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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.

Programming Comfort Food

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I attended the season planning meeting of my block booking consortium today. As I suspected, many projects which would have been quickly picked up by the membership in recent years were deferred to other years because of financial concerns. One partner is going into a major retrenchment mode reducing their events from 10 to three or four. I left the meeting with fewer details solidified than in the past, in part because there were fewer tours available to collaborate on. There are a few dangling possibilities that I can pursue but I will have to work much hard to build a tour working on people individually than I would have in the meeting.

The situation was expressed best by one of the members. She spoke about her audiences orienting on “comfort food” rather than experimenting with new fare. While she isn’t moving toward more pop culture acts, many of the performers she is looking at have performed at her venue before or are similar enough to previous artists to provide audiences with a familiar reference point. Because of this approach, even though economics are driving so many decisions, she actually turned down the opportunity to present a less expensive, lesser known act that would be more intellectually challenging in favor of a much more expensive, better known one.

There were a couple positive outcomes to the meeting. A board member flew over with the director of his organization in an attempt to understand how the consortium worked. When a board member is motivated by financial uncertainty to involve themselves in some aspect of operations, it can be a iffy proposition. Negative judgments made after a short exposure to an unfamiliar process can be unhealthy for an organization. In this case, it was a positive experience all around because the board member asked a lot of questions and seemed to recognize that the problems they were facing were widespread and not particular to them or due to missteps by the director.

That was the second positive outcome of the meeting. For the first time since I have been a member of the consortium, people actually took the time to talk about a number of subjects. The people who attended the Arts Presenters conference last month spoke about the Marketing Segmentation Study Alan Brown from Wolf Brown spoke on. I was pleased, of course, since I am a believer in arts people taking the time to stay abreast of recent literature and generally stay informed.

There was also discussion of different strategies people are using in pricing, marketing and sponsorship. I took quite a few notes. The one idea I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of was providing show sponsors with the option of either having a full page ad in the program book or donating the space to a non-profit. That is a win all around since the sponsor gets points with both the theatre and another non-profit and gets to write off more of the sponsorship as a donation since they didn’t get the value of the ad space. The theatre gets the financial support and scores a few points with the non-profit and its supporters. The other non-profit gets increased exposure.

Is This The First Step To Better A Structure?

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If you haven’t heard yet, Michael Kaiser, President of the Kennedy Center has decided to turn the Center’s resources, knowledge and expertise toward helping arts organizations around the country weather the current financial turmoil in a program called Arts in Crisis.

I am very hopeful about this effort and I want to encourage people to participate either as a seeker of knowledge or as a mentor. Like many people, I have some reservations. My primary concern was if he and his staff were really equipped to do this. It seems like a big job. I haven’t really been impressed by ArtsManager.org which is also a service they offer. The discussion boards are barely trafficked, resource area doesn’t have much and job boards are completely empty. I can participate in more lively discussion on blogs and other forums without having to register. There are much better free job and resource sites.

On the other hand, Arts in Crisis effort might be closer to the Kennedy Center, and certainly Kaiser’s true competencies. There are few organizations in the country who have the resources and knowledge to act as brokers of knowledge in this manner. Frankly, if this is going to work Kaiser might do well to tap those other few organizations to get involved and provide guidance, resources and leadership in encouraging people to become mentors. This may mean that Arts in Crisis needs to leave the Kennedy Center’s direct control if another has the infrastructure to marry knowledge with need. The National Performing Arts Conference Conveners and Partners, for example, have databases full of arts professionals and have had more personal and direct contact with them than the Kennedy Center has.

My optimism and hope is that the current necessity is the mother of invention of a method of partnering, mentoring, information sharing and learning that arts and cultural institutions sorely need. If some strengthening network emerges out the road Michael Kaiser and the Kennedy Center have started upon, that will be great.

My concern is that for this to happen there is a lot of resistance to overcome. People might have fear of revealing weaknesses to local competitors or fear of mentoring a competitor only to have them use the good advice to eclipse them. It might be best to match up people who aren’t too far away to drive for site visits but distant enough not to be in direct competition.

There might be fear of helping another organization will mean neglecting your own. Or people might just not think they have anything to offer. One of my initial thoughts was that I wished I had the knowledge necessary to help–forgetting for a moment that I have contributed a respectable amount of constructive feedback for the PACE construction project.

The truth is, a lot of arts professionals with a great deal to offer may not have the first clue about how to effectively mentor and provide feedback to others in the industry. It will probably be important for the Arts in Crisis team to provide training videos and printed materials to assist in the process. My suspicion is that it may take a lot of poking and prodding from discipline service organizations and state/local arts councils to get people to imagine themselves as a mentor and download the materials.

As I said, the best of all possible worlds will be one where the industry emerges with greater strength and unity, confident and having proved they are a force to be acknowledged by governmental entities.

Going beyond that, the ideal would be for many organizations to form productive partnerships and then be able to go out and instruct others in their core competencies. One group might have developed a crackerjack presenting consortium, another might have a great method for developing and producing new works in partnership with higher education writing and performing arts programs, still another might have successfully leveraged their collective purchasing power to share legal, accounting and facilities services.

What will ultimately strengthen us is not depending on the expertise concentrated in a few central entities. It is going to be cultivating collective strengths
and having a system by which others can access the knowledge, even if it is as simple as having a list of the right people to call.

Is Audacity What Counts?

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In December I wrote that one of the initial speakers at the Arts Presenters conference was going to talk about how the current financial crisis evolved. Arts Presenters posted Jeremy Nowak’s conference remarks today. It is a little long, but if you are seeking an understanding of the forces and situations that came into play, he does a thorough job explaining things.

His suggestions on how arts organizations should operate in the new economic climate appear at the end of the piece. He talks about collaboration, emphasizing the economic and status quo smashing value of creativity and cautious management, but ambitious planning.

His observations under the heading “Defining What Counts” resonated with me most. (emphasis mine)

“A crisis brings an opportunity to define what is most important – the core part of what you do and what counts the most. In this sense, a crisis can be a painfully clarifying opportunity. A crisis also creates a political screen to eliminate legacy programs and initiatives that are hard to remove for historical reasons but can be justified at a point of financial duress. A crisis is a time to preserve what is core; organize your constituents (including funders) and define what efficiencies can be instituted.”

My first thoughts connected back to a story he told early on. He talks about how his organization is rebuilding a community made famous in HBO’s The Wire.

“Two weeks ago, in a magically irrational economic act, we purchased a liquor store that was selling alcohol to young people and functioned as a gathering place for drug distribution. We overpaid because its demise was worth more to us than the market value (and the owners knew it). We then added to this irrational act by publicly burning the liquor license – which we could have sold on the market for $75,000. At least it got us a good article and picture in the Baltimore Sun.”

My first thought was that this act defined what was important. It exemplified the an argument for investing in arts and culture in times of crisis. Even though there may be a higher cost involved, you pay it because it changes the dynamics of the community and improves the environment both directly and indirectly.

My second thought focused more on the sentence in bold above. Although Nowak meant it to be an internal practice, crisis very frequently provides a political screen to eliminate funding for arts programs in communities and schools. What it is that matters is not easily defined. The result is that often the trash trimmed away having been determined not to matter can very well be another person’s treasure.

Both Andrew Taylor and Greg Sandow have entries along these lines. Sandow specifically cites the oft used argument that if a government entity supports the arts, then babies will have to go without food and medicine. This seems a bit of a false choice because there are plenty of other categories of things you can choose to cut as well that can result in more people being fed. How many more children would be alive if legislators didn’t have franking privileges? Not a question entirely lacking in relevance given the NEA’s budget is generally measured as about two postage stamps per person in the U.S.

I want to make it clear that I haven’t really been a big proponent of some sort of arts bailout. I am still not convinced the sector is best served by jumping on the bandwagon. That said, I am beginning to think that the arts and culture industry ends up being treated thus because they are not audacious enough. There is never any money in the budget for the arts but we can go deeper into debt to bailout the banks, automobile companies and wage wars.

I will acknowledge that perhaps the production methods and business models the arts employ might be as behind the times as those of the automobile industry and are need of revamp. I have admitted as much throughout this blog. It really requires some cojones to take bailout money from the government meant to provide relief to debtors and pay yourself huge amounts in bonuses. Yet despite all the displeasure the U.S. citizens. and their president feel for this activity, the administration is still working their butts off to convince Congress to find a way to give them another infusion.

I know that arts organizations get “bailed” out by state, city and county governments and concerned citizens on a regular basis and in many cases, the organization is back asking for more a couple years later. But I can’t think of any who have been accused of so blatantly misdirecting these funds the way the financial sector has, much less on the same scale. The peril is genuine.

I begin to think that maybe we should be standing up and asking for a bailout. While the effort should be entirely serious, the ultimate goal might not be to get the money as to become less timid about asking. If the banks aren’t cowed by the idea of people being dispossessed of their homes and belongings, maybe we shouldn’t be deflected in our efforts by protests that saying yes to us means people will die or live in agony. I think we are all comforted by how empathetic arts and culture people are but I wonder if the recognition of that is being employed to manipulate us.

Actors Locally

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About a year ago I started thinking about doing a project that involved our organization’s immediate artistic community, artists throughout the county and as much of the public at large as we might be able to entice into becoming involved. Bringing different artists who don’t normally work together is one goal. Second, I was thinking that as much as I talk about how groups should offer audiences alternatives to sitting passively in a dark room, I should really put my money where my mouth is. I would also like to break down barriers members of the general public have about their artistic abilities.

When I originally began considering this I was thinking of bringing out an artist who was well-practiced at taking volunteers with little or no experience and producing a show in two days. My thought was to have a site specific show developed over the course of a week to ten days and then have a final performance. The assistant theatre manager suggested a local artist who could spearhead the same sort of effort. Suddenly the necessity of having someone who had experience putting a show together in a short time was less relevant.

It also has the benefit of being less expensive since I don’t have to house, transport and feed guest artists. Ultimately, I may end up spending the same amount of money, but it will be over a longer period of time which will hopefully allow a greater number of people to be involved.

I didn’t really plan it this way, but I think I may be presenting more local artists in the near future. I suspect when I attend my consortium meeting next week, I am going to find that my partners are really scaling back their activities. I will probably have fewer opportunities to partner with them due to scheduling conflicts and differences in our respective audiences’ interests. Buying local won’t be sustainable over the long term because there are few local artists I can present that people can’t see more frequently closer to the city core and drink alcohol while they are doing so. The strength I have is an ability, limited as it may be, to encourage and cultivate some new works.

None of the three artists I have spoken with over the last month about developing performances are new acquaintances. We have had relationships over the last couple years and we have reached a point where broaching the possibility of collaboration was logical. The tough economic times weren’t really a motivation. I haven’t suddenly decided to make due with the local talent because it has become tougher to bring people in from afar.

Anyway, I spoke with the artist today and she was just thrilled by the prospect. I could see the wheels beginning to turn inside her head. I presented the whole concept to her as pretty open ended. I know who I want to have involved, but until we have a core idea I can’t go convince them to sign on. As we spoke today, we realized we can really expand this project out a little bit. There is a possibility to have the produce of workshops, continuing ed courses and street fair craft projects created over the course of a year integrated into the final performance. Some possible workshops might even be designed to begin eroding anxiety and make people comfortable with expressing themselves with the aim of involving them in the final effort.

For example, we talked about mask making classes/workshops. Masks can be fun to make and wearing them allows people to be less self conscious. The artist related a story of how she brought a group of visual artists together to help her with a performance piece and they all protested they weren’t performers. Then they began to tentatively approach the masks and play with them. By the end of two hours the biggest problem was that people couldn’t decide which of the characters they had created for the masks to use in the performance.

Right now I am pretty optimistic about the future of the project even though I don’t know when it might start or finish. The woman with whom I spoke isn’t letting any moss grow on her and wants to get right to planning. We have a meeting on Thursday to look at possible locations around the grounds. I intend to post on the progress we make in the planning and implementation of our little scheme and share some of the challenges we face so that others might avoid them.

Cost Is More Than Pocket Change

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We had a meeting today with some renters to discuss an event they will be presenting in about a month. It is going to be a performance by a youth orchestra and choral group. One of the organizers told us his method of figuring out how to arrange his musicians given the space constraints. He uses pocket change.

Pennies do for most musicians but nickels are necessary for those like the flautists who need a little more room. Much of the percussion section is represented by quarters.

This low tech approach brought some “kids today” thoughts to mind. Many industries complain that recent graduates from all levels don’t possess the basic skills to perform the task at hand. It is frequently mentioned that the performing arts are so expensive because production costs can’t be circumvented/minimized by advancements in technology and efficiencies (aka Baumol’s cost disease).

However, there have been instances when technology seems to have indeed left people lacking in the ability to perform basic tasks. A few years ago, there was a problem with fitting a visiting designer’s design in the facility at which I was working. He was asked to quickly revise the problem portion and hand it off to the technicians to execute. Unfortunately, since his design software wasn’t available, it had to be done by hand and the designer didn’t have the requisite skill to effectively execute it. The project was delayed a bit longer than expected when one of the technicians had to draw what the designer dictated.

In this last year we had a similar problem with another designer who insisted the show couldn’t be done without a specific type of computer controlled lighting equipment which we didn’t have. We were somewhat incredulous when it turned out that all the special equipment for was going to be used for was backlighting. Using the special equipment would reduce the number of instruments needed by 1/3. However, we had plenty of lighting instruments and circuits to produce the effect. But it took the better part of a week to convince the guy to add the other instruments to the design rather than insisting we rent expensive equipment for a half hour piece.

Alas, technology may have advanced, but the ability for our budgets to acquire technology for our house stock hasn’t. Nor had it for three of our partners so resistance to change in the face of such dearth was also puzzling and frustrating.

I can’t say for sure if the designer wasn’t just busy with other projects and really did not want to revise plans. From my vantage and from the responses we received, it appeared to be lack of imagination and problem solving skills to conceive of alternatives.

I don’t want to leave the youngest set out so I will also roll my virtual eyes at some of our students who don’t know how to use a ruler. I am not talking about scale rulers which I will admit make my eyes glaze over. I am referring to a standard 1 foot ruler. Guys, 1/4 scale means 1 inch equals 4 feet. Shave something off that chair you made out of foamcore–it is 8 feet high on your set model!!!!

I understand that technology does actually contribute to greater efficiency. It is quicker to hang one instrument instead of three. You can also do much more with the same number of circuits. You can design much faster if the computer does it for you and automatically includes all the pertinent information people need to execute the plan. But I think there is a greater cost when people don’t possess the basic skills of their profession for which technology provides a shortcut.

I really do comprehend the desire to move beyond the basic rules to the place where we get to express ourselves. I still have a paper from college with a comment that the content of my writing was simply excellent and insightful–but the grammatical errors were legion. At the time, all I cared about was the recognition of my brilliance. My grammatical skills were obviously sufficient to allow my brilliance to shine through after all. No need to shackle myself with tedious rules which only professors valued.

Now if you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you have probably come across instances where my fingers act independently of my brain. Those times notwithstanding, there came a moment when I realized if I was to advance in nearly any career, I needed to embrace basic grammatical discipline. I know now that paying attention to how others employ those picayune details has enhanced the sheer magnificence my literature professor acknowledged so long ago.

Interesting Thoughts From Other Places

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Read some good stuff today on two blogs that really can’t be improved upon by any commentary I can offer so read on—

The Nonprofiteer had some sage advice in a recent entry regarding recruiting people to fill volunteer roles be it a board member or ticket taker — recruit in pairs.

The two-by-two recommendation is most often made about Board members, and specifically about minority Board members: don’t ask someone to be the only African-American or the only woman in the room. But it’s equally true of any Board recruit, or in fact of any volunteer: bring in 1 person, and you’ve got a 50% shot at keeping him/her. Bring in 2, and you’ve got an 80% shot at keeping them both.

