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Art(ist) Education

Breaking Hearts Away From Broadway

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Broadway Producer Ken Davenport wonders why Broadway doesn’t do an American Idol type audition either having open auditions or putting casting directors on a bus to tour the country.

The basis for this suggestion is that it would get a lot of people engaged in the process–not only the people who auditioned, but all their friends and family as well. And they would remain engaged over a longer period of time, keeping the show present in their mind during the rehearsal period, leaving them primed to want to attend once it opened.

“You don’t think all those people that audition in the coming months will be more enthused about watching Season 13 when it rolls around? They’ll tune in to say, “Who beat me?” And they’ll be proud to tell their friends, “I auditioned for that.” By involving people in the process, they expand their audience.

[…]

Why doesn’t every Broadway show have open calls, allowing anyone and their brother, Equity or not, a chance at Broadway stardom? We did it for Godspell, and we had lines around the block (and collected emails). So many people said it was their dream just to be seen for a Broadway show, and they would never forget it, even if they went back to their day job the next morning. Sure it’s a cost, but you don’t think you’d make that back in press and tickets? And just imagine if you found a cast member from that casting net. Oh the articles!”

One of first thoughts was about all those experienced actors that have been honing their craft and hitting the pavement for years. Where does this leave them? What message does it send about the performing arts?

There is a long tradition of unknowns being “discovered” so I am not put off by the prospect of someone getting a lead role with little effort. It has been known to happen. Much the rest of the cast would probably be comprised of experienced people and the producers probably shouldn’t be looking for the lead parts like “You’re The One That I Want” did for the revival of Grease.

My biggest concern is that in an environment where people think orchestra musicians shouldn’t want to get paid for “having fun” performing, an American Idol type process for casting Broadway shows would send the message that just about anyone could circumvent the hard work involved with performance and just walk into a part.

Where most performers work to become suitable to be cast in a variety of roles and shows, the only thing you could say for sure about a person cast in this manner is that they are suited to play this character in the dynamics of this particular production.

Certainly, they might have the ability to do a credible job in many roles. My concern is that the general public would believe that success in this specific endeavor validated their ability to perform well in multiple roles. There is a big difference between what you need to bring to each role. But it will appear that anyone can be a performer after a few hours of competition and coaching.

Best situation would be if the process wasn’t televised because the meat of the casting and coaching process would be edited out leaving people with the wrong impression of the process. After watching someone get asked about the character choices they have made, why they reacted to another person in the manner they did and if they understood the time period in which the show was set, people would get the sense that there is work involved in preparing for a production.

As part of coaching, this makes for boring television. As the basis of biting criticism from a panel of judges, it might be very exciting, but it is rather far from the mind numbing reality of a real audition process. I am not sure anyone is well served in the long term by injecting that sort of unrealistic melodrama into an audition process.

But an untelevised national casting tour that mixed competitive drama with an emphasis on the fact that this was the exception rather than the rule to having a performance career could be productive.

The title of this entry comes from the old saying “There’s a broken heart for every light on Broadway.” I do agree with Davenport’s perception that people would be happy just to have the opportunity to try out for a Broadway show. That could be turned to a constructive end if an effort was made in conjunction with the auditions to encourage people to become more involved with their local performing arts organizations, reinforced the value of a liberal arts education and disseminated the idea that talented people didn’t/shouldn’t need to go to New York, Chicago or LA in order to work.

Of course, my agenda and that of television and Broadway producers probably don’t intersect in a lot of places.

Of Resumes and Job Applications

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I have only been at work for three months, but already they have me on a search committee. When we were meeting to talk about interview questions before human resources gave us the application packets, I took advantage of the opportunity of working with a new group of people to take a quick poll about a pet peeve of mine that I have referenced before– the resume objective statement.

Like me the other people on the committee found it really unhelpful, thought it often felt stilted and unnatural on an already heavily formalized document, were uninteresting, unhelpful to the process and took up too much room on a document that was supposed to be limited to one page.

And this was from people in a cross section of areas from graphic design, finance, athletics and accounting.

I have come to the conclusion that all those guides that tell you to include objective statements on your resume are doing so at the behest of big corporations who use software to screen applicants based on key phrases in the resume. I suspect there are a lot of employers that don’t find the format really enhances their impression of applicants.

In the arts, a little divergence from the standard suggested format can definitely be an asset.

A long time friend recently asked me to look at his resume and it occurred to me that like so many things that involve selling a product, service or idea, it is the story you tell about yourself that really matters.

Because what you will emphasize differs from employer to employer, I generally provide that narrative in my cover letter and leave my resume to provide the supporting details. Often those details need to be tweaked a bit, but the big variation in applications is in the cover letter based on the job requirements and information about the organization my research has turned up.

