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.

CONNECT WITH JOE

[novashare_follow button_size="medium" button_shape="square" networks="twitter=https://twitter.com/buttsintheseats,linkedin=https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-patti-14aa666/,subscribe=https://insidethearts.com/buttsintheseats/subscribe/"]

Be Nice to Your Playwright

by

I am so pleased to be finding more and more arts related blogs out there and the most recent I have come across is just great.

Joshua James’ Daily Dojo is a working, living playwright’s view of what a working, living playwright has to go through in that line of work these days.

I started reading his November 8 entry where he discusses his frustration (quite entertainingly) with the way directors/actors/etc feel scripts are just a starting point to do their own thing.

Come to find out, this long entry is just the latest entry in his “Talkin’ Smack About Theatre” series. Two other entries (Hey, What’s That Guy Doing In a Dress and Hey, What’s That Guy…Part Deux) give actors, directors and others advice about how to get the most out of working with a living playwright (and how to work with other people in general.)

The other entries in the series are a rant on how so much Broadway is a cover of someone else’s work (ie adaptation, revival, etc). I haven’t had a chance to read the cover entries yet, but the “Guy In A Dress” entries, while long are a lot of fun to read.

The titles come from Joshua’s experience showing up at a theatre to find a character in a dress because he is “making bold acting choices.” He does a great job exploring the friction behind the necessity of remaining true to the playwrights intent and choices and the urge artistic people have to explore the opportunities the material presents beyond the limits the playwright set.

He acknowledges that some of that exploration can be illuminating for the author too–provided he is consulted and included at all. He also shares a number of anecdotes where the playwright’s name shouldn’t even be used in association with the work because the changes blatantly run counter to what he/she was trying to achieve.

Again, he presents it all in an entertaining manner –writing dialogue and presenting courtroom testimony accompanied by parenthetical sidebars of advice– all the while making his argument/plea for empathy/compassion/cooperation/consultation with playwrights.

Death of Curiousity

by

I responded to an Artful Manager post today commenting on how I didn’t see the harm in taking pictures of stage sets on backstage tours even though technically it is copyrighted work because it at least showed people were excited by what they saw. I noted that I would worry if they weren’t entranced by an experience with theatrical illusion up close since it would mean there was one less thing they saw value in the arts experience.

As I finished writing, I realized that I had probably unconsciously channeled the sentiments of an article I read this weekend care of Arts & Letters Daily. In an article on Triangle.com, J. Peder Zane discusses the surprising lack of curiousity students seem to have these days.

“…such ignorance isn’t new — students have always possessed far less knowledge than they should, or think they have. But in the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing, far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. As one of my reviewers, Stanley Trachtenberg, once said, “It’s not that they don’t know, it’s that they don’t care about what they don’t know.”

I actually mentioned this article to my technical director today and he told me he could see it happening in his stage craft class. He had a gurney with a sheet over what appeared to be a body next to where his students sat yesterday and not one of them lifted the sheet to check it out.

Part of the problem is that there is so much to know these days about everything, even the mundane, that people are forced to specialize in gathering information on specific areas. As a result, people are primarily interested in learning more about topics that are immediately useful and discard anything else.

Without social pressure to be well-rounded, people are becoming less so. Because so much information is available so easily and quickly, there is no need to worry about not knowing until the need is imminent. Want to impress a girl with your knowledge of the controversies surrounding who actually wrote Shakespeare’s works? Check out the Wikipedia entry and take a side trip to collect some sonnets to whisper in her ear.

This sort of trend should be of concern to arts organizations. Where there might once have been hope that as young people matured, they might suddenly decide that it would be valuable for them to engage in visual and performing arts experiences and might one day come a knockin’, there is a danger now that they will never consider there is any value in doing so.

NALI And Friends

by

Back in early September, I wrote about the National Arts Leadership Institute and Andrew Taylor commented “that he continue[s] to be frustrated by the disconnection of leadership initiatives in the arts.” This was based on the fact that there are many such institutes and few of them talk to each other so they end up inventing the wheel over and over again.

I decided to take a look at just how many there were out there and what they were offerings. I have to admit, while I didn’t doubt Andrew, it soon became clear as I searched that I could have continued far longer than I had.

Mostly I focussed on leadership training institutes that seemed to be focussed on offering sessions at conferences so my brief research doesn’t include programs like the Kennedy Center’s Institute for Arts Management which offer longer term internship and fellowship programs rather than an attempt to offer one day seminar type classes.

The Theatre Communications Group straddled both world offering the mentor/internships of the Kennedy Center along with institutes in conjunction with conferences.