Why? Because misery loves company, and being a newcomer/outsider is always misery. And because unless your Board or volunteer program is truly astonishing, anyone observing it from the outside will think it could use a lot of improvement. The prospect of trying to improve something unaided is usually daunting to the point of not bothering.

Seems easier to do with board members who tend to be actively recruited as opposed to volunteers for other areas which are often self-selected. You don’t want to turn someone away simply because no one else offered their services this week. It is possible though to orient people in pairs or small groups to facilitate bonding among them. If the 80% retention stat is correct, it seems prudent to arrange the situation so people’s initial volunteer encounters are in multiples.

Over at Producer’s Perspective, Ken Davenport relates an answer Sandy Block of Sernio Coyne gave to the question about why producers attempt to mount Broadway productions given the enormous challenges. Block stops the class in which the question was asked and queries those attending how many remember the first movie they saw and then how many can name the first Broadway show they saw. Few people raised their hands at the first question but everyone raised their hands at the second.

Says Davenport:

There’s a highly emotional experience connected with Broadway; a passion that can be turned into profit . . . Now the real question is, how can we capitalize on that?

Davenport then asks his readers to take Sandy Block’s survey and record the first movie and first Broadway show they saw in the comments section of the entry. If you remember, go on over and write it in.

New Place, New Look

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As you can see, the blog has a new look. It may not be as apparent that the blog is in a new place as well. After five years on my old Movable Type platform, I accepted Inside the Arts founder, Drew McManus’ invitation to move my blog entirely to the Inside the Arts website. I still own the Buttsseats.com domain name and have it directed here so you can keep your bookmarks. Those who subscribe by newsfeed are probably going to have to reset them. I know that some people liked a verbose feed and others preferred a more compact feed and I plan to feature both.

I apologize to those who had difficulties reaching the blog these last couple days. I was having some difficulty getting my domain name to redirect here properly. I appreciate Drew’s patience with my emails urging him to try various settings in an attempt to make things work. There are still a couple things that probably need to be worked out but my intention is to limit such flailing to times of low traffic to the blog.

My primary motivation for moving is difficulties I had getting Movable Type to do what I wanted. It is a very flexible platform for blogging and as such has a lot of settings that can be adjusted. I believe that despite my best efforts in emulating standard settings, there was something set somewhere that precluded the execution of my changes.

Had it just been a matter of cosmetics, I wouldn’t have had a problem but there were problems with comment posting where you would be scolded for not entering the spam prevention password—only you were never given the opportunity to do so unless you previewed your post first. I spent the better part of three weeks playing with various settings to no avail. I believe this new location will provide readers with a much better experience.

My second motivation was based somewhat in envy. Drew McManus is an attentive shepherd for our merry little band of bloggers here. Evey week he sends out tips on how to improve blog posts. Often these tips include information on new plugins and programs available for the WordPress platform Inside the Arts uses. Given I was faced with so much frustration, the proposition of accomplishing my goals at a click of a button was rather seductive. There are also little nifty tools that seek out broken links within entries which will enable me to keep my old entries either up to date or at least bereft of dead links. Months of coveting such luxuries inspired me to move my blog.

I am pleased thus far with the new blogging accommodations and look forward to being able to provide a more informative experience for my readers given the new tools at my disposal.

Tough Times Bring Not So Strange Bedfellows

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I have often written about what I felt was the very likely need for arts organizations to start partnering in some manner, be it booking artists or sharing the cost of bookkeeping. The approaching/continuing financial crisis seems bound to force some arts organizations into such arrangements if they want to continue operating. In the Chronicle of Philanthropy, there is a piece about the distress the Charleston Symphony Orchestra has been going through as a result of their past administrative decisions.

The one thing that grabbed my attention was a quote from the Coastal Community Foundation following the mention of Charleston Stage and Charleston Ballet Theatre having similar problems.

“For the longest time, each of the organizations thought they were alone in having financial difficulties,” says George C. Stevens, the foundation’s chief executive. “When they began to realize that, no, their partner down the street is also having the same challenges, then they started saying, ‘Well, how can we work together?'”

The organizations’ first step: a $30,000 joint marketing campaign to promote their holiday performances. The city of Charleston covered the cost of the campaign.

The community foundation created a Web site to complement the advertising, and media organizations threw in donated ad time and space on top of what was purchased.

The effort seems to have paid off. The symphony sold more than 90,000 single tickets to its holiday performances, exceeding the goal it had set of 76,000.”

I am not going to claim partnering will solve problems by increasing attendance, etc. In fact, there is no mention about how well the ballet and theatre did as a result of the effort. The entire story might not be wholly positive. Still, I applaud the Coastal Community Foundation for organizing and facilitating the marketing campaign.

I also won’t claim that I know the status of all my neighbors in the arts. However, I do work together with other arts organizations to put our seasons together. For all the areas in which I wish our partnership did better, I will say that I am aware of the troubles other arts organizations are having. Frankly, I would never have listed our frequent communications on various details as a benefit of membership but in light of these Charleston groups feeling they were alone in their troubles, I guess it does assist in placing one’s situation in a larger context.

About three years ago, Andrew Taylor had an entry on his blog suggesting arts organizations be open about things that went wrong with a program on grant reports. Though you might imagine other arts organizations in your community are just waiting in the wings like hungry wolves ready to drag you down at the first sign of weakness, the stakes probably aren’t really that high. Chances are you would find it beneficial to talk about some of the significant and not so significant challenges you face.

Also—it would probably help me personally if you all would be a little more open. When people email or ask me how things are going, I am fairly open about some of the challenges we face in a general sort of way. I talk about the annoying and sort of troublesome, potentially cause for concern, but not so dire stuff. I get the sense from people’s reactions that I sound like Marvin the Paranoid Android. Okay, well maybe I stray into cynicism a little. The whole romantization of martyrdom a Catholic upbringing affords you and all. But really, once people realize half the stuff they are experiencing is actually the status quo, franker folks like me don’t come off as such downers.

Letter to President Obama

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The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

There are many calling for you to create a cabinet level position for arts and culture. There are certainly many factors involved in such a decision. There is a necessity to exhibit how the country values arts and culture by providing leadership, but also revising the way we fund these disciplines. You may not be aware, but the section of the tax code under which many non-profit arts and culture organizations operate, 501 (c) (3), does not mention the arts and culture at all. Despite this, it is fortunate that the generosity of the American people, businesses, foundations and endowments flows to arts and cultural organizations under the auspices of this section of the tax code. Whether or not arts and culture find a greater representation within your administration, you can do a great service to the community by creating an improved, more focused way for the arts to acquire support.

For a sense of why the current method of funding the arts is in need of change, one might read John Kreilder’s “Leverage Lost The Nonprofit Arts in the Post-Ford Era.” In the third section of the piece, Kreilder notes that the theory employed by the Ford Foundation was that support they provided could be leveraged by stimulating donations from other sources. This same approach has been used by the National Endowment for the Arts, many state arts agencies and some private funders.

But as Kreilder notes:

“Any student of biological, physical or economic systems would immediately recognize the flaw in the logic of funding leverage, as it has been practiced not only in the arts, but also throughout the nonprofit sector. One of the fundamental tenets of systems studies is the “free lunch” principle: no system can depend on the unlimited growth of resources. The leveraged funding strategy of the Ford era can be likened to a chain letter, a Ponzi scheme, or any other pyramidal growth system. The initiators of chain letters and Ponzi schemes often claim that, for a small effort or investment, a virtually limitless return will be realized, and though initially this prophecy may appear to be feasible, inevitably all such arrangements must fail because resources are finite. In other words, there is no perpetual free lunch. Ultimately, funding leverage will become unsustainable.”

Five years ago the Independent Sector issued a statement calling on foundations and endowments to shift their focus to long term broad support of organizational core programs rather than the short term project support prevalent today. The Independent Sector felt this short term emphasis keeps non profit organizations focused on reinventing their programs to comply with narrow guidelines rather than investing their energy in building institutional capacity.

If your administration were able to provide leadership and incentives to encourage longer term, core support of non-profit organizations, it would be a boon for the entire sector. But for non-governmental funding of non-profits to thrive, there needs to be greater opportunities both in the way these entities can incorporate themselves as well as the mechanisms by which they can raise money. The origins of both these solutions will be found in the tax code.

One of the ways this might manifest is by providing increased options for the formation of non-profit entities. Among the possible processes by which a company might form could be as hybrids between the current 501 (c) (3) and for profit methods of incorporation. It might be necessary for such an entity to pay more taxes than a current non-profit but such arrangements will expand the avenues by which people can pursue serving myriad constituencies while facilitating opportunities for greater self-support.

As for diversifying the means for garnering support, Douglas K. Smith had an intriguing idea a few years back he termed, Dynamic Deductibility The piece he authored explains it in detail, but simply, a person would buy X amount worth of shares in an organization but doesn’t take a deduction until he sells the shares. If the share value goes up, he takes a bigger deduction than he would have had he donated directly. If not, he takes a smaller deduction.

The primary way this would differ from the stock market is a non-profit would get money every time the stock changed hands rather than the one time infusion a for-profit gets at its initial public offering. This option doesn’t exist as yet because there are no laws creating or governing such transactions. Certainly there is much to be considered in how the tax code and laws might be written to accommodate such an arrangement and guard against abuse. When I first read the article, I wondered if the activities of non-profits would be substantial enough to attract investment interest. Having since learned of the financial instruments in which people were investing that lead to the current financial crisis, I am convinced these organizations offer more than enough tangibility. Donors employing this avenue to support an organization realize returns in the form of both observing how the non-profit is able to serve its constituencies and tracking how the organization is valued via its shares.

My hope would be that smaller non-profit organizations who did not feel they could garner significant interest on their own, or even larger organizations looking to enhance their value, would come together to offer shares in partnership with one another. I am an arts person so my immediate vision is of visual and performing arts organizations cooperating to increase their shared value. It doesn’t take much effort, however, to also imagine social work and health care organizations working together to improve the value of their shares by improving the lives of the communities they serve.

I hope you have noticed, President Obama, that while our endowments and savings, small as they were already, have shrunk severely we in arts and culture have not asked for a bailout. Certainly it has been suggested. It is difficult not to want a portion of the billions of dollars being distributed. Yet the loudest cries right now aren’t for you to increase the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, but rather to create a cabinet position. We don’t want a bailout as much as we want the esteem and respect of our government and our countrymen. We want to be better organized and educated so we can achieve and serve with greater efficiency.

What I ask is in the same vein. Assist us in becoming more viable and integral contributors to the economy, the national cultural and social identity.

Most respectfully,

Joseph Patti

What Price Cultural Leadership?

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There has been a real big push in the last month or so between articles and email exhortations to have President Elect Obama appoint a cabinet level secretary of culture. As I read these things it really appears that no one has really stopped to consider what the implications of such a position might entail. There was an article that appeared right after the idea came up at the National Performing Arts Convention (NPAC) this summer. I have spent about 8 hours over the last three days, alas to no avail, trying to find it because it made a convincing case for being wary about instituting such a position. It might be that I am misremembering when it appeared and that is preventing me from finding it.

From what I do recall of the article, one of the points it made was that the effort would cost the President a huge amount of political capital because there is no national popular support of the arts. Education, Health, Defense, Homeland Security, Interior, etc can all have cases made for their importance and people will go along. Government support for the arts has often been a contentious issue disproportionate to the actual funding it receives. It certainly isn’t a reliable survey method, but when you read comments on the articles about a cabinet level culture position, those against pretty much unanimously mention not wanting their tax dollars to go to the arts. If the Obama administration pushes for the creation of this position, there is going to be a great deal of public debate on the topic.

Now I will be the first to admit that short of some transformative incident, national support and appreciation for the arts will likely never emerge on its own. I don’t anticipate there will ever be a good time to institute this position so there may be no point in waiting. If the next phase of the economy is going to be creative, then we certainly want strong leadership in that direction. Arts and Culture could absolutely benefit from stronger central leadership and advocacy. I would welcome a scenario where everyone working in an cultural organization was better educated and equipped, working collaboratively with other entities and enjoyed the confidence of having support on the national level.

A Secretary of Culture would also benefit the country internationally since we don’t have a central person with whom foreign officials of similar portfolios can meet. There would be much rejoicing if Visa processes for artists were facilitated and that pernicious 30% tax on foreign performer income was adjusted.

The thing to remember is that the agendas of the government, no matter how sympathetic an administration might be to one’s cause, is unlikely to be synchronized with the agendas of the arts and culture organizations of the country. It is one thing to disagree with the initiatives of the National Endowment for the Arts because the worst impact they can have on you is to decide not to fund you. When you have a person making cultural policy decisions for the entire country, that is a different matter. And if you stepped up to call for this cabinet level position, your cooperation will certainly be expected.

There is the question of whose interests will this person predominantly represent. Both Hollywood and folk artists are home grown and national treasures, but money buys access and influence. Will the Secretary of Culture press for greater freedoms of artistic expression or fight to preserve and extend copyright and intellectual property protections at the behest of large corporations? Will live experiences and interactions with art be valued or more virtual experiences like television, film, internet and video games?

If one thing is supported, other areas end up lacking by simple default. What happens though if an administration decides something should be actively censored or undermined? Things can be declared as unrepresentative of the culture of the United States or simply un-American and we will have asked that someone be placed in the position of doing so.

Don’t think it will happen? Last year British Culture Minister, Marge Hodge, criticized The Proms of…well actually being too British and not inclusive enough of the multi-ethnic backgrounds of the country. Yes, multi-cultural focus is to be desired, but it could have easily gone the other way and people were still miffed at her comment. In 2002 another British culture minister, Kim Howells, stated the contenders for the visual arts Turner Prize had produced “conceptual bullshit.”

It is one thing if a senator stands up and criticizes a work of art but quite another when someone whose job it is to eat, drink and sleep arts and culture and theoretically knows what they are talking about makes damning statements.

Finally, don’t forget, there is no guarantee arts and cultural institutions will get any additional money. The budget can be cut regardless of the title the nation’s top arts official holds. In fact, for a number of years Congress will be able to claim they quintupled the arts budget without grant awards increasing a penny because all the money will be directed to the bureaucracy of this new Department of Culture.

So the question is, are you willing to accept the possibility of all this? As cynical as I may sound here, honestly as soon as I read about the NPAC proposal to have a cabinet level position, my first thought was of Gilberto Gil. In my mind, he is the Culture Minister to emulate in terms of striking a balance between the interests of the creators and consumers and promoting creative expression.

But I am also cautious. Given how we have discovered that the Justice Department and Inspectors General of many government offices have been subverted and suborned in recent years, there are no assurances anyone can offer me that my gravest concerns can be warded against.

I guess for me, it comes back around to where I started this post. If there is enough political will to make the position effective and credible to accomplish all the positive things we hope for, then I am generally willing to accept the potential for the negatives.

Demand Based Pricing

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Earlier this week Drew McManus talked about the problems with Demand Based Pricing. By some coincidence, I had posed a question about that very subject to the Performing Arts Administrators group on LinkedIn just before Christmas. The next day I caught the article by David Sharp that Drew linked to on that very subject so I cited it on the LinkedIn as well.

The discussion received a handful of responses, some from people who feel the practice of demand pricing has been successful for them. One person says a theatre at which his company will be performing starts at one price and then increases when a certain number of tickets have sold. Another says her company sets a premium on orchestra level aisle seats and then also starts raising prices when a threshold for each price section is passed.

The practice that piqued my curiosity, among some others, came from a gentleman who stated they offer the best discounts to the best customers and that the “Net revenue per ticket has increased without raising ticket prices.” Someone beat me to the question about how they tracked and applied the discount. I am partial to this approach because it rewards loyalty and can be used to build a relationship with people. Raising the prices as the seating fills only encourages people to order early but not necessarily often. Unfortunately, we haven’t received an answer yet.

I assume if some people have started experimenting with demand based pricing, a fair number of you have at least flirted and experimented with the concept. I would really be interested in learning about various initiatives others have used, especially in regard to successes and pitfalls one may have encountered.