Still it is important that your resume be able to tell your story on a stand alone basis. A person should get an idea about what things ignite your passion while they determine how accomplished and suitable you are for the position based on your work history.

What sort of frustrates me as a person working in the arts is that the process I often need to follow suppresses the usefulness of 95% of the expressive tools available these days. You often have the option of submitting materials by email now, but the distribution to search and audition committees is generally by printed hard copies which eliminates the usefulness of links to videos and other materials.

From my own recent searches, I know that committee members will definitely check out blogs and webpages. I would see a surge in visits on Google Analytics and have a sense that I would get a call days, and sometimes weeks, before it was made. It is more difficult for a committee member to accurately type in the URL for a YouTube video.

Sure you can set up a webpage with appropriate links and direct people there. But it is much more organic to be able to cite a project and immediately provide a link to it.

It is also difficult to set up a custom website with an easy to enter URL for every job application you send out. You don’t want to apply to a Children’s Theatre and send them to a site that includes so many links to other types of projects that the employer gets the impression your passion really lies elsewhere.

I am vaguely aware that visual arts organizations make more direct use of digital portfolio review in hiring. I wondered if anyone in the performing arts was conducting their searches in a way that really took advantage of all the available technological opportunities.

Likewise, I wondered if anyone that had recently applied for a job had managed to leverage technology to their benefit as part of their initial application.

One option that just occurred to me would be to create a personal URL for each job search so that each employer only saw the materials you wanted them to see.

Embracing The Feedback Loop

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A few months back, Seattle based artist Clayton Weller, wrote a piece addressing what he feels is a self-limiting outlook held by many artists that theatre is dying and there is no money out there. He confesses to having embraced the same outlook until he worked for a start up company.

Now he advocates for every artist to work for a start up in order to adopt their more nimble outlook. (my emphasis)

When you say the word “business” to someone, especially an artist, they automatically assume you’re talking about something stuffy, rigid, uncompromising, and [insert horrible adjective].

You say “business” but they hear “bureaucracy.” THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING!…

To eschew something because it can be done poorly, is a disservice to yourself, and might rival einsteins famous definition of insanity (look it up plebes!).

[…]

Talking directly to people, iterating ideas before execution, creating a feedback loop with measurable data; it all makes perfect sense.

By doing this you create a real connection with your customer (audience) and develop a product (art) people will not only tolerate, but will clamor for. In terms that an artist would use: your art becomes relevant.

That’s a big deal.

The average artist does NONE of these things. Not only that, they intentionally avoid them. They lock themselves away to pursue their secret “vision.” When they receive negative criticism, they blame their audience (customer). WHAT?!?

For me this addresses some age old debates about artists being more business minded and selling out vs. thinking you know what audiences/customers should like. (the most negative extremes of the spectrum)

Obviously, I like his point about not dismissing options because other people don’t do it well.

I think the complicating factor is the fear is that you too won’t do it well and the process will dominate your time and take you away from your creative work. Or worse, make you resent your creative work for making it necessary to become involved in the business side. For some it may not be a wholly irrational fear.

Still, I think regardless of your fears and regardless of your views about what constitutes selling out and remaining true to your art, the feedback loop Weller mentions is a useful process.

Failure and missteps are things you will face, especially when you are working in the arts. Proper feedback can help minimize this over time. If nothing else, the process can help you identify the proper people to solicit for feedback.

If you start a flow chart from the simple proposition that you want to support yourself with your art. You can ask, do people say nice things about my art? If the answer is yes but they don’t pay for it, you either need to find other people to get feedback from or figure out a different way to monetize your art from the people giving you feedback.

Likewise, if there are a lot of people who criticize your work, but still won’t buy it after you make the changes to the areas in which they say you fell short, then you may need to find other people to solicit feedback from.

Obviously it isn’t as completely clear cut as that. The problem may lie in your execution not being very good. My point is that you can’t depend entirely on your family and friends or trolls for feedback. It is necessary to identify people with the level of discernment you seek whose feedback you can trust and work from there.

You just need to recognize and own the potential implications of appealing to 1,000 versus 100,000. You can make a lot of money from those 1,000, but you need to be producing to a certain standard. Meeting the expectations of 1,000 can be just as burdensome as that of 100,000.

Have A Fulfilling Experience Being An Artist

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Earlier this week, Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group listed an artist residency program that really appealed to me.

Only Australians are eligible to apply, but I just really liked the way the Asialink program at the University of Melbourne listed the expectations for their program.

You can’t use the residency for research or academic study. Instead, (my emphasis)

Each resident is offered a specific amount of funding and initial contacts in the host country. It is then up to the individual to make as much of the experience as possible and to plan and manage their own program.

