess there would also be a concern that things were being dumbed down or compromised to fill seats. I have heard of symphonies playing video game themes and integrating cell phone rings into the performance. There is much more potential for a quality experience in this idea –and an interesting educational one too boot! You can have a blues guitarist perform Lead Belly’s version of “Gallis Pole” and talk about the centuries old history of the folk song and then have the whole orchestra play Led Zeppelin’s “Gallows Pole” as a comparison.

Talks about the composers might be a lot more interesting to audiences because some have lived recently enough that the circumstances that influenced their writing are more familiar to audiences. Then there are the controversies over song writing credits.

I know that it is easy for people on the outside to criticize and say they could do better. What I have described here has sort of been my idea of how I would program things if I were in charge.

But to a degree, I am.

I have a lot of under employed symphony musicians running around my community right now. What is to keep me from going to them and asking them to put together a program that mixes a few of the standard pieces with arrangements of more contemporary works for a performance some point in the future? Given my financial resources, I wouldn’t imagine I would get the whole orchestra, but 1/4 might sound impressive enough to determine if the basic concept is sound.

Any success I may have wouldn’t necessarily imply similar promise for orchestras. I do not run an orchestra so expectations of my events are much different than for theirs. While I would love to have this idea succeed and an orchestra schedule these events at my space, real success in my mind is when a change like this becomes the primary practice, not separate from it.

Just Leave Those Barriers Intact, Eh?

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Well, I am actually happy to confess that upon review, there aren’t as many artists being promoted by trite phrases as I implied at the end of my post yesterday. I get 40-50 emails a week from agents and artists during the off-season and close to that a day during the conference season. Even if only 1% contain trite phrases, I am seeing them with enough frequency that it feels like an epidemic.

The general area of offense I had in mind when I mentioned it yesterday is of the “ground breaking, barrier shattering, break through” ilk. I found quite a few of this type in my review. It appeared in emails, two cold call resumes I received in the last month and at least one radio advertisement I have heard lately. The closest to the truth any of these people seemed to get was the label experimental. I see the claim made a lot in reference to dance, but theatre and music make their share.

If you do modern dance with ballet, hiphop or jazz influences, you really aren’t pushing the envelop. Employing Hopi Indian influences gets intriguing. Getting the women of al Qaida to do modern dance is breaking all sorts of barriers. As is a ballet company doing something other than Nutcracker for their Christmas show.

Performance art pieces doing strange things in strange costumes that may or may not be a reference to the alienation of the individual by some force may be entertaining and thought provoking, but the ground was broken and has been pounded back down by many who have come before.

Taking a classic rock tune that appears fairly often on soft and light rock stations, turning it into an easy listening tune and calling it a break through crossover hit is just plain evil.

I have harped on the annoying overuse of “what it means to human” before. I am happy to see that phrase has moved to the fringes. I did see it used two weeks ago, but there had been a very welcome gap in our encounters. (I do pray it isn’t experiencing a revival.) I am hoping that the barrier breakers either find some other ways to talk about themselves or become involved with some legitimately innovative activities.

Use of trite marketing language generally doesn’t have any relation to the value of the performance or audience enjoyment. It does form a first impression so it definitely impacts the likelihood of being considered as a performer.

I’ll be the first to admit that writing effective copy is tough and if I am not, I will be among the first to shout Amen! Staying away from the trite stuff makes it harder but you ain’t gonna get any better allowing yourself to default to those word choices.

Artist, Promote Thy Self!

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Ah summer! When a young theatre manager’s thoughts turn to…collecting promotional information for the upcoming season.

I have been trying to collect information to promote our upcoming season on the web, season brochure, press releases, etc, etc. Much of my motivation is to have most of this into my graphic designer and web person’s hands before I go on vacation so I can come back and review what they have done.

It really astounds me that so many artists are ill prepared to promote their works. I can understand not having images upon my request, especially for works in progress or when an ensemble has had some significant change over. It can be tough getting everyone together and turn around from a photoshoot in a short time.

But there are a couple groups that seem unable to verbalize what is attractive about their work. All I need is 4-5 short sentences at this juncture folks! How hard is it to formulate something to get me excited!

One group I wrote up a blurb of the general sense I would be going for and asked them to fill in some blanks. My blanks even had suggested answers along the lines of – Mitch is a well regarded musician for his virtuosity in (bluegrass, classical, rock). All that they needed to do is clarify what was unclear.

That was over a week ago. I still haven’t heard back from them.

Another group is reviving a masterwork. For two weeks I have asked them for some simple clarification about the program being revised. I saw the principal performer two weeks ago at a theatre and he assured me I would get something (along with the contract) soon. I did receive a blurb this week about the last time he worked together with a guest artist appearing in the revival–but nothing about the revival itself. I finally emailed the organization which secured the grant for the revival asking them for some general information. Their deadline for materials was a few weeks ago so presumably they have something more than I do.

Something I noticed. With one exception, the groups I do have materials for all have agents. I have started to wonder, if not for the agents sending out a standard packet of information, would most of these other groups been in a position to communicate about themselves so clearly? The one exception is a young group without an agent which sent me two fantastic pages dense with great information.

If it comes to pass that agents either sever or reduce their involvement with their less than marquee performers and artists are left to fend for themselves in some manner, it might be a bad situation for many groups.

I don’t have any illusions about my role in things becoming redundant if artists really focused on managing their own business. Yeah managing the business end saps your energy for making art.

Just like anyone associated with an arts organization should be able to passionately extemporize on the value of what they do, every artist should be able to dash off an email or a make a phone call to give a short spiel on why they are worth seeing.

Notice I say extemporize. It is a maneuver that not everyone can do but with enough practice, people can sound unpracticed doing it.

If I have the time to ponder over lunch tomorrow, perhaps my next entry will be on some of the trite phrases being bandied about in promotional messages these days. In this, neither agents nor artists hold the high ground.

Lord knows, some of them do a better job than the publicists for arts organizations. Just take a look at Greg Sandow’s rants from 2005 (read from May 25 through June 15)

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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