BTW- If you are interested in speaking with people who have already started experimenting with these pricing structures, join the LinkedIn group. None of those who commented have anonymous aliases. I just avoided mentioning their names in the hope readers will be driven by curiosity to join and contribute to the discussion.

Stuff You Can Use: Google Analytics

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Analyzing Effort Effectiveness
As a logical follow up to yesterdays post about how we have been communicating with our constituencies, I wanted to mention one way we are trying to track effectiveness. I recently started using Google Analytics to get a better sense of the traffic on our website. The service is free, probably because Google is already collecting the information and all you are doing is asking them to share what they collect from the pages you mark with your unique code.

I tested it out on my blog for a couple months before applying it to my web pages at work. As I noted, you have to add a short bit of code to each web page that you want it to track. Since the blog has fewer distinct pages on it, I felt it was a better use of effort to monitor the viability there. The data is much more organized and easier to read than when using programs like Awstats. Analytics also theoretically weeds out visits from search engine spiders and other automatic processes so the numbers you see are more likely to represent real people.

Sooo Much Information
The service provides some interesting information. You can see what pages people visited, how often they visited, how they got to your page (direct address, search engine, referred by another web page), how long they stayed, from where they were visiting and what search terms brought them to your site. You can also see how often someone from an IP address returned to your page and how many new visitors you had. The default setting is to show you the visits over a month’s time but you can expand that to a longer period or focus in on just one day. If you are interested, you can even learn what sort of operating systems, monitor settings, browsers and Flash versions your visitors are using. If a lot of people are using older computers, you may want to reconsider optimizing your web pages for viewing on monitors with higher resolutions. As I see from the report, there are a couple people viewing our web pages on iPhones.

I Think They Like Us!
One of the things I have discovered using Google Analytics on our work pages is that people seem to read and act on the emails we send out. The number of visitors to our web page shot up a great deal the day we sent out our last email and remained higher for a few days after. The visits to the event we profiled also increased as you might imagine, but we also saw a bump in visits to the pages for later events. We also saw an increase in ticket sales though that is a separate system from what Google tracks for us.

Who is Watching Me?
There is an option to create your own custom reports from the information provided. Despite all the information available, there are a couple weaknesses with the data you collect. With my blog I noticed that often when I visited from my home computer, my visits wouldn’t register. However, there did appear to be visits from the nearby Air Force base in the same number and duration of my visits. My theory is that because cable modems shift traffic around to nodes with less traffic, sometimes my visits registered as my neighborhood, sometimes I was apparently on an air force base. To bolster my theory, on January 12 both my blog and work website registered two hits from the Air Force base. When checked Network Location on my blog report, there were a bunch of links from the local internet server. The Network Location report on my work site shows “DoD Network Information Center.” So I am pretty sure the Air Force isn’t monitoring my blog on a daily basis. (Or at least they are doing a better job covering their tracks.)

But I Wanna Know More!
The other aspect I find lacking is that the report maker is limited. I don’t know if this is just because it is a beta feature and they haven’t enabled cross referencing for everything or because the limits help protect the anonymity of the data. What I would love to do is cross reference hits on certain pages to neighborhoods. The neighborhood data might not be entirely accurate but there would still be some value in knowing certain shows were attracting interest from certain general areas.

There are definitely entire swaths of the county that are under served and granters are interested in having us reach. Because these are people who are least likely to order in advance, it is difficult to use ticket sales records to prove an event designed to appeal to them actually did. If I was able to show there was a lot of activity on the show specific page of our website from these areas, it would lend some veracity to our claims. I am hoping this capability emerges at some point.

Even though the vast majority of the Network Locations register as large providers like Time Warner, Comcast and Verizon, there is enough specific information to give you a hint at the type of people viewing your pages. In addition to the aforementioned members of the Air Force, there are a couple hits from various universities, the city, the state department of education, health care providers and insurance companies on the theatre website.

On the whole, Google Analytics’ data is both feast and famine. You learn a lot more than you did without it, but in some cases you have no idea how the data might be pertinent to your needs and activities or you can’t process the data as presented in a manner that is meaningful. This is probably actually comforting to many of us since this means the sites we visit can’t easily figure out a lot of stuff about us either. (Though I am sure there are some smart people out there for whom this data is more than sufficient to establish identities.)

Still, if you acknowledge and accept the limitations, it can be illuminating and fun to explore. I have certainly only scraped the surface. We probably haven’t been using and playing with Analytics long enough to discover its full potential. I would really love to learn how other organizations have made the data work for them.

Segmenting Mass Appeal

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More and more often these days at work are segmenting our message to audiences and I have to say, it is a pretty labor intensive undertaking.

In the last week I have:

Contacted Newspapers
Sent out press releases and images for our upcoming shows and discovered the newspaper arts editor who was there in November took the buy out package and is no longer there. The features editor who oversees the weekend arts section has stated she is taking things in a new direction. Considering that the last direction was more pop culture oriented and away from the arts, I am reluctant to learn what this new focus might be. In any case, this means shifting the language of my releases yet again to make our performances seem to resonate with this new theme without misrepresenting the shows.

It would be great if the rival papers, seeing the shift in focus figured the main daily was on to something and copied them. The problem is that the alternative weekly defines themselves as an alternative to the main daily. We get a healthy portion of our audience from the alt-weekly. Where the main daily wants to write stories on shows with the widest appeal, the alt-weekly wants to tell people why a select niche go to these shows. Their readership is pretty savvy so a lot of explanation isn’t necessary. However, I did make a note to the editor observing why people might, on the face of things, underestimate a couple events.

The main daily paper has also started to emphasize user generated content which makes me think the days of the editors that remain may be numbered, too. We already lost the editors who did stories for the neighborhood inserts a couple months earlier. For the moment, it gives me another avenue of communication with the public. Although this means essentially writing a press release that appeals directly to the general public rather than one that tries to convince an editor the performance is worth tasking someone to write a story about.

Contacted Schools
Because it is the start of a new semester, we emailed information to many of the area colleges suggesting professors add us to their syllabus as supplementary material or extra credit assignment at the very least. I email the theatre, dance and music people, of course. However, thanks to online course listings, I am able to contact history, education, religion, anthropology, literature and philosophy professors when the subject matter of a performance aligns with course topics. Some shows are more suitable than others. Although it is fairly labor intensive to cross reference course titles with the descriptions on other web pages, we get enough professors giving positive responses to make it worthwhile. At the very least, many of the professors attend even if their students don’t. Since these academics are from other campuses, this helps spread the word about our venue to a desirable demographic.

Contacted Our Email List
Every month I send out emails about the performances for that month. Because this group is so large, we know the least about how to effectively pitch to this group. Our approach can be similar to the material we use on the newspaper’s user generated content. Except these people know us and have a relationship with us and we can’t talk to them as if they are entirely anonymous entities. We also have the benefit of controlling the timing and content of what we release. This is the group I am most anxious about contacting because I don’t want our communications to come across as spam.

Back in November, Adam Thurman at The Mission Paradox touched on this subject. I am indeed the Joe who made the comment on the entry. I am concerned about find a balance between telling a compelling story about our organization and saying so much people consider it spam and don’t read it. Every month we have a few people who unsubscribe from our list. I keep a list to make sure we honor their wishes and don’t resubscribe them at some point. I rarely know why people leave our list. Why did they chose this month to leave and not last month?

Today I actually received one answer to this silent question. A woman emailed us to tell us she was leaving the list because she lived on the other side of the county and no longer drove at night. She urged us to keep up our good work offering people great performances. It is encouraging to get emails like this. I don’t have the capacity to ask people and allow people to explain why they are unsubscribing when they do so. I am looking into a technology which I believe might actually facilitate this.

Adam Thurman’s answer to the questions I had about balancing selling with creating relationships was a suggestion to add a couple interesting tidbits into the email. He noted that if an item needed more than a tidbit in length to explain it, a link to a page expounding on the item should be provided for those interested in more information.

The performance schedule for the next six weeks really lent itself to this practice. One event, the performers encourage people to bring hand held percussion instruments for audience participation. . Another event we are able to offer an opportunity to attend a master class so suggested people mark the date. We will follow up with another reminder next month.

We Also Did Everything Else
We were also working on PSAs and print and radio ads making changes appropriate for each audience as we went. You pretty much have the idea of how we were working so I won’t belabor the point with each of these.

The thing that is intimidating is that as much as we have crafted our message for each of these audiences, we could be doing more. Technology allows us to collect and process information more readily than in the past. We only have a small portion of our total audience’s email addresses and attendance histories because so many people are buying tickets at the door where it is difficult to both capture contact information and serve everyone on line in a timely manner.

Still, I have quite a bit of information with which to work. I can target all people who attended dance performances with a custom message about an upcoming dance performance. I could subdivide them and target people who attended sub-genres of dance similar to that of an upcoming event and further customize my message to make note of that similarity. I can toss in other criteria like frequency over a set period of time if I wanted.

Just as there can be a Tyranny of Choice with consumer goods, so too can the plethora of options paralyze your marketing and promotional plans in an attempt to find the perfect permutation of elements to generate the most effective appeal.

The Emperor’s New Ad

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I emailed an ad to our local weekly for the Spring Arts issue today… only I forgot to attach the ad. The realization appropriately hit me about the same time as the incoming email chime sounded alerting me to the message from the newspaper informing me of my faux pas. Trying to save face, I wrote back that we were experimenting with user generated content and our goal had been to have readers use their imagination to create our ad in the blank space. But, I continued, given that our ad did not appeal to smart, savvy people like themselves, perhaps I needed to re-evaluate our campaign design and the ad I had attached would have to suffice for now.

When I finished that bit of wit, I started to wonder if we would one day reach a point where our audience was creating promotions for us. It would involve a heck of a lot of trust on the part of an organization to give up control of part of its message. In the presenting field, I think it would take even longer to cede control over an entire season given that an artist’s image would be involved along with the organization’s. Many artists reserve the right to review promotional materials utilizing their image before they are submitted for publication. Not that artists working for a producing organization shouldn’t be concerned about how their image is being used. It is easier for the producing organization to communicate and gain agreement about the type and manner in which images will be released for use.

People already use social networking sites to send out information and links about their favorite performances. Often the materials being used are low resolution or low quality and stolen/borrowed from a source that stole or borrowed it themselves. One of the ways I imagine this evolving is that organizations will place images, video and audio in a publicly accessible place and allow people to manipulate the material to promote a performance. Providing descriptions and scripts will allow people to get a better idea about a production. The process might even go so far as to allow people to sit in on rehearsals so they can get an even more accurate sense of the production. If a performer or group isn’t present, then video of past performances might be made available.

Some groups might allow unfettered access to their materials and let people go wild with the philosophy that the only bad publicity is the lack thereof. Others may limit access to individuals who have shown they can produce high quality, respectful products.

My initial thought is that people might mash materials up and send some sort of promotional piece out to their friends or post it on their personal sites. I would think that mainly it would be those who have a personal connection to the show who would put something together. But who knows, maybe the challenge of making highly creative promotional pieces will become something everyone does to express themselves. I rather suspect that it will take the development of some new platform or channel that facilitates this sort of thing that propels it as a widespread activity.

Wherein I Become Interested In Eskimos

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Busy, busy, busy day today. I had a lot of meetings, some of which I enjoyed more than others. One that gave me cause for optimism was a planning meeting for a show we will be developing and co-producing to be staged in September 2010. As part of this partnership we provide rehearsal and performance space as well as design services and facilities. The other organization is creating the performance. One of the things that encouraged me was that they held an intimate fund raising event with only 20 invited and raised a fairly respectable amount toward development costs. (I was also happy that we had the meeting because I was able to remind him about an impending grant deadline.) This is a good sign that in these financially troubled times, people are still willing to provide support for a project.

Most of the conversation revolved around set design. Since we are hoping the show will do a little touring, trying to get a preliminary idea of how to create something that was light enough to travel, strong enough to bear weight and durable enough to be reconstructed frequently monopolized a bit of time. This is one of the aspects of my job from which I gain satisfaction. I may be the administrator guy but the dynamics are such that I feel I can run around making suggestions about materials and design and not have the designers and artists look at me with disdain for treading upon their territory. It won’t be long before the project progresses to the point my insights have little value, but I enjoy the fact that I have enough expertise to have my suggestions valued.

The guy with whom we are partnering is doing some amazing cultural exchanges via his company with Japanese groups and has started making contacts in Korea. In addition, he is often asked to participate in cultural exchanges and projects with the Inupiat and Yupik people of Alaska. His interactions with these two latter groups are going to inform the content of the show we are developing. So I am sitting there thinking, why the heck isn’t more funding going his way? He is developing some really vibrant new works that are culturally respectful and have a fairly wide general appeal. I know we will sell out so I need to make sure we don’t limit the number of performances we can do like we did on the last project we produced.

He isn’t reticent about promoting his projects and he sits on a lot of grant panels so he has a pretty good idea how to make a persuasive case. I mean, until today I had no familiarity with the Inupiat and Yupik. I have to say, I want to learn a little more about them because this guy got me excited about the cultural elements he intends to integrate into the work. The tech director and musical director are pretty excited about these elements too. As I am writing this, it strikes me that maybe he isn’t getting more funding because no one is writing letters in support of his grant that say he has made them excited to learn a little more about Eskimo cultural practices–and this is for a show that has nothing to do with Eskimos.

I am already pointing him to some of the grants I listed last week. Maybe I need to offer to write a letter talking about how impressed with his cross-cultural work I am and how it makes me want to learn. This guy is worth funding.

What Price Success?

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A recent revelation that Guthrie Theatre director Joe Dowling makes over $680,000 in salary and benefits in 2007 has a lot of people grumbling. As of this writing, there are 156 comments on a Star-Tribune article on Dowling’s pay. Some commenters defend the salary in the context of the Guthrie being at the top of the theatre game as opposed to the local sports teams who are not performing too well and get paid much more and receive public funding for stadiums. Others are saying his pay is ludicrous and that the theatre should not be receiving any more public money if they can afford to pay him that amount. Of cited is a desire that proceeds of the tax passed last month to benefit the arts not go to the theatre.

Dowling is purported to be the highest paid theatre director in the country. I don’t have my passwords to the latest salary surveys with me to check but I will assume it is correct or nearly so. A couple years ago, I asked if a musical director of a symphony was really worth X times as much as the musician. (I can’t seem to find the entry, so it might have been another highly placed position in a symphony.) Looking at the same comparison on an annual basis between Dowling and an actor or perhaps ticket office clerk, I would say Dowling wasn’t worth it.

However, looking at Dowling’s history at the Guthrie, that is another matter. He has spent the last 13 years there. Twelve of those years the theatre has been in the black. He retired $1.8 million in debt, expanded audiences and guided the organization to construct a new facility on the Mississippi River. ($100,000 of his 2007 salary was a bonus for doing so.) In this context, he is someone the board of directors will want to keep around. Whether they could do so for less might be the question but they would certainly be fools to immediately pay whomever eventually replaces him close to his departing salary. I daresay there are few in the country capable of directing the Guthrie at the level it currently operates.

As something of a comparison, this past November it was revealed that the highest paid university president in the country was David Sargent at Suffolk University. It raised quite a ruckus when it was learned he makes $2.5 million when the median salary for presidents is about $500,000. There were some extenuating circumstances like the fact he has worked for the university since 1956 and has been president for the last 19 years and never taken a sabbatical in that time.

Is longevity and dedication worth that much? Is it worth that much in light of the rising cost of college educations and the declining value of personal assets?

Given the tough financial times, people are especially sensitive to any indication people receiving public monies are squandering it. There is some indication that Dowling is responsive to the needs of the organization. According to the article when times were tough back in 2003, he took a voluntary 20% pay cut. Now assuming he was making around $300,000 at the time, (I don’t use Guidestar often enough to spring for the Premium membership necessary to view 990s from that far back.), that is a $60,000 cut.