Every conference I could think of seemed to have its own institute. I can see why Andrew Taylor felt there was a lot of duplication that might benefit from merged efforts because the list of topics covered is essentially identical.

First of course, came the Southern Arts Federation’s National Arts Leadership Institute.

The Western Arts Alliance has their own. (Since they hosted a NALI session, perhaps they are thinking of merging their offerings with them.)

-Arts MidWest professional development offerings.

Arts NorthWest has them at conference and sends them on the road through Washington and Oregon

And of course, the granddaddy of them all-Association of Performing Arts Presenters offers some learning..

Like Theatre Communications Group, the national organizations for the other performing arts also offer institutes at their conferences-Dance USA, American Symphony Orchestra League, OPERA America

Americans for the Arts also holds sessions at their conferences. Alas, their Arts and Business Council’s Arts Leadership Institute is only available for arts leaders in NYC.

When I found the leadership institute for the Alliance of NY State Arts Organizations, I realized I could probably find a similar program in nearly every state and decided to stop there.

Merging all these programs into a single national program most likely isn’t the answer since certain regional organizations have strengths the others don’t. (Western Arts Federation seems to have a strong research bent, for instance.)

Some consolidation that saw conferences hosting leadership institutes generated by one of a handful of regional or national organizations (who co-ordinated syllabi to some degree with one another) might in order to ensure quality and uniformity.

Another Crazy Idea

by

Back in July I posted an entry about how internet sites were limiting access to their content through various means. At the end of the entry, I promised to think upon it and post a follow up later.

Well, here I am posting a follow up.

I had hoped to do a little more reading on consumer psychology before posting, but it doesn’t look as if that might happen any time soon. Since I posted last week about how new media entertainment was taking a page from live performance’s book, I figured that was enough reason to post about how we should steal a little bit from them.

At the end of my entry in July I had posted that the only way I could see arts organizations doing something similar was if the first part of the show was free and then re-entry after intermission cost the ticket price.

The more I thought about it, the less crazy it seemed. (Though granted, was still crazy.) Performing organizations frequently have free performances to try to lure people in, why not partially free performances? Also, there are a number of performing arts companies that have fundraising appeals that point out that the ticket price only pays for the show until intermission. This turns that around so you can claim the sponsors paid for you to get in the first act, now the rest of the show is up to you.

Will people go home at intermission feeling they have gotten their fill? Perhaps. Performances with a plot of some sort would probably fare better than a collection of repetory pieces. A novice theatre attendee is probably more likely to feel a need to go see the end of Death of a Salesman than a novice symphony attendee might feel compelled to hear a Mozart piece based on the Bach he heard in the first half of the evening.

On the other hand, reading the psychology of decision making scenarios Andrew Taylor presented back in May, I could see a newbie deciding that after getting a babysitter, driving and paying for parking, maybe it is worth paying for the second half.

Museums, I am still at the same place, sorry. Best I could suggest is a small exhibit in an antechamber with the ability to pay to enter the exhibit proper after getting a taste of it.

For performances, this sort of suggestion opens big cans of worms, even for those who might experiment with it only once a year to see how audiences like it.

First of all, there is front of house-instead of letting the box office and part of the usher staff go home after the show starts, their fun just begins at intermission.

Also, if you have reserved seating how do you handle that? Subscribers and those who know and trust the quality of your works will have purchased their tickets for the whole night’s performance in advance. But say that only fills up to the tenth row.

At intermission, the guy who got row Z is the first one out of the theatre because he is closest to the back, runs to the box office and buys tickets in row K so he can get closer. Guy in that seat in row K for the first act is annoyed. God forbid and people actually enjoy the show so much they start leaving during the first act to secure tickets closer to the stage.

A lot of theatres use bar code readers now so people can print of tickets at home. While you could use this and only charge people who scan in after intermission, you would then have to force people to scan in by 5 minutes to curtain so you could sell the vacant seats to people waiting at the box office before intermission was over (and of course, most empty seats will be singles and most people wanting seats will be in a party.)

Something like this would be best used either with General Admission audiences or for shows you know will be 80% sold so that you can set aside specific seats for this program and have no need to worry that you might end up with a gulf of 10 rows between your full night buyers and the half night taste testers.

The other issue is artistic-Do you end the first act with a bigger bang than necessary in hopes of luring people back for the second act even though the second act isn’t as exciting as the end of the first act lead them to believe? (I am looking at you Phantom of the Opera)

Then there are shows that are so short, an intermission makes no sense. Some shows are structured in a way that an audience loses its involvement in the momentum of the action if an intermission occurs.

Still, I have to think that there are some organizations out there for whom this sort of scheme might be just the thing they need to excite a community and provide an introduction to what the company does.