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 was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA. 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.

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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