For a lot of theatres, that number probably represents a position or two. Given his most recent salary, the same percentage would probably represent four or five positions. In that context, you can see why people commenting on the article are suggesting public and personal funds be directed toward the less affluent arts organizations. It is people’s right to spend their money where they feel it will do the most good.

I would argue though that the Guthrie Theatre isn’t just any ordinary theatre. It’s founding has a place in theatre history at the start of the residential theatre movement with the intention of being an alternative to Broadway. It is ironic then that the first salary comparison the article makes it to New York. The Guthrie is meant to set a standard, and by many measures it does, but Broadway is apparently still the gold standard. So if the Twin Cities and surrounding region feel the organization has lived up to the promise of it’s founding and has cultivated a high quality product for audiences without commercial success being the sole driving force, they ought to be proud and support it.

This is an entirely different issue than how much the people responsible for creating this state are being paid to do so. There are far too few great theatres around to damn the organization for how much the director is being paid. It is perfectly valid to be identify the Guthrie as a source of Minnesotan pride and ask the board to engage in a conversation about the appropriateness of the leadership’s salaries. I am afraid it would get lost in the noise of a hundred other issues that spawn objections, but it would really be exciting and interesting to have someone lay out the case for why the pay is justified.

Because you know, everyone is focused on the issue of why he gets paid so much more than everyone else for the work he does. No one in the article or comments asks why it is everyone else puts up with getting paid so much less for the work they do. That is the conversation the Guthrie should start.

N.B. – January 6 – Editorial in the Star Tribune defending Guthrie board’s decisions regarding Dowling’s salary. Additionally notes that in the larger world of non-profits, Dowling comes in at #14 in the Minneapolis area.

Great Performances, No Ads

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So I went to see Slumdog Millionaire last night. Terrific movie. I am a little puzzled why with all the national ads running for this movie, a county with 115 first run movie screens and 800,000 this movie is only playing on one screen. The movie has been running here for about a month and the theatre was still pretty packed last night. But that is an entry for another time.

What I wanted to gripe about a little is all the freakin’ ads. I know that you all know about them so it isn’t news but I have never seen so many ads before the previews even started. By the time the movie began to run, I realized, I was no longer interested in seeing it. Fortunately, the story started to appeal to me pretty quickly.

My point is, the movies are hobbling themselves from the very start by running all these ads. I wasn’t in a receptive frame of mind when the show started so the film had to start winning me over right from the beginning. If the movie had only been mediocre or designed to start slow and build, it would have been over before it had begun. No chance, no way, no how. Because movies aren’t live events, the producers and performers can’t sense the audience getting restless the way a person giving an overlong curtain speech can. (or should be sensing) So the ads keep going on and on heedless of how the audience feels.

I am thinking my next wave of promotions for our productions should have the words, “Great Performances, No Ads,” using the absence of ads as a selling point.

Information You Can Use- Grants and Foundations

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I don’t know if there is something in the air or just a lot of grant deadlines coming due but there were quite a few funding opportunities listed on the WESTAF website last week. I thought I would post on some of the opportunities that caught my eye. These aren’t all of them. WESTAF does good work and I don’t begrudge them their subscription fees which are pretty reasonable given the number of opportunities they list. Based on my assumption that everyone needs money and opportunities these days, it seems a moral imperative to post this information.

Google Grants
The first one is for free advertising for your non-profit from Google. It is similar to their Ad Words service though you don’t get as ready access to keywords and your ad has to be focused on your organization’s mission which is to be expected.

This is actually only one of the services they offer to non-profits. Check out the aptly named, Google for Non-profits for more information.

PennPAT
I have to say, I love PennPAT. They provide nice support for artists and organizations in the Mid-Atlantic States. I just wish I lived in the Mid-Atlantic states! However, no matter where you live, PennPAT will provide assistance with travel costs from anywhere in the US if you are traveling to see one of their artists perform. From the way I read the eligibility requirements, you could be living in Oregon and traveling to California to see one of their artists on tour. Or you could attend their annual showcase in Pennsylvania.

Wachovia Foundation
To receive support from these folks, you pretty much have to live in an area served by Wachovia Bank because they support non-profit organizations with which their employees volunteer. Focus is making artistic opportunities available to people with low to moderate incomes. If you think you are eligible, check out the details. At the very least, it is good to know the bank encourages their employees to volunteer with non-profits and then backs it up with some financial support. (Hey, I also don’t live in a Wachovia state!)

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
As the foundation name suggests, they are primarily focused on contemporary visual arts. However, they do occasionally support performing artists “when the visual arts are an inherent element of a production.” The scope of what they support in visual arts is pretty broad and includes scholarship as well as exhibitions, catalogs and creation of new works. There is also an award for defending the First Amendment right of artists.

Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs
This one is actually a program of the U.S. State Department supporting “cultural exchanges around the world as part of the nation’s public diplomacy strategy. ‘The Department’s agreements support academic, cultural and professional exchange and training programs as a means of seeking mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries and to promote the free exchange of information and ideas.'” If you want to be part of promoting international understanding, you may want to check out the website. I am actually not clear how performers position themselves to be considered since the project proposals apparently originate from what I assume are U.S. Embassies abroad.

The Dana Foundation
The Dana Foundation supports programs that provide professional development opportunities for arts specialists and professional artists who teach preK-12. They are looking for people who have created a curriculum for teaching the teachers essentially. Bad news is the are interested in supporting project originating in 50 mile radius around NYC, Los Angeles or Washington D.C. OR in rural areas. Not so good for those folks in Chicago and Dallas, et. al. but there are still a lot of people able to qualify from rural areas.

National Education Association (NEA) Foundation
The NEA you may not be as familiar with. These folks are also interested in supporting education, but don’t have a geographic limit. They also don’t have a subject area limit so you are potentially competing with everyone from every public school and public higher education institution. On the flip side, this provides possibilities for interdisciplinary and college prep projects.

The Multi-Arts Production (MAP) Fund
“A program of Creative Capital, supports original new work in all disciplines and traditions of the live performing arts. The goal of the MAP Fund is “to assist artists who are exploring and challenging the dynamics of live performance within our changing society, thus reflecting our culture’s innovation and growing diversity.” I haven’t applied for this but some groups with whom we closely partner have. It is a pretty competitive from what I hear.

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
The NEA we all know. Whether Barack Obama will be able to make good on his promises to have a robust arts policy while he is fighting to get the economy stimulated to the point it can be described as tepid remains to be seen. Still, seems like the time to stand up and advocate and apply for some funding.

Tough Times Follow Up

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Arts Presenters posted the audio from the conference call I sat in on two weeks ago.

At the end of my last entry, I referred to cryptic notes I had made to review information. One of the notes was “write about the Boston organization.” This was in reference to Sandra Gibson’s discussion of World Music/CRASHarts in Boston. The organization is sort of shaking up the type of events they offer and how they market them. According to Gibson, they have been cutting a lot of programs over the last 10 years due to increasingly constrained budgets, but they knew they had the ability to expand their reach to younger audiences. They hired a young man who started them on the road to adding back programs. One of the things they have done is began to collaborate with other area organizations and have added 50 concerts in the last year.

This new hire was the impetus for the programming but the fact he has been promoting the events in unconventional ways is really causing conflicts in the organization. The marketing department is anxious about not knowing how to message the events. They feel they should be doing press releases and making other promotional efforts. World Music/CRASHarts lists eight different venues around Boston at which they have events so it is understandable that clear and organized communications would be highly valued. The executive director has started conversations about the situation and the staff has decided to take a chance and market these 50 concerts employing Facebook and other alternative means.

Gibson says they are seeing 60% sell outs (not sure if she means 60% capacity or 60% of the 50 events have sold out. I assume the former.) close to the performance date. As a result they are changing their income projections to reflect an expectation of cash flow later in the process. They are seeing a crossover of audiences who usually respond to subscription campaigns and mailers who are getting their information from these alternative online sources.

In the context of my last entry, this seems like a good example of an organization that has questioned their assumptions about their programming and promotion methods. World Music/CRASHarts hasn’t gotten a huge infusion of cash, yet they have expanded their programming rather than contracting it as they had in the past. Though it was a source of anxiety, they also put some effort into less tested methods of communication to promote their events. At the end of the season, the new direction may turn out to have been unsuccessful. With some luck and discernment, it may provide lessons about how their approach should be refined as they move forward. The former process is unlikely to be sustainable, especially as it apparently involved an increased series of cuts.

Finding Some Direction In Tough Times

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Last week I participated in a conference call sponsored by APAP on the impact of the economy on the presenting field. The call was about an 75-90 minutes long and covered a fair bit of ground. They were supposed to post an audio file of the call this week but haven’t yet. Once they do, I will link to it. As you might imagine, there is quite a bit of concern about the topic. So much so that the opening plenary speaker at the conference will be an economist who will speak on how the current crisis came to be.

A lot of the participants were looking for guidance on possible solutions and ways to cope with the stresses they were feeling. There was a lot of constructive advice given but one of the earliest caveats issued was to resist making decisions that might provide short term relief but damage your organization’s reputation and goodwill over the long term. One example given was trying to dissolve contracts instead of trying to find areas to negotiate costs down.

Word gets around the industry so breaking a contract with one agent/artist can have repercussions for your organization very quickly. In the past month, I have conversations with three people who have moved to a different employer. If I had had poor relationships with any one of their former employers in the past year, word would have easily spread to take care in dealings with me.

Among the suggestions for coping with the current economic situation were examples that many arts organizations are now looking at collaborating, partnering or just plain merging operations. Some are looking at increasing their family programming since people are looking to do things closer to home. Someone on the call suggested that one of the great values of the arts is that, properly positioned, it can help communities deal with tough times and even build communities with others who are having a similarly tough time.

One term that kept coming up in the discussion was Porter’s Five Forces. (or Wikipedia entry) I could, and probably will, do an entirely separate entry on how this applies to the arts. If you have the time to read it, it will put some of the concepts brought up in the conference call in context.

One of the suggestions that was made was to examine the problems your organization has and determine if they really have their origin in the economic problems of if they are pre-existing. Were shifts in local demographics, values and preferences already leaving your organization behind? Was there another organization that had entered the market that was doing what you do, only better?

Something to look at is refocusing on the core competencies of your organization. By which the speaker meant, the elements that were central to what the public valued about your organization. The speaker (sorry, tough to keep track of people on a conference call) reiterated the idea that given another organization might now be doing a better job than you, it might be time to shift your focus.

Someone emailed in a question for the panel about how you innovate in times when there aren’t a lot of funds to support such activities. The answer that was given was to find a new path to achieve the mission. Shift the organization’s pathway away from business as usual. One should be prepared to question the underlying assumptions that you have about every aspect of the business from what your audience and community values to the effectiveness of the business model and organizational structure.

This strikes me as requiring a lot of bravery and resolve. With all the problems that an economic down turn brings, do you really have the time to devote to effecting this sort of change? Though frankly, in good times, do you really have the incentive to do so? In better times, you want to avoid the type of radical changes that may send you into a death spiral. You also have so many things to point at that are apparently working there is no need to closely examine the underlying assumptions.

Addressing other portions of the conference call will have to wait until they post the audio. The rest of my notes contain semi-cryptic messages to review parts of the session whose interesting details came too quickly for my note taking abilities. I am pleased that APAP has taken steps to inform and educated its constituency.

Answering “What Can I Do To Help?”

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NPR’s All Tech Considered show today talked about a website which helps a person’s friends assist them in times of crisis. The site, Lotsa Helping Hands provides the tools to create a free site at which people can volunteer to help someone out without actually having to ask them directly during stressful times. Among the examples given in the piece and the cases discussed were cooking food for funerals or people who had undergone surgery and arranging play dates to keep kids occupied during such times.

The site gives examples of coordinating rides to medical appointments, keeping track of elderly love one’s care, including confidential legal, financial and medical details from a distance. But they also suggest uses of the product for less worrisome situations like simply organizing volunteer efforts in the community.

What made me immediately think about this as being useful for arts organizations was that I was reading the blog at the Hancher Auditorium today. This summer they had an unfortunate visit by the Iowa River when heavy rains caused flooding. They might have been able to use this web site to organize the efforts of sympathetic supporters to clean up and move equipment and materials to dumpsters and alternate performance sites.

Presumably, the software can also be used for more mundane tasks such as allowing and organizing volunteers who sign up to usher, build, conduct tours and the like. I have passed the link on to the gentleman who handles our volunteer coordination to have him assess its usefulness to us.

Creativity Now

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Sort of busy as the holidays approach but a thought came up in recent conversations.

They say the next phase of the economy will emphasize creativity and so people need to acquire the appropriate skills.

I wonder if the recent financial problems originating from Wall Street compounded by the billions lost to the massive Ponzi scheme perpetuated by Bernard Madoff might actually help usher a higher valuation of creative backgrounds along. After all that has happened, and in light of what is yet to come, perhaps an MFA might have less of a stigma than an MBA.

More Manufacturing Your Worst Enemy

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As the title of the entry implies, I did a little more digging on the subject I covered in my last entry. The author of the story I originally quoted, Kaihan Krippendorff, mentioned that he would be writing about his interview with ePrize founder, Josh Linkner, over the course of a week so I sought out the other entries. In one of the entries, Krippendorff links to the audio of his interview.

There were a couple things of note. First was a promotional service (starting around 23:00) he designed to be affordable and accessible to the owner of “Jimmy’s Pizza Shop.” ePrize’s clients essentially pool their money in order to syndicate participation in the pool drawing of promotional prizes. Presumably, you can’t promise a Ford truck if you aren’t investing as much money as Coke does (or maybe you can, I won’t make any claim of being an expert on the business model.) The small business owner can log on and guided by a web based program, design their own promotion in about 15 minutes and have it immediately go live. The drawing is legal in all 50 states, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

If it is as easy as Linkner says, this could be a great resource for arts organizations. You could offer subscriber and employee rewards and perhaps even show related promotions.

Back on the topic of their invented rival, Slither, Linkner verifies that my suspicion of Krippendorff taking poetic license was completely unfounded. Slither did indeed “invade” the company to commit sabotage and espionage (starts around 33:00).

There were some things said in the interview which expound on the concept of how useful an invented enemy can be to a business. One benefit to corporate culture Linkner cites is that it allows open conversation that can circumvent office politics. Normally, he says, one might be hesitant to suggest that a policy is flawed for fear they will insult the person who created it. In a meeting Linkner says he may ask how Slither approaches a problem or to talk about the one thing a Slither counterpart does better than him/her. This allows conversations about weak spots in the organization’s processes and policies and how to improve rather than criticizing something specifically and marking it for elimination.

Manufacturing Your Worst Enemy

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I was reading on Fast Company about a company called ePrize that didn’t have a sufficiently large competitor so they created one to keep themselves innovative. ePrize created a company called Slither complete with logo, an industrial espionage group and history of competitive campaigns. (Though I am not sure about the latter two. That may have been the writer taking poetic license on ePrize’s poetic license.)

By asking its employees what they think their counterpart at Slither would do differently, Linker says ePrize “creates a fun, safe opening for continual discussion about what the company could do better.”

Ask yourself these three questions to see if a threat can unblock your business’ innovations.

1. Who or what is our worst enemy?
2. What is our enemy doing that we can do better?
3. Can we create an enemy to spark new ideas?

Arts organizations have no lack of competition of every shape and size so they have no need of creating an entity for that purpose. I was thinking that perhaps creating an imaginary competitor might be helpful in removing emotional elements which may present an impediment to objectively approaching problems and generating solutions. As I noted a year ago, there is a lot of emotion investment by those working in the arts.

In my personal experience, there is often a lot of envy for our arts neighbors: The other guys are favored yet undeserving of the grants they receive. The other guys are the darlings of the community. The community will give lots of money to save the darling from their missteps but don’t give us a second look. The other guys are bloated, arrogant and outdated; we are lean, innovative and the wave of the future.

In some places this attitude is more prevalent, other places it is less.