Key attributes are the ability to cope with sometimes unusual or difficult situations, and to work successfully in a challenging environment while maintaining good working relationships.

That is basically it. The criteria is to have a plan, take advantage of the opportunity, be able to cope with strange situations you may encounter. You have to show that you worked on your project when you return and submit an accounting about how the money is used.

Coming from a higher education environment which emphasizes research and publishing in order to keep your job and an arts environment which has lengthy grant proposal and reporting requirements, this is refreshingly brief and liberating.

Applying will take some work and preparation, and certainly the opportunity isn’t for everyone, but the process doesn’t seem terribly onerous.

I am sure there are other grant programs like this, but I have come across few which state they expect you to have a fulfilling experience.

It makes me a little envious and wish I lived in Australia since the program includes Arts Management experiences.

I offer this in hopes it will inspire others to emulate them. And if some entity is offering something similar and Americans are eligible, I hope someone tells me about it!

What To Expect In Arts Administration Class

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Last week in response to my call for suggestions of topics to discuss, commenter Samara asked,

“I am attending Bellarmine University this fall as a freshman and am the only student as an Arts Administration Undergrad with music being my emphasis. What should I expect in my Arts Admin classes? Besides the fact that I’ll be alone and don’t get a studio until spring semester haha!”

I took a look at the Bellarmine Arts Admin program and the course requirements for the music focus and generated the following response for Samara.

[hr]

Samara-

In terms of exactly what sort of experience to expect, I obviously can’t tell you because every arts administration program is different, even from year to year.

What I can tell you is what to expect from yourself and what expect from your instructors, internship supervisors and other colleagues.

I apologize right from the start there is probably going to be a tinge of condescension in some of what I have to say. It can’t be helped when you are trying to offer general advice to someone you don’t really know.

The first thing to be aware of that you are being taught the skills you will need to be a successful arts administrator, but you are not being taught how to be a successful arts administrator.

Ken Robinson said it best a few years ago when he talked about how schools creativity.  He notes that we never know now what students will need to know decades down the road so the best thing we can do for students today is teach them to be creative, think critically and teach themselves new skills.

Twenty some odd years ago when you were born the world was just being introduced to dial up internet, and 14.4k at that. I remember a guy in 1994 telling me I should use the Macs in a different computer lab because they had this new thing called a web browser which let you see the internet with colors.

No one really had cellphones, cable or wireless modems. We could imagine a time when we would have cellphones, faster internet connections and maybe something like iPods, but social media, texting, Kickstarter campaigns, global warming, American Idol and so many other things that are common today weren’t really on anyone’s radar.

But in the three-four years between 1994 and 1997/1998 we went from web browsers just beginning to appear to everyone expecting that any worthwhile business would have a website and I was learning HTML.

No one really knows what the future will demand of arts administrators even four years down the road so they can’t give you the secret formula for success upon graduation. What they can do is equip you with the skills to discover that formula for whatever company/organization you work for or establish. Every company is different in terms of the goals they have and the customers/constituencies they seek to serve.

What you should expect from your degree program is a lot of opportunities to discuss problems facing the arts and possible solutions. By the time you are ready to graduate, I guarantee there will be entirely new problems to discuss.

You will need to read and talk a lot about challenges, trends and techniques outside of the arts which may be applicable to the arts.  You will have to discern which are likely flash in the pan trends that just have good PR behind them but won’t amount to much and which trends have staying power.

You will be a good arts administrator when you graduate if you are practiced at looking at new situations, generating and evaluating possible solutions and then implementing them.

Note that you may not be a successful arts administrator by many measures because you can certainly still make mistakes, especially when trying something new. But if you have the capacity to evolve ideas rather than fall back on old practices, you will be in good shape.

Given that times are changing quickly,  I won’t assume you will end up working for an arts organization. You could easily be a manager at an online gaming company.

One of the things I am really pleased to see about your degree program is that there are a lot of interdisciplinary seminars. (Though not surprising since Roberto Bellarmino was a Jesuit and the school had a close association with Thomas Merton.)

My hope is that you will be in those seminars with business, science and liberal arts students so that there are opportunities to exchange multiple views. There can be a lot of dangerous insularity in the fine arts.

I see from the degree requirements you will be participating in classes that engage in discussions and field visits to local arts organizations. You will also have a couple semesters of internships.

Take the opportunity to ask questions and make suggestions realizing, that you are going to make some really dumb suggestions. That is just part of the process of learning. It can be painful, but can’t be avoided.

I only stopped saying dumb things six months ago…..

Some of your suggestions will actually be good but the people in charge are afraid of implementing them. You have to be humble enough to accept being told no because you won’t be experienced enough to really discern what really isn’t viable and what people are afraid to consider.