By creating an imaginary enemy, you can concentrate on responding to events without the emotional subtext lurking beneath the conversations. Yes, there are plenty of groups out there eating your lunch, but your biggest problem is The House of Extraordinary Matinee idols. (THEM) Your fictional enemy, THEM, noting the trend of sold out shows has decided to program seasons of 100% musicals. How do you position your next season in relation to this imagined challenge?

The fictional enemy doesn’t have to be a proxy for an actual rival in the community, it just has to present a credible challenge to your organization in order to spur innovation and creative thinking. I will confess there are three local organizations that do musicals 100% and others that include a couple in their seasons. I don’t see them as a direct threat to my audiences as I am annoyed by the fact they are essentially forced by the dearth of commercially viable musicals to mount a show another has done a year or so later. It drives me crazy to see the same titles coming around again. (One recently had to promote their production of High School Musical as the first community theatre production in the state because at least nine schools in the county have mounted it in the last three years. Last February & March, three schools performed it in the course of two weeks.) I frankly feel less agitated and more rational when I think of how I would approach the problem of the disembodied THEM.

Now as I said, I don’t see these groups as a direct threat to me. Other than being philosophically offended when I see their advertising, on the whole I don’t have any ill-feelings for them. I rail about the lack of diversity in local offerings for 5 minutes, mostly to entertain myself, and then get on with my day. There are others groups and factors I see as more direct competition. I don’t really harbor any ill will for them either. However, if I were going to design a hypothetical competitor, one of the things it would probably do is produce all musicals all the time. This is because it would have the characteristic of being a popular draw competing for people’s free time and disposable income but not have more elements in common with those I perceive more directly as rivals. Making the fiction resemble reality too closely might impede my ability to stay dispassionate.

Give it a try as an intellectual exercise. Think of a hypothetical entity with characteristics that might challenge you and decide how you would respond. When you have completed your thought process, think back and see if you actually acted that way in a similar situation. I will admit, hypotheticals can only help you so far. It is one thing to talk about how you would handle an irate customer and then discover how you really react in that situation.

In a sense though, what I am suggesting is a sort of reverse engineering where you reflect on the challenges you have faced with the emotion removed. That is why you need a fictitious opponent. When you engage in hindsight, you bring the emotional memory of what happened into your decision making process. Analyzing a situation in terms of “when he said X, I wish I had responded with Y,” can involve anger, resentment and self-recrimination. Also well phrased retorts, while satisfying, don’t solve the larger problem. Coming to the realization that your policies appear inconsistent to a hypothetical segment of your patrons can lead to communicating the policy differently or scrapping it altogether.

Theatre of the Future Gives Me Ulcers

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I happened upon the YouTube video below by Imagination Stage. I surmised that it was part of a contest of sorts held by Theatre Communications Group for organizations to make a video about the future because it is organized in the TCG YouTube account and most of the videos seem to deal with the future of theatre. Also, I have a vague recollection about the contest being listed somewhere.

At first I was a little depressed by the world they portrayed. Then I realized they probably have a pretty accurate view of how things will be. The opening where the girl is getting poor grades, most likely because she is involved in theatre, is actually pretty comforting because it show that some things won’t change.

At first I was a little put off by the idea that she was learning acting from a hologram, especially given that the hologram was pretty over the top. Of course, I figured holograms and virtual reality would be part of the future of theatre back when I started the blog. On the whole, I thought the video was well done and the details of the user interface they portrayed was spot on.

For a moment I was also a little turned off by the idea that acting instruction was structured as a video game with levels to advance through that people would try to gain shortcut cheats through.

Then I thought, we should be so lucky to have people that invested!

I was also heartened by the fact the young woman in the video wouldn’t even consider giving her friend a shortcut hint. There are no shortcuts to hard work, after all.

What disturbed me the most though was the concept that a production would be subject to the caprice of whether talented people chose to log in or not and doing so at the last minute. The video shows the young woman manifesting in a theatre and the director saying they hoped she would log on, tossing out an auditioner who was less qualified for some reason. I assumed she hadn’t obtained enough points/levels. Then the young woman rehearses as a hologram opposite live people and performs as Juliet at the opening the next night.

As I acknowledged though, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility. If audiences are waiting until the last moment to buy tickets, could not artists delay the decision about which production they wanted to be involved with until the last minute? If performers have the ability to manifest themselves as holograms in 2028, opportunities become available across the entire country and perhaps the world.

As long as there are more actors than roles, then there will always be competition. But then competition for elite performers also becomes extreme. Get great reviews for your performance as King Lear in Madison, WI one night, you could receive an offer to play Lear in Hong Kong the next night and actually be able to do it. What worries me is the ulcer inducing environment this will create for arts managers.

But damn, wouldn’t bring a real sense of excitement and unpredictability to the arts. The most notable companies won’t be those who can maintain a stable cast, it will be those who can produce a consistently high quality product regardless of the vagaries of the cast.

Prepare for Feast in Famine

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As much as I talk about what a bad turn things have taken of late, I do want to advocate cautious optimism unless you are in immediate danger of closing your doors. This may be a period of retrenchment and delaying activities, but it probably is not good to abandon long term plans entirely.

For one thing, your supporters may be more optimistic and energetic than you give them credit for. As you may remember, I am providing feedback on the design and construction of a performing arts center in Bellevue, WA. Within weeks of our group site visit, everything really went to hell on Wall Street with Lehman Brothers and many banks failing in the space of a week or two. I was praying that the finances of those who supported the performing arts center construction weren’t too entangled in these troubles. My fear was that the next email we got from the arts center administration was that they decided to scale back given the financial woes.

I was quite pleased when the next email brought news that everyone was excited by suggestions that came out of the site visit and that the plans were getting a little more ambitious. Around the same time, the local Indian community, undeterred by the emerging economic problems announced their intent to raise $1 million and were already $400,000 along. Last month, another support group held a benefit that raised $450,000. Given that the same event in 2007 raised $320,000, staying ambitious and optimistic in a faltering economy seems to have yielded some results.

Now I don’t expect everyone will realize a $130,000 gain by thinking positive. I am sure a lot of ground work was required over the intervening year to realize that sort of success. It’s the ground work, relationship building and planning that you can’t allow to falter if you decide to put activities on hold. In my theatre we are planning for a renovation. We know the renovation is going to be further off than it was last year but we are still moving ahead assessing the work that needs to be done. When things turn around and money becomes available, we want to be ready with a plan. Not having a plan at the time might mean getting passed over for another budget cycle or two.

Even if you aren’t building something physical, you can use the time to meet key decision makers to gauge what their agendas are so you can make effective proposals when they are more open to receiving them. It is also the time to research and learn new theories related to your long term plans. True, arts leaders have little time to engage in research as it is. The necessity of putting action on hold allows you to research periodically over a longer interval than trying to cram it into a short gap before implementation. Or even worse, neglecting to be up on current practices and theories while executing a program.

Certainly tough times bring their own problems which displace our ability to engage in any of these practices. Yet, we do have the ability to be constructive even as we may choose to defer construction.

NB-Since this entry first appeared, I have corrected my math 😛

The Lipinski Stradivarius Is Coming To Town

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…Oh and it is bringing Frank Almond with it.

I have been hearing ads and stories about a performance in which Frank Almond will participate shortly. However, they all lead in by talking about the violin. The story goes on to talk about the sponsoring organization and then Frank’s interview is at the latter third.

It is always important to work with high quality tools but usually it is the musician that lends cachet to the instrument, not the other way around. You want the guitar Jimi Hendrix played or one that Pete Townshend smashed. But with classical stringed instruments, especially the violins, it is the other way around.

The presence of the violin eclipses the musician. Because a superlative instrument needs an excellent player, Frank Almond is elevated to the plane of the lone cowboy who can tame the wild stallion or the only pilot with the skills to keep the experimental airplane under control. In this context I begin to imagine the grisly deaths of second chair violinists when the first chair’s concentration flags for a moment and the bow is torn from their hands. Or violinists decapitated by a snapping string when the instrument decides the musician is not worthy of it. With such power imbued in it, it is any wonder the devil has chosen a fiddle as his instrument?

Okay, so maybe my imagination is more vivid than most. But in the interview with Frank I heard today, he as much admits he is servant to the music and the instrument. “When it is working, it is great fun. Practice makes perfect,” he replies to the observation that it must be fun to play all the double stops in the Bruch Violin Concerto.

From a butts in the seats perspective, it is amazing to me that a well crafted piece of wood can command the attendance of so many. I will be the first to admit that the storied past of the instrument of which Frank is merely one of a series of custodians is quite exciting and engaging

Must Remember: Innovative, Not Creative

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I have been over at Artsjournal.com reading the entries in the Arts Education discussion. The entry that gave me most pause was one by Eric Booth today where he notes,

“people in business have asked me if we can just stop using the word “art” because they stop listening. They then confessed they are not really interested in the word “creativity” either–they kind of glaze over–they like the word “innovation” because it is the product that they really care about, getting new business-ready products as a competitive advantage.”

A Rose By Any Other Name Is Just As Fluffy
This is not something you want to hear if these same business people are the ones involved in the philanthropy decisions for companies. Booth makes some interesting points answering comments in that entry which expound on this idea. He says business people feel creativity is a “fog-sculpting word that fluffy artsy people use.” They prefer innovation because that is the result they seek. They see creativity as being on the path to innovation and they will tolerate the use of the word as long as we can trace the path for them.

I couldn’t help thinking that innovation is easily as nebulous a word and only derives its power from the fact they repeat it back and forth to each other. Recall these are the people who were tossing “synergy” around as a desired outcome a few years ago.

Direct and Indirect Arts Encounters
As I was reading the multiple entries on arts education, I was reminded of a locally produced show on the public radio station I heard early last month on the topic of technology use in the classroom. Now there are many options for including art in a student’s experience from a direct experience with a performance or having the students perform/create themselves. On the other end of the spectrum is including art in instruction of other subjects. Making those hand shaped turkeys while teaching about the first Thanksgivings, for example.

Focus on the Objectives, Not the Tools
What I saw as applicable from the radio show about using technology in the classroom is on the latter end of the spectrum. The people on the show talked about the importance of focusing on the learning and not the device. One of the guests who is involved with a local foundation said that they wouldn’t provide grant money for a project seeking to use cell phones in the classroom because the focus was on the technology rather than the learning. The example he gave of what they would be interested in supporting was a program that focused on how students learn and how to develop critical thinking skills. If the teachers decided to have students collect and record information as part of this process and realized that one of the best methods available would be by having students utilize cellphones since they always had them handy as they go through their day, the foundation would be interested in funding this sort of endeavor.

Given that I am in the business of offering live performances, my first vote is always going to be for live interactive experiences with art. Watching or participating in some sort of activity is my first choice when it comes to arts education for any demographic or age group. You will never achieve any real aptitude either in understanding or execution if your interactions with art is slipped in between the pages of some other subject. You may develop appreciation, comfort and familiarity which these days is not to be discounted. But I want people able to enjoy interactions with art.

Wherein I Contradict What I Just Said
Now all that being said, I am going to do a little reversal. What seemed to be the core of the discussion regarding technology in the classroom was the idea that you shouldn’t define what you need to be doing in the context of popular technologies, rather how the technology can facilitate what you really need to be doing. That is my basic point when I suggest people not jump on adopting every new technology that becomes vogue. I think there may be some validity in taking this approach when advocating for arts education.

Arts Prescriptions
Right now a lot of the arts education is promoted along the philosophy of “You must have Mozart or you brain will atrophy.” This is the case made for in utero exposure as well as arguing music will raise math and science grades. The prescriptive approach to arts advocacy doesn’t really benefit us in the long run. Saying that you have to integrate cellphones into classroom instruction is much the same approach. You don’t need to use cellphones, you need to teach critical thinking and the cellphones are a tool. You can use the arts to teach critical thinking. Heck, the arts don’t exist in a vacuum today and they certainly didn’t in the past. The subject can be used to teach literature, history, politics, etc,. I did well in history, but I would have been all the more interested had I learned that someone commissioned a work to tweak the nose of an enemy or rival.

I will admit I haven’t had a lot of experience seeing it implemented, but whenever I hear people talk about integrated curriculum whether it includes arts or not, it sounds so clunky and unwieldy. The way it is described sounds very prescriptive and evokes an image of alternative subject matter inserted in a textbook on handwritten sheets of looseleaf because an administrator decided that this was the new way it was going to be taught. I am sure there are very successful programs out there on which to model an approach but I am entirely unaware of them.

Everyone Is Happier With Shoes That Fit Well
What the arts have to do is convince educators and decision makers who aren’t familiar with our disciplines that their instruction does not necessarily have to be defined by a need to shoehorn the arts in but rather that the arts can be a tool that integrates smoothly into achieving their objectives.

Of course, if you see an opening to champion direct arts instruction and after school activities, push, push, push for that!

What A Great Show. Please Pass the Pumpkin Pie

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I tell you, there is nothing better for your digestion on Thanksgiving Day, nothing better at waking you up from a carb induced doze, than someone praising your last show and insisting people go see one of your upcoming performances. That’s what happened this past Thursday. I was having dinner at the house of a friend who has no connection to the performing arts at all. One of her guests, clearly intelligent and possessed of good taste, praised the most recent performance and then went on to talk about how excited he was that a particular artist was scheduled in the next couple months and that everyone should go see her.

While this gentleman was talking about how exciting the most recent show was, I had a reaction very similar to one that Inside the Arts neighbor Holly Mulcahy describes in a Partial Observer post today. In her second point, she talks about the importance of not allowing our hyper-awareness and intimacy with a performance get in our way of accepting a compliment.

As we are wont to do, my staff and I talked over the strengths and weaknesses of the performance casting a pretty critical eye on the production. While I was happy that the dinner guest hadn’t noticed any of these things, I was a little disappointed that he was focusing on the spectacle and not really talking about the actor performances or at least things about each character that resonated with him. I tried to steer the conversation in that direction a couple times but what I really wanted to do is throttle him while screaming “Stop talking about the spectacle!!!”

Now I have to admit, achieving the spectacle took a lot of hard work and those who executed it deserve a lot of praise. I have absolutely no problem with people noticing and complimenting the beauty of the set and lighting design since those folks rarely get enough recognition. The performed spectacle occurred just a few times in the production so it didn’t overwhelm or really define the show. But that is what impressed him most. That is what he remembered best. That is what he talked about.

But as Andrew Taylor notes in a talk posted on his blog today (around minute 20), the producers of an experience don’t get the final say in how the experience is processed. Something happened that was meaningful for him. And he had it in my venue which is a small victory for both of us since my preference is for people to be here than elsewhere. Despite all the flaws we may have seen with the show, I knew that overall we offered a quality product to our audiences and there was ultimately no shame to be associated with the show.

I really didn’t have any problem accepting the compliment. I am sure the delicious pumpkin bread helped make it taste all the sweeter. My comment about choking him was a bit of hyperbole, especially since I probably would have knocked over the gravy. I don’t think there is anything wrong with wanting your audiences to speak a little more confidently after every visit and it is part of our job to help them get there.

Out Damn Robot!

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First it was cars and real estate, now the Japanese are making a move on our arts industry! Back in April, I wrote about the Honda robot</at that conducted the Detroit Symphony.

Now Mitsubishi is attempting to build a better actor. Actually, Mitsubishi built the robot. Osaka University developed the software to allow the robot to interact with others on stage.

According to the BBC article, “In the play, the robot complains that it has been forced into boring and demeaning jobs…”

Sounds to me like the robot has already immersed itself in the daily life of an actor.

I guess Futurama had it right and one day we will be treated to performances by the likes of Calculon.

Art Is Cake

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Thinking Big Thoughts
We were closing a production this past week so I was occupied with that project and didn’t have too much time to create entries. However, as I wandered through the lobby between acts, I did have time to ponder various subjects. One of the things I thought about was issue of arts as a way of cultivating various goals within community vs. arts as a profit making venture. I am constantly thinking about issues related to whether arts organizations should exist in their current form, the type of fare they should be offering, what philosophies they should be embracing in an age of technology and a whole host of related ideas.

That is a pretty big concept to tackle, thus my note in yesterday’s entry that I didn’t think I could and meet my obligations last evening. I continued thinking about it today while catching up on the blogs whose feeds to which I subscribe.

It turns out that Don Hall and Adam Thurman both addressed this topic two weeks ago. I won’t reiterate what they and the commenters discussed at length.

Well, except for one person.

Too Much Cake
The point made by Nick Keenan really summed up the problem we face. You can argue judgments about art are a result of snobbery and relativist visions of quality and I think it is important for these conversations to continue. But to me Nick seems have cut right to the heart of why the environment is unsustainable.

Here’s the problem: On an industry-wide scale, equating popularity with quality is a dangerous game. It fuels volatility and kills innovation, which can often lead to a lack of flexibility in the industry…

To put our playing field another way, the Jukebox musicals and reality-TV-fed downtown spectaculars may be wildly popular, but they are like Cake and Frosting. Eat too much of them, and our patrons will get a stomach ache and associate that stomach ache with the theater. We need to serve people a well-balanced meal as well as the meal that they want to buy. To me, that means innovation as entertainment, rather than fluff as entertainment. They are not generating new artists and new forms that will lead to connecting with new audiences. The R&D for that new audience solution is being done in our storefront theaters, but especially the largest theaters in our community (Broadway in Chicago) are foregoing a great deal of commitment to this R&D so that they can focus on profits.

Nick makes no claims that the storefront theatres are creating works that are more or less worthy to be called art than the product presented by the large spectaculars. He points out where the investments in the future are being made which to me is a good rational for supporting those places.

Constructive Use of Free Time
One observation I wanted to make that no one really preempted was that despite how broken (and increasingly going broke) the existing system of funding the arts is, it seems to me that since about the beginning of the 20th century the arts world has been given the breathing space to discuss these issues on a large scale.

This may be news to those actors, musicians and visual artists who are waiting tables, watching kids and working as customer service reps at insurance companies for as their first through third jobs in order to support their creative activities.

Artists may have always complained about audiences having low tastes since the Greeks but they were still beholden to patrons, be they aristocracy or townspeople gathering around their wagons and in town squares to earn their living. They had to performed what was valued to survive.

It wasn’t until relatively recently in the last century or so that those who were doing the performing (as opposed to scholars) had an opportunity and breathing room to stay in one place long enough to ponder and discuss these things among themselves and begin to comment and theorize on the state of things as a group. The Internet has merely closed the geographic gaps and allowed the conversation to become more widespread.

This freedom and flexibility was funded by Carnegie, Rockefeller and the Ford Foundation. But the model they helped introduce doesn’t seem to be viable any longer. The next model may manifest itself out of the conversations these entities enabled. It is important to cultivate and participate in them.

Preparation for Conservation on Arts Education

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The topic I was going to blog on today got me thinking so much I don’t think I can coalesce my thoughts and attend to the obligations I have this evening.

I did want to mention, if you haven’t noticed that next week Artsjournal.com is hosting a debate on arts education. Being a once and hopefully future educator, I believe in preparing for discussions. In addition to pondering the issues which face the arts in relation to education while indolently laying about after Thanksgiving dinner (or industriously scrubbing the dishes.) You may also want to prepare by reading arts education blogs like Richard Kessler’s. He will be participating in the debate next week.

I also suggest my Inside the Arts neighbor Ron Spigelman’s Audience Connection’s class podcasts. Education of artists is part of arts education and the podcasts are a primary source for the questions students are being asked and are asking. Don’t be put off by the number of podcasts listed. Each one is only about 4-5 minutes long. In fact, it it is better to experience them in the context of the original entries which are here.

I always find these conversations Artsjournal hosts to be engaging and thought provoking. Between the number of people generating entries and those commenting, there is a lot going on daily. Make some time to read every day otherwise you may be overwhelmed by the amount you need to catch up on and only skim. Arts education is a subject that deserves more than skimming.

We Got Answers, You Got the Questions?

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Everything Needs A Little Organization
I learned a semi-important lesson about injecting a little organization into seemingly low key events. We had a large group make an advance request to meet the cast of our current production after the performance. The group organizer didn’t think the older people would want to interact with the case, but was pretty sure the kids in their group would want to. I talked to the director and between us made all the required arrangements with the cast.

Essentially, the plan was to have the group come down to the edge of the stage after the show and the cast would come out to talk with them. We were open to any other members of the audience coming down to speak with the cast as well but didn’t announce the opportunity.

Before the show the group leader came to me again and double checked that their group could meet with the cast. She told me how keen they were to meet the cast. I went backstage and verified the arrangements with the director and stage manager.

Come, Talk To Us!
Well come the end of the show, the cast came out and some people came down to talk with them but most hung back and talked with other friends in their group. The cast had come out prepared to answer questions about the production and ready to interact with young people and were disappointed that the interest wasn’t as advertised.

I began to suspect that perhaps the group leader and a few others were excited at the idea of their young people meeting the cast but hadn’t actually measured or cultivated any interest in the kids. Nor did they really encourage people to come forward. It seemed the group leader was happy with the experience because those who wanted to talk and get autographs had the opportunity to do so.

My thought is that I should have talked to the group leader a little more to learn what she expected and to express how we envisioned the encounter taking place. With kids involved we obviously desired something more spontaneous than a “raise your hand Q&A” but still wanted some effort expended to corral people in our direction.

Questions Are The Hardest Part
Ultimately, I think the whole concept of a Q&A with audiences may be flawed. The majority of the time it the experience seems to be a disappointment for the artists involved. The source of this disappointment seems to be the questions being asked which tend to revolve around the basic discipline any performer must cultivate; things like how they remember all their lines or movements.

The source of this problem is that people generally don’t know what to ask. You can probably trace this all the way back to the lack of arts education in the schools without too much effort if you had a mind to. It is a matter of lack of exposure and understanding about the process. Audiences ask how long people rehearsed. Performers are dying to talk about how things evolved and were decided over the rehearsal process.

Why Does That Sound So Familiar?
Unfortunately, that conversation often has no meaning for audiences. In a Q&A for a Shakespearean play, an actor remarked that the choice was made to perform the show in the standard North American dialect. Even though the patron had just heard it for a couple hours, she asked the actor to say something in the dialect and was rather disappointed at how unremarkable it was not comprehending that the “standard” label referred to how common it is to hear people speaking that manner.

We Will Answer Your Questions…
One of the easiest steps to take would be to list possible discussion questions in the playbill for people to ponder while they watch the performance. Of course, there is no guarantee people will read that part of the playbill or will think at all. I have seen a couple theatres include these questions in their programs. I only remember attending Q&A sessions at one place. It didn’t eliminate questions about learning lines but the quality of questions seemed higher. I can’t say if it was a result of the discussion prompts or the general quality of the audience members being better than at other places.

Perhaps one of the elements integral to making people feel more involved with performances is really, really, really pushing them to ask questions. This means having someone with answers. Given that designers and directors move on after a show has opened, stage managers, actors and technicians are busy wrapping up after the performance any not always available, this may mean having a separate person with an intimate knowledge of the performance available in the theatre or lobby immediately after the show to fulfill patrons’ desire of instant gratification.

..But Please Don’t Text During the Show
They may also be tasked with answering questions via online forums later as people digest what they have seen. Or perhaps they are following up with answers to questions they didn’t know the night before. They may even end up fielding text messages during a performance. Not the ideal situation from the performer’s point of view, but perhaps highly valued by the patron.

Rare Relaxing Residencies for Arts and Culture Managers

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Always on the look out for programs that benefit arts managers, I came across the following listing offering residencies to arts and cultural managers at a location in Key West. For some reason, they don’t promote the opportunity on their website. You need a subscription to reach the website on which it was listed. But such is my desire to make people aware of the opportunity, I am reproducing selected portions of the listing here. If you are interested, you can contact them and they can regale you with all the benefits of their facility.

Artists and Managers in Their Natural Environment!
I am aware of numerous organizations that provide residency to artists but this is the first I have encountered that offers them to leaders and administrators. Since you would theoretically go alone, it wouldn’t be a staff retreat where you engage in group strategizing or team building activities. It might be beneficial for administrators to mix with creative artists for whom they would have no responsibility. There would be no pressure to rein in, budget money for or contract the services of the creative artists. It is not often arts managers have an extended time in an arts environment free of these considerations. It might actually help managers and artists develop healthier attitudes toward each other. From my experiences in performing arts and from what I have read on blogs and articles, I don’t think there is an arts discipline where the relationships aren’t at least guarded.

Anyhow, here is the listing. Hopefully one of my intrepid readers or their friends will have the opportunity to engage in a constructive stay.

Mull Management in Mango Tree House

IT’S NOT A JOB, IT’S A CREATIVE ISLAND ADVENTURE The Studios of Key West, an emerging creative community at America’s Southernmost Point, seeks cultural managers and innovative arts administrators for 1 to 2 week residencies in our Mango Tree House. This residency requires no work, no problem solving, no meetings or presentations, and no reporting of any kind. Directors, program officers, and Alliance of Artists Communities’ leaders: Tell us your dates, plan your travel, and think Zen.

A SHORT TROPICAL RETREAT FOR ARTS ADMINISTRATORS As a companion to our longer-term Artist-in-Residence program, this short-term stay in Key West’s Old Town can include project research, program planning, networking and collaborating; or it can simply be a retreat-like hermitage on a warm and libertarian island, away from the usual workaday environment. TSKW is currently considering the short-term residency needs of academics, cultural managers, critics, instituional officers, museum professionals, and other professional people involved in forging high, low, popular, and obscure culture. Time and space in Key West will provide new influences and fresh experiences, and an appreciation for life here in the Conch Republic, 30 leagues North of Havana, America’s Mile Marker 0, Cayo Hueso

[…]

The Studios of Key West is proud to offer a handful of 1 to 2 week residencies for America’s Cultural Managers and Arts Administrators each year. If you have time off to travel to the Southernmost Point, and are interested in a singular retreat opportunity, please contact us for details on how to proceed.

IS THIS A VACATION? Yes, but it’s also a new form of professional development, in a place that will welcome and honor your presence, at a new kind of creative community. Learn about us here www.tskw.org, then contact Eric Vaughn Holowacz Executive Director at eric@tskw.org

THE FINE PRINT Cultural managers, arts administrators, artistic directors and producers, program officers and curators who can get away from their busy roles for a week or two are welcome to express interest in the TSKW Cultural Manager Residency. Participants must be able to cover travel to and from Key West, as well as some living expenses while on the island. […]

Come Early And Watch

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I really love watching productions come together. Last night I was watching a dress rehearsal for a show we are opening on Friday. I always do so around this time so I can spot any audience related concerns that didn’t occur to anyone to tell me. I usually watch for things like strobe use, characters entering from the audience that will necessitate holding late seating or people returning from restrooms. I also keep an eye out for things that might offend audiences despite assurances that there is nothing offensive in the show. (Yeah, right)

I give feedback on the production. I don’t engage in any of the meddling for which producers are stereotypically infamous. Generally I just talk about things that confused me because of costuming, point out some overacting that went on while the director was looking elsewhere or note that people were bumping the scrim during backstage crossovers.

A recent development I have been pleased to see is the migration of staging techniques from our smaller experimental Lab Theatre space to our Mainstage. In that space activity begins as people are being seated prior to the performance, segues in the performance proper and through the intermission. What I have liked is that the action has been appropriate for the performance and has engaged the audience’s interest. Seats are filled well before the show begins so there is no need to chase people in from the lobby or wait while stragglers pick up tickets.

Beyond guaranteeing order and promptness, I appreciate that this is a step away from the pattern of arrive, sit quietly during the show, leave. People can talk during the pre-show and intermission or watch as they please. It also gives the performers an opportunity to create something original within the bounds of the production circumstances. They can develop their character a little more. Infrequently seen characters can get a little more performance time.

My hope is that something more evolves out of it and takes theatre to the next stage in engaging the audience. My fear is that the practice will move from appropriate to gratuitous as people decide it is a cool thing to do and attempt to include it in every performance. Not only will it be ill considered artistically, but it can also halt the evolution I hope for if people get stuck in the rut.

The mainstage production we are opening doesn’t actually incorporate original work but rather uses a song from the script as a musical interlude during the intermission to lead back into the show. One consideration in attempting what I have described here is that inclusion of original work before and in the middle of a performance may run counter to the intent of the creator and invalidate your performance license. You may also run into copyright infringement. Our Lab space has done out of copyright works or added the action with the approval (and some times participation) of the playwright.

None of things mean it is a bad idea. I am sure this not a unique idea and other theatres regularly use these techniques. In fact, I am pretty sure at best it may be a new take on a very old idea.

Bullets and Hooks For The Arts!

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Amid all the press about the Obama victory last week and the extremely slim margin of votes separating Norm Coleman and Al Franken in Minnesota, you may have missed the news that Minnesotans passed a constitutional amendment to increase the sales tax 3/8 of 1% to fund the cleaning and maintenance of Minnesotan lakes, parks and wildlife areas and to fund the arts.

Arts Go Fishing And Catch Some Money
You may be wondering, as I was, how the arts and culture became a part of the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment. According to a couple sources, sport fishermen and hunters found a common cause with the arts. On the Pioneer Press website, Chris Niskanen writes (my emphasis)

“A small part of the general fund (about $10 million) goes toward arts funding (out of the state’s $34 billion budget), but about one-third was cut during the state’s budget crisis in 2003. The hunting and fishing community at first opposed arts being added to the amendment, but saw arts supporters had similar arguments for funding. The alliance ultimately helped the amendment pass the Legislature and, perhaps, will help it pass on Nov. 4.”


Bait Your Hook With A Powerful Lure-Arts and Culture

But the quote I really liked came from an article Artsjournal.com linked to in which columnist Jay Weiner writes,

“As it was, the pioneers of the amendment idea — the sportsmen with bullets and hooks — were wary enough of the arts being included … until they saw the political power of the statewide arts and cultural organizations.”

My first thought upon reading this was that if this is true, the Minnesota arts community should be the envy of the rest of the country. Every state should be lucky enough to have an arts community with enough political clout to help get a constitutional amendment passed. Of course, that influence didn’t magically appear, the state arts community would have been working on cultivating it over the course of years and probably decades.

If you have any ambition of trying something like this in your state, read Niskanen’s piece which addresses the arguments for and against the amendment.

You may also want to read Weiner’s article which addresses the apparently mocking suggestion that the Minnesota Vikings should have gotten on board the amendment so they could get a stadium. Weiner points out first that as fervent as sports fans in Minnesota are, they never seem to rally behind their teams politically. The other thing he mentions is that berating the arts and parks people perpetuates an environment which keeps sports fans from forming coalitions. Some interesting thoughts on the whole from a sports writer.

Work For Obama? Yes, You Can!

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Get Your Plum
The presidential transition team has set up a website at Change.gov where you can actually apply for a non-career position with the new government. There is a link to the transition directory in the lower right hand corner to give you an idea of what to expect if you apply. Even though it is a similar color, it apparently is not the famed Plum Book though you probably can use it to get a sense of the general department for which you may want to work.

I mention this in hopes some passionate people interested in government service will step forward for the NEA, NEH and other cultural and educational departments. There is certainly a need for competent people to enter public service. A foundation endowing the Wilson School at Princeton University is suing the school for not preparing enough people to enter government.

What You Should Really Look At
Even if you have no ambition to work for the government, you may want to contribute at the American Moment: Share Your Vision link. I am sure there are a lot of people with millions of ideas who will contribute via this page and anything we send may get lost in the crush. Still there is a better chance of something happening than if nothing is said.

The page provides the ability to upload a photo or video. My immediate thought was that if someone knows of a great program out there they should create a well written document supported by images and video. Share your vision for an arts education program based on something that works in at a school district in Montana. Talk about the way the local government partnered with industry to lead community investment in that arts center overlooking Lake Erie. Tell them about your idea for changing the tax code to provide arts organizations with other alternatives to the 501 (c) (3) structure. I had no intent of submitting anything myself, but now as I write, I begin to have some ideas.

Fake Violence Can Still Be Traumatic

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Via Artsjournal.com is an interesting article on how actors deal with inflicting violence on one another. Even though it is simulated, the very personal, brutal actions the performers replicate can have a psychological impact on them.

Acting Comes Between Us
I have been involved with two productions of Extremities, a play in which a woman is attacked in her home by a man intent on raping her. She gains control of the situation and takes her revenge on him. The actors get physically close to enacting the rape and when the tables are turned, the would be rapist is half blinded, tied up in a fireplace with his intended victim threatening to burn him. In both productions I have been associated with the two primary actors had to take showers afterward to cleanse themselves of the psychic and emotional baggage of the show. People who were close friends found an uneasiness crept into their relationships during the production. They had to reassure and reconnect with each other after every performance to essentially ground themselves.

I know much of this because rape as a subject matter lent itself to many outreach and audience talk back sessions. On one production one of my responsibilities was to make extra sure that family and friends didn’t make their way backstage before the actors had an opportunity to reoriented themselves.

Hopefully No Wrong Ideas About Method Acting
As far as I know, no one went out and engaged in violent behavior in order to prepare for the performance. I think what disturbed each person so much wasn’t that they had so much simulated violence directed at them as that they found something to tap into within themselves to fabricate a credible portrayal. Knowing that the potential for that sort of thing exists within you and your friends can be pretty unsettling.

Coping Mechanisms for Violent Acting
As I read the NY Times article about how the how London actors insulated themselves from their actions, I wondered if that sort of strategy was widely used by actors. It certainly didn’t seem that way with the highly charged productions I have been involved in. I also wondered if theatres who produce these types of shows make alterations to their normal practices and give the performers extra time and dedicated spaces to wind down after performances.

I would be interested in hearing about other people’s experiences either in the comments section or by email.

Where Is The Love?

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Where Is That “Yes, We Can Spirit?”
Well, whatever optimism people may have felt about Obama becoming president-elect, it apparently wasn’t enough to offset pessimism over the economy. Not only did the Dow drop 480 some points but I got two separate calls about problems with some tours. Even though the difficulties occur after the performers leave my venue, the whole situation reverberates up the line in the form of inquiries about how flexible I am on a number of matters.

Where Is My Partner?
Then I get a call from one of my partners about a third tour. Given everything that has happened until now, I thought her organization might cancel on a tour too. My fears were compounded by the fact I can’t reach her all morning and suddenly her phone is ringing busy for hours on end. Has she left the phone of the hook so she doesn’t have to tell me the bad news? (Then why did she call me?) Imagine my relief when I realized there was a problem with entire organization’s phone system that was causing it to ring busy and when I learned she had misplaced her copy of the tour contract I am lead partner on and had a simple question.

Where Is This All Going?
When I wrote about the possible impacts of the economic downturn a few weeks ago, I half imagined I wouldn’t have any practical interaction with any of the consequences I was mentioning. If anything, I thought it would be me negatively affecting other people–though there is still plenty of time for that to come to pass.

Where Is the Money!
One semi-positive occurrence this week. The amount the state arts foundation grant panel elected to award us was more than we expected. The bad news is that I found out at 4 pm Monday that the revised proposal was due this Friday. So there was a little bit of a rush since there are two layers of bureaucracy which must review my proposal before it could be submitted and the didn’t work on election day. Of course, the whole process is embraced by the caveat that I may get no reward for my expeditious handling of the paperwork if the governor decides to defund the state foundation.

I also have the sneaking suspicion that the larger than expected grant award is based on the assumption that few will be able to meet the fast deadline and if there is any money to disburse, there will be fewer people to split it between.

Lasting Influence of Superlative Volunteers

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Late last week, I received news that a superlative volunteer at an organization I was once employed had died. The news shocked everyone given that she was only in her mid-fifties. Even though I no longer work at the organization, I wanted to use the forum of my blog to do honor to her on the day of her wake to acknowledge the place she had in my life and so many others.

Beverly Dodge was not, to my knowledge, related in any way to Geraldine R. Dodge but on a local level she contributed as much to the arts in her community as the Dodge Foundation. She proved the adage about there being no small roles, only small people. Even in the most passive sense, people’s lives connected with her’s. Her family had a long history in the small town where she lived. One of the staff of my former employer lives in the house Bev grew up in. Although the general store which Bev’s parents once owned closed for a number of years after their deaths, the woman who bought it kept the Dodge name in acknowledgment of it’s history in the town.

She never married but she did have many children. For many years she hosted Japanese exchange students for a year in high school. Some of them returned to live with her when they came back to the U.S. for college. I never heard any of them call her anything but Mom. A couple even brought boyfriends back from Japan to meet Bev.

Bev was the volunteer coordinator at the local hospital and was a primary force in the community fair the hospital held every year. She had a real service orientation in her life. In addition to volunteering for Appel Farm, where I worked, she was active in her church. A couple years ago for her 50th birthday she asked that instead of buying gifts, attendees bring cash that would be donated to Heifer International, an organization that buys livestock, birds and plants to enable people to feed and support themselves.

Of course, she also volunteered for Appel Farm and was the primary hospitality entity that interacted with many groups. For small groups, I took care of hospitality needs but when it came multiple groups or larger events, she was the go to person. She was highly organized, attentive, resourceful and calm in the face of frantic or demanding artists. These are all crucial traits for a hospitality person to have. But she was also patient in the face of long periods of down time and that is something I haven’t found in a volunteer since.

There is a hurry up and wait element in some presenting situations. There is a rush to get everything set up correctly and get food set out and coffee made. Then when the artist arrives there are bus drivers to run to hotels, clothes to be pressed and ironed. But then, you wait….and wait…and wait some more. This is a sign that everything is okay in most cases. People who haven’t done this before feel like they are useless. They have been asked to come in six hours before the curtain. There was a lot to do and now, there is nothing.

But they aren’t useless. I have a lot run around to check on. Other volunteers to meet. Security people to check on. Artists and technicians whose progress I need to monitor. It is a great relief to me that I don’t have to worry about making coffee, icing down more water, running unanticipated errands. When all the little quick jobs aren’t being done, they add up. It’s isn’t just the jobs themselves, it is wiping up the loose coffee grounds, throwing away used plates and crumpled napkins to maintain a pleasant appearance in the green room. Done all at once these things take a lot of time you may not have if you are dealing with thousands of other details.

It is tough to find someone who recognizes that like Bev did and who plans to bring a book and knitting to do. She would introduce herself, quietly withdraw into a corner and then step forward when it was apparent that there was a need. If having good front of house staff is crucial to audience relations, good hospitality staff is crucial to making the performers comfortable, happy and prepared to put on a great show.

There were also occasions where she would have the artists over her house for dinner. It wasn’t terribly often. A lot of people are wary about ending up obligated to remain in the same room as a potentially overbearing fan. But there are a couple people who took a chance or heard good things who welcomed the opportunity for a home cooked meal in the middle of a lengthy tour. Those who didn’t eat at her house became her friend and engaged in lively chatter with her. Even those artists who tended to be reclusive and reserved warmed up to her –or at least what passed for warming up in the context of their normal behavior.

One of the biggest hospitality services Bev provided was during our annual outdoor music festival. Having deep roots in the area, Bev had a lot of cousins. Some of them helped us out on other events, but pretty much all of them got pulled in to the Festival. Fortunately, Bev was sweet tempered because it could have gone badly for us if we got on her bad side. As it was, there was a wedding in the family on the same day as the festival one year and we lost the half of the family that felt closer to the bride than the other half. (Though loyalty still ran high as some of them skipped out of the reception to come to the festival.) I am hoping with her death one of her trusted lieutenants will take charge of the area.

If you have ever volunteered on a music festival, you may know that it can be difficult to get one of the more prestigious assignments. In some cases, this is good because you want trusted, tested people on the crew. The problem with some places is that the crews become very insular and political in a less than constructive way. We tried to prevent this from developing through the general low key environment we cultivated and the process by which people could volunteer. Given we were trying to get 500 volunteers a day, we did depend on crew chiefs to do a lot of the recruitment, but we also introduced people we were trying to develop as future leaders so there was always new blood.

I tell you this to illustrate the trust we had in Bev when I say we never worried about this happening in the artist hospitality area. Part of it I think was due to the fact that she and many of the people she recruited were much more involved with the organization on a year round basis. Even though she was the volunteer coordinator at the hospital, she drew on very few of them. As many cousins as she had in the area, it wasn’t all family either. Many of them lived locally and I guess intuitively understood what we needed from them—and then they would go an extra mile.

I mean, I would take 12-14 artist riders and make a shopping list. We would fill up three flatbed carts at Sam’s Club and then three vehicles to get it all back to the office. Then we engaged a caterer to make food for the artists and volunteers. The amount of food Bev and her cousins brought themselves, you would think we were scheming to starve the performers. There were pots and pots of stuff they had been making for weeks. And Bev would have copies of all the riders so she could make sure to set aside any special requests specific groups had so she knew exactly what I was getting.

Other than being concerned about breaking an overloaded axle on the drive back from Sam’s Club, we never had to worry about artist hospitality on Festival day. Bev would borrow tables from the Ladies Auxiliary and get the room set up days in advance. All we had to do is pile up the food we bought, the stuff to eat it off of and provide plenty of trash bags to haul it away.

I know that there were other people who were involved in organizing the details on festival day. They know the process Bev used. They know the list of things to be done. Even though I am gone, I am still worried about what this year’s festival will bring. At the very least, there will be a lot of rechecking to make sure nothing Bev usually does has been overlooked.

In the near term, as the holidays approach, her absence will be felt keenly. Every year she would get a humongous tree for her living room and invite family and friends to decorate it. I lived half a block away so I would always go. I would also help undecorate it. There were a lot fewer people at that party. The decorating party was a tradition for many people. People would drive in from hours away and renew friendships with those they met at last year’s party.

Bev has been on my mind a number of times since I left Appel Farm. Some times it was wishing she was volunteering for me at the time. Other times it was just wondering how she was doing. Other times it was thinking that I should send some of the Japanese snacks so readily available here but not as much in South Jersey to her for the Japanese students. I have seen her a couple times since I left so I have no regrets about our partings, only about not having the opportunity to meet again.

If you are moved in some way by this story and want to help her continue her legacy, donations can be made in her name to the following organizations:

Appel Farm Arts and Music Center– (856) 358-2472
South Jersey Healthcare-Elmer Hospital– 856-363-1000
She also listed her church as a recipient, but I need to double check on the information and post it.
The Church of the Good Samaritan, Paoli, PA – Freedom and Christ Scholarship Fund (610) 644-4040

Fear Of The Fundraiser

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Hat tip to Seth Godin who reproduced Sasha Dichter’s Manifesto in Defense of Raising Money which begins “I’m sick of apologizing for being in charge of raising money.”

It seems to me a must read for anyone who is in the position of raising money which includes pretty much everyone in an organization since theoretically everyone must be part of the organization’s narrative. As you read, don’t get side tracked with thoughts about how his cause is so much more worthy of donations than your own. There are many elements that contribute to personal and societal health.

Dichter basically feels people approach fund raising from the wrong perspective seeing it as a chore rather than an opportunity to evangelize about the change you want to effect. For me the third point he makes after asking why people are so afraid to ask for money seems the most salient.

“…wealth is associated with power, and not having wealth can feel like not having power. So going to someone who has money and saying, “You have the resources, please give some of them to me” doesn’t feel like a conversation between equals.

How about this instead: “You are incredibly good at making money. I’m incredibly good at making change. The change I want to make in the world, unfortunately, does not itself generate much money. But man oh man does it make change. It’s a hugely important change. And what I know about making this change is as good and as important as what you know about making money. So let’s divide and conquer – you keep on making money, I’ll keep on making change. And if you can lend some of your smarts to the change I’m trying to make, well that’s even better. But most of the time, we both keep on doing what we’re best at, and if we keep on working together the world will be a better place.”

One of the other points Dichter makes is that storytelling is more a skill than a talent and I think communicating the sentiment in an effective manner would take cultivated skills. There are already organizations using this approach except they are saying, you make money, you keep giving me the money and don’t pry too much about what I am doing with it.

It occurs to me that if you are approaching fund raising as evangelizing rather than as a necessary evil, you aren’t waiting for people to ask but rather reporting back before being asked. I am certainly in a better mood when I am writing to our donors about our successes than I am filling out the final report forms for a foundation. The format of the first allows you to tell people what events you perceive as progress. The format of the second forces you to try to recast your success according the the criteria by which the foundation is measuring progress. Something tends to get squeezed and lost when you try to stuff your excitement into the box provided.

Yo Mama Says Mozart For The Win!

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Well my esteem for Stephen Colbert was nigh upon worship already due to his encyclopedic knowledge and slavish devotion to the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, but he may have gone up another notch last night. Ah, who am I kidding, the Tolkien knowledge pretty much eclipses everything else. But last evening’s show was pretty impressive since he had Yo-Yo Ma as a guest. The interview begins at about 13:30. Unfortunately, there isn’t a separate clip of the interview so you have to advance the slider. Though there is one of Yo-Yo Ma’s performance after the interview.

What’s the big deal you ask? Yo-Yo Ma is pretty much everywhere. That may be true, but is he on a show that with the audience demographics of the Colbert Report for over a third of a 21 minute program? What made the incident important in my mind was the recollection of Dana Gioia’s graduation address to Stanford University’s Class of 2007 where he noted popular culture once celebrated the achievements of public intellectuals and artists making household names of people like “Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O’Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead…”

He commented that the blame doesn’t flow in one direction, “Most American artists, intellectuals, and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.”

So when I see Yo-Yo Ma on Colbert’s show joking with Colbert about the variety of ways people pronounce his name, (including Yo Mama), and referring to himself as being Joe the Cellist in some people’s eyes, I get a little optimistic about artists’ ability to converse with general audiences. I am encouraged when Colbert asks questions like, “Are the candidates addressing the concerns of Joe the Cellist” (here are their positions, by the way) and noting Yo-Yo Ma’s involvement with a variety of projects like the Silk Road Project because it raises general awareness about the importance and reach of artistic endeavors.

Whether it was intentional or not, Colbert addresses the whole issue of classical music being elitist and artists being aloof from the general public which opens the door to Yo-Yo Ma talking about the necessity for humility and collaboration. Colbert also asks if we are winning the classical music wars since the Chinese are studying Mozart and we aren’t clamoring to learn the pipa. Ma replies that it is Mozart that is the real winner. Colbert revisits the idea of classical music being elitist by asking if there are any good cello works about American themes like “pick up trucks and kicking ass” This segues into a request that Yo-Yo Ma play a song for Joe the Truck Driver. I don’t know if the piece he and his friends play is necessarily for Joe, but it also doesn’t conform to any classic music orthodoxy. In fact, I hope the look on Yo-Yo Ma’s face while his bagpiper yawps and hoots at him makes all the average and not so average Joes curious.

Attitudes won’t change overnight but increased awareness through conduits like the Colbert Report can help in the battle. Despite the self-involved bluster his television persona exhibits, Colbert has used his position to advance causes he believes in. One of his Lance Armstrong parodies resulted in a $171, 525 donation to charity.

One comment Dana Gioia made in his Stanford address that I totally forgot about until I went back to link to it, “When a successful guest appearance on the Colbert Report becomes more important than passing legislation, democracy gets scary. No wonder Hollywood considers politics “show business for ugly people.” Given all the potential fodder for comedy during this election season, I wouldn’t be surprised if the significant time devoted to Yo-Yo Ma wasn’t intended to advance an agenda and perhaps put Colbert’s influence to work for culture rather than politics for one night.

Colbert has begun to have musical guests on his show more often. Perhaps it is time to get in touch with his talent booker and send some intriguing performers his way.

Apparently I Am Going To Be To Blame In The Next Election

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Thanks to a rift in the space-time continuum this weekend, I received this cautionary video dated November 7, 2008 from my future self. Apparently, I will be responsible for great calamity in the next election.

Perhaps it was due to my selfish belief in my own dark horse candidacy. (No embed link so you will have to visit the site. Make sure to watch until the end!)

The first video was put together by MoveOn to encourage people to vote for Obama on election day. The second one just seems to be purely for entertainment value. I don’t know what is involved with the technology but I can see all sorts of potential for the arts. With an ever increasing desire for personal, customized service, I can see this technology becoming more sophisticated and widespread.

You could have personal URLs to a webpage with a video from the point of view of driving up to your venue, picking up a ticket envelop with their name on it and then entering the theatre to see a bubble with an arrow with the words “John and Mary Smith’s seats” hovering over their actual seats.

For a capital building campaign you could have a virtual tour of the proposed facility and have the name of the donor you are courting appear on the plaque on the wall, in the program book, seat plate, brick, etc. And because the technology enables you to fill in the blanks, you can send the same pitch to hundreds of people at a time. You can probably also update wall plaques with the names of those who have already given for those who need the incentive of seeing their names among august company.

I have seen websites where you can upload photos and have faces appear in the video. As you might imagine, it doesn’t always integrate smoothly because of the way the image was cropped, the way faces are turned, etc. I’ll bet within five years someone figures out how to make it work more believably.

Voice overs on the other hand I can see being viable in a shorter time. Make a video of a man and woman who aren’t on your staff. Then record employees reading script prompts “Acme Museum welcomes….”, “…., you will notice the various benefits you can avail yourself of at Acme Museum.”

Then you can go back and have the same people read off names- John (pause) Smith (pause), James (pause) Smythe (pause). Loop the audio in with the video players, insert the names and you have a video where the people are talking personally to your patrons.

The reason I suggest using people who are not your employees is so that people aren’t confused by the actual person’s voice when they meet them in your lobby. Having employees do the prompts and the names preserves the continuity of the voices. As you acquire new patrons you can have your employees go back to the studio and record their names to be inserted. While there is probably significant expense associated with creating something like this the fact that you can record and edit so much of this on a home computer brings the cost down from where it once might have been.

Finally, We Can Walk Tall And Funky

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I generally don’t post on Fridays but sometimes there emerges such a compelling piece of news, you can’t ignore or delay it’s reporting.

Artful Manager Andrew Taylor has once again exhibited great foresight and leadership of Arts Administrators the world over by composing…

It is available for download so you can put it on your iPod and listen to it before going into a meeting and exude the cool, funky confidence that comes with having a theme song.

They Took My Beautiful Coke Machine!

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Yes, we lost a good friend today as the guys from Coca Cola removed the vending machine from my building. This summer we had a fire inspection and were told that we couldn’t have the power cable for the machine running under the door into the scene shop. The door wasn’t pinching the cable in any manner and the inspector admitted that it wasn’t necessarily a fire hazard. But apparently safe practice requires we not have the power cord run there even though it isn’t a trip hazard either.

The powers that be decided they would rather get rid of the machine than drill a hole in the wall so it was adios to the Real Thing. Whether this will constitute a safety hazard as people working late at night have to run out to other buildings to get their caffeine fix remains to be seen.

Though I don’t the fire inspectors were really fully aware of it, the history of horrific death tolls in theatres provide ample reason to closely monitor safety operations. One of the most famous theatre fires was Chicago’s Iroquois Theater fire in 1903. This was a disaster of Titanic proportions as the theater billed as “absolutely fireproof” burned down within five weeks of opening due to a series of poor judgments and scrimping and not installing all the fire safety measures they were touting. The fire itself killed 572 people and the death toll from related injuries eventually brought it to 602.

In 1811, 72 people perished in the Richmond Theatre Fire. In 1876 nearly 300 died in the Brooklyn Theatre Fire

All three of these fires occurred in December which may be a sign to stay away from theatres during that month. All of them were caused by light sources. The Iroquois fire by sparks from an electric light that ignited drapes, Richmond by a candelabra that flew out unevenly an lit the drapes and Brooklyn by a kerosene lamp that…lit up the drapes. These are only a few of the many fiery theatre incidents from history.

The theatre going experience is much safer now that technology has moved away from flame based lighting technology and have adopted safer methods and standards for electrical lighting. In the past, as with today, theaters and fire marshals come into conflict over the circumstances surrounding performances.

Of course, many a proactive theatre stays ahead of the fire marshal’s objections by instituting and disseminating safety procedures. Some theatres even have a process for reviewing stage sets at the design stage.

The loss of my soda machine notwithstanding, the fire marshals were pretty fair in their evaluation of our facility. The changes they required were appropriate to the amount of traffic an area got and the training and familiarity with the facility possessed by the main users of those areas. The interaction was certainly not as antagonistic as some of the experiences I have had and stories I have heard.

Theory Crashes Into Practice

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Over on Fractured Atlas, Kamal Sinclair posted some of the responses they have been getting while researching the professional development needs for artists. The focus of the comments in this particular entry revolve around the frustration BFA and MFA students feel when they realize their formal education taught them how to be creative but not necessarily how to exist as a practicing artist and navigate their respective industries.

The entry contains about 10-15 quotes from graduates reflecting on how well or poorly their training program prepared them for careers in their fields. Hoping to provide incentive to read the entire entry, I will resist quoting some of the ones that resonate strongest with me here.

I will note that according to Sinclair, in the course of their research Fractured Atlas found that the problem may be that the training programs are slow to recognize the pressing need. “…sources imply that universities and colleges have a long history of resistance around educating artists in “the business.” The philosophy is that art should be taught for art’s sake.”

Sinclair lists some of the suggestions the respondents had about how to improve the situation. Again, you should read the entry to learn more. Fractured Atlas’ blogs contain a lot of great material on a daily basis and if I lose readership to them by pointing you there, I will still feel victory has been achieved.

I can’t help but cite one of the suggestions that leaped out and smashed me over the head with a frying pan– “Eliminate the myth of “getting discovered.” I tell you, that is just replete with all sorts of complexities. As much as training programs may perpetuate this, it is inherent in society at large. It manifests in shows like American Idol which allows people to believe they have a reasonable chance at becoming famous–the odds of which are only slightly better than winning the Powerball lottery.

Hopefully implicit in that comment was the idea that success can be defined as more than just a Broadway role, recording contract or big gallery show. Those that decide they are just biding their time in their current job until they are discovered are closing off other potential avenues for success. The current president of Valparaiso University went to grad school for acting and directing, for example. Seventeen years and three colleges ago when he was teaching me acting, I would never have figured he would end up as a university president. While a number of doors doubtless opened for him, I am sure he worked hard to position himself near those doorways.

Turning Our Professions Off

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I don’t usually talk about specific actors on the blog but I heard some amazing things in an interview with Terrance Howard on NPR this weekend. I heard the 12 minute version that aired but went and listened to the 40 minute uncut version via the NPR website. (The broadcast version is there as well.) I haven’t been following Howard’s career with any devotion but I may just do so now to see what he is thinking. He seems to have a real sense of his place in the world acknowledging the bonds that run back to his actor/musician great-grandmother, Minnie Gentry, to his mother through him and down to his son. Despite his success, he does a lot of carpentry work professionally and pro bono. His greatest hope seems to be that his son will become the scientist that he wanted to be before acting deflected him from that path.

I am not quite sure if his explanations of scientific matters are completely accurate but I am impressed by his intellectual curiosity and rigorous pursuit of knowledge much the same as I was in Danica McKellar.

What grabbed my attention most was his observations on one consequence of acting being that you insulate yourself from life and begin to observe. In the interview he reflects on this in relation to his mother’s death just two weeks ago.

Starting at about 24:00 full version of the interview-

“As an actor, the saddest thing. You stop experiencing moments. You start watching them as if you are storing them for future reference. … It’s like when I was sitting there with my mother for the last two weeks. There were moments when I couldn’t turn that actor off where I was watching her. You know. And wondering what was going through her mind…And trying to stop myself…”
[…]
The actor sometimes takes over in places that you don’t want it there. Maybe I was just afraid to face the emotion that was happening so then I began to watch.”

This state is difficult for people to deal with, he says, and as a result, “And I think that’s what happens to a lot of actors, and therefore they get hooked on drugs because they’re desperate to get away from not feeling. They want to be excited or something.”

I can empathize because I have had similar experiences. I have difficulty enjoying performances because I analyze how effects are being accomplished or I wonder what is happening backstage. The technical director at work often thinks about how he could improve the lighting for shows or events like weddings. But even outside of performances in real life, I some times realize I am watching myself experience an event. I can’t recall doing so during a something as highly emotional as watching someone die. Certainly, I haven’t filed it away for future use the way Howard suggests he does.

I don’t know whether to pity him for not being able to feel or envy him for being able to insulate himself from negative events. I suppose if he is equally unable to fully experience joyful events, then it is a net detriment.

But I wonder if every vocation doesn’t hold a similar threat. Had he become a famous scientist as he planned isn’t there a chance that he would instead be talking about how science removes the wonder from his life. That he can’t enjoy the rainbows, blowing bubbles and sunsets without analyzing the forces that went into creating them. Perhaps he might talk about how science has isolated him from those he loves because he can’t experience the world with the same joy and wonder they do. As interested as he is in science, he still looks to explain events and occurrences in terms of grandness and wonder. He talks about a soap bubble existing because the universe is finite. Commenters to the NPR piece talk about surface tension.

Even as he looks upon the road not traveled with some bittersweetness, perhaps the lesson he and all of us should take away is that engaging in other interests in the manner of professional-amateurs, we can avoid those aspects which might remove the joy from the pursuit. By pursuing acting as a career, Terrence Howard may have taken on an obligation to examine and distill life in order to advance. By pursuing science out of love, he is not necessarily responsible for defining his relationship with it in a specific way.

Getting The Dead To Blog For You

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Thanks to an interview with librarian on my local public radio station, I became aware of a fascinating blog written from beyond the grave. The grandson of William Henry Bonser Lamin is publishing his grandfather’s letters home from the trenches of WW I exactly 90 years after they were written. The first letter, written on February 7, 1917 was published on February 7, 2007. His grandson had to make some allowances in his publishing schedule since 2008 was a leap year and 1918 wasn’t. But he remains true to all gaps in letters whether due to loss or his grandfather being home on leave. Only the Lamin family knows whether the senior Lamin returned home or perished in the trenches. All misspellings, grammatical errors are preserved.

While the same element of a suspense over an unknown fate may not exist for some of the more famous artists in history but the basic idea might be one arts organizations could use either over the course of a season or in the weeks or months leading up to an event. If the letters are accessible, the organization could post them in some manner appropriate to their plan. What was Tennessee Williams writing in his correspondence while he was writing A Streetcar Named Desire? Or Van Gogh when he painted Starry Night? He had committed himself to a mental hospital at the time so it is sure to pique some interest based on that fact alone even if there is nothing untoward in his letters.

A release plan that was paced slow enough not to overwhelm people or make them feel it was a burden to follow but frequent enough to give people an excuse to return to the website regularly could be welcomed by patrons of all experience levels. This could be a good alternative to attempting to have performers and creative teams contribute to a blog during rehearsal and performance periods. A reproduced letter with notations that the untimely death of a sister referenced by a composer were the primary motivation for a symphony will probably motivate a respectable readership.

The biggest negative I could see if this became a common practice is that those organizations with money and prestige will be able to do more research and gain exclusive access to estate letters. But the less affluent arts organization can still flourish by employing more publicly available materials in a manner that resonates with their community.

Little Bird, Will You Sing For Me?

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Short entry today because I am feeling under the weather. I wanted to briefly reflect on my experience appearing on my local public radio’s fund drive.

First of all, we made the goal for the hour which was $500 more than the goal was last year. Even though I am not a public radio employee, I was feeling a little anxious as the end of the hour was approaching and we were still a little ways from our goal. It would be a blow to my pride if they didn’t succeed while I was there. Not only did I want what I was saying on air to be an inducement to pledge, but I was worried that the tickets I was letting them give away as a gesture of appreciation wasn’t being valued by the listening audience. In the end, all the tickets to one of our performances were snatched up.

One of the most interesting things that happened during my time there was that we were getting pledges from people in California and Louisiana. I thought maybe they were from some homesick people listening online. It turned out that the phone volunteers for that hour were self-professed computer geeks and were appealing to people on their extensive Twitter network to pledge. So we had people making $50 donations who never listened to the station based on their relationship with the phone volunteers.

Last month on my Inside the Arts’ neighbor blog, Scanning the Dial, Mike Janssen wrote an entry, “How Classical Stations Could Use Twitter.” I guess this is another use to add to the list. Of course, the use is hardly specific to radio stations. If you and your patrons and donors have an established network, be it on Twitter or some other social network, you might employ this tactic yourself. Renewals may have to be through the same friend rather than your development office because the person won’t have as strong a personal connection to your organization. But this fact will go that much further in convincing your local supporters that their efforts on your behalf matter and are appreciated.

View From The Other Side

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Where Are These People Coming From (And Why Aren’t They Attending My Shows?)

Being around theatres for so long, it is easy to become jaded and forget just how wondrous the on stage perspective of the audience seating area can be for people. Over the last few weeks we have had an inordinate number of tour requests. I have easily given more pleasure tours (vs. perspective rental tours) in that period than I have in the previous three years.

Don’t get me wrong, as I have noted in previous entries, I relish any chance to show the facility and brag about it. I certainly welcome the opportunity to increase awareness of our activities. It has been a great time to have tours due to all the activity surrounding our upcoming production. Actors, props people and carpenters have talked to tours about their backgrounds and what they were doing for the show. Even when no one else was around and I had to go turn the lights on in preparation for the tour, there has still been so much hanging or laying around to point to and ignite imaginations.

So Strange and Exotic

But what has never failed to impress people is stepping out on to the stage. As we move from the scene shop on to the stage people catch sight of the hemp fly system which seems strange and exotic to them. If the wings are filled with props and equipment, they catch sight of this as well and get a chance to see through the illusion of what appears otherwise from the audience.

At some point, they end up seeing the audience seating from the stage and for many, this reversed perspective is the most exciting part of the tour. I usually make sure to take people out into the audience area so they can see how much of what was apparent while standing onstage suddenly disappears from their view. Again the realization of how much of the illusion is preserved by distance and limitation of sight lines is often intriguing to people.

A View From The Bridge

Then there are a few choice groups who get to clamber up above the stage to the loading rail of the fly system, across the catwalks over the audience seating area and up above the lighting gird to look down 70 feet to the stage below. That introduces a whole different set of sensations for many people.

Two years ago our technical director took people up on to the roof of our stagehouse and showed them the expansive vista available from that vantage point. Ever since then one of the tour participants as been looking for an excuse to get up there again. A recent conference he organized gave him that excuse. While most chose not to climb out on to the roof, just about everyone was intrepid enough to climb above the grid. The conference organizer pulled me aside yesterday and told me how everyone appreciated the opportunity and how excitedly they spoke about their experience.

I guess it says something about how interesting the experience is that someone would schedule a break in a meeting include a tour of your facility. With that sort of investment in my theatre, I am going to make sure I keep lines of communication open with this guy so that he is always able to advocate and talk about us whenever he is so moved.

It’s Also Greener Over the Septic Tank I Hear

Certainly it is partially a matter of the grass being greener in your neighbor’s yard or one person’s garbage being another’s treasure. For those of us working in these buildings, the space represent challenges. There isn’t enough room in the wings or on the fly system battens to accommodate everything we need to for the show. On the other hand, we would love if the building were smaller so we didn’t have to go so far to change the lamps and gels in the lighting instruments.

For visitors, ours is a mystical land. I know from conversations with the groups, for many it is their first time setting foot in a theatre much less on or backstage. They hardly have any context by which to process the experience much less recognize the limitations we deal with everyday.

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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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