Always assuming that people are too timid to take chances will just make you miserable. Make a list of your ideas and come back to them later. Throw away the ones that were bad and propose or keep the good ones. Repeat.

Or try implementing your ideas yourself on a smaller scale.  The times increasingly offer greater resources that allow people to accomplish thing on their own.

In terms of your internships. Everyone has to make copies and coffee when they are interns. That shouldn’t be the whole of your job though. Talk to people who have interned before to make sure the internship coordinator is ensuring the internships are valuable experiences.

The easiest way to make sure you will have a good internship experience is to know before you go that your internship coordinator actively monitors the environment and is on the look out for your best interests.

Even if you are asked to do a lot of menial work, you can turn it into a learning experience. Interning in the days before email attachments were so easy was both a blessing and a curse. I may have had to run a lot of errands, but many times it was to the lawyers’ office. I knew enough not to talk about it with others, but no one said I shouldn’t read the documents I was couriering while waiting at the red lights…

In terms of useful skills, I would encourage you to pay very close attention in the accounting, finance and law classes. A person who can understand contracts as well as maintain and properly interpret balance sheets and cash flow statements will be valued pretty much anywhere.

The same with the writing classes and communication classes. There are so many channels of communication from email to 140 character texts to image sharing and probably more still on the way. The more that emerge, the more valuable a person who is able to quickly and clearly engage the viewer/reader.

Finally, I would stress the leadership/management and philosophy classes. Effective leadership has more to do with a good understanding of philosophy than with the analytics found in other business courses in my mind.

Ultimately, it is up to you decide what you want to invest and reap from each of your classes.  Worry more about what you are getting out of the class than obsessing about your grades. When I was an undergrad, I was content to get a B or C in a class I enjoyed because I felt like I gained something valuable. The grade was only a measure of my progress at the moment, but the interest the class engendered in the subject matter inspired me to continue to learn more about it.

Good luck.

What Should I Talk About?

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Now that I am back living in the lower 48, I have begun thinking a little more seriously about possibly presenting at some of the national or regional conferences. I had actually thought about it a bit when I was in Hawaii, but distance limited my opportunity to attend many conferences and hampered collaboration opportunities.

That gave me the idea to ask my readers–what do you think I should do a session on? This is actually a double duty question because I am also essentially asking what topic would you want me to write blog entries on to.

I understand that many people can’t attend conferences so I would ultimately be planning on posting whatever I talked about on the blog. And readers might see bits and pieces of what I was working on emerge on the blog as my research brought me in contact with new information.

Rather than to ask what topics I should blog about, I wanted to frame in the context of what do you want to know about so badly that you would seriously consider undertaking the expense of travel, hotel, food, etc to attend a conference where someone was talking about it?

I also suspect I take for granted people’s familiarity with many topics I come across in my daily reading. The reality might be that people are desperate for information. So even if I didn’t do a conference session on it, your feedback will help determine topics I blog about in the future.

Just as examples of conferences sessions to get you started, Arts Presenters is looking for session proposals on Catalyzing Communities around the arts, Making the Case for the Arts and The Art of Transition. That last one seems like it could encompass everything from leadership transition to changing your organizational approach to programming and marketing.

I just found out that I probably will be attending APAP conference this year. Though I am not sure I would get a proposal together by the deadline next Thursday so I am not necessarily looking for a topic that would fit that conference.

I figure I can either lead or contribute to a conversation about:

-contract negotiations, submitting offers, reading contract riders
-closely partnering with multiple arts presenters to organize a tour as a consortium
-partnering with artists to create performance works reflecting stories/values of indigenous cultures

Of course, I can talk about many other topics like marketing, social media, presenting in higher education environments (and bureaucracies) but I feel like a lot of other conference presenters can and have done so before. Though I am certainly happy to produce blog posts on these topics

I feel what I have listed are areas in which I have more specialized knowledge than many others. It is also likely that I am forgetting some too. If there is a subject area which you have come to value my expertise, let me know.

Thanks.

Giving, Rather Than Sacrificing

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I was thinking last week about the growing sentiment that non-profit organizations should resist the impulse to do “more with less.” The idea being that it gives funders, boards, government entities and the public an unrealistic view of what the real costs of programs actually are and is likely to cause burnout among employees.

The quality of all programs will probably suffer in an effort to make up for the loss of funding to one, as well.

Although it would really hurt organizational pride and morale, the suggestion is to eliminate the program rather than stretching and stressing yourself even more trying to maintain it. That way, at least the consequences of low funding are unambiguous.

A cynical thought crept into my mind that some organization of younger workers unfettered by concerns of good pay and work-life balance might come along and belie your insistence that the program couldn’t be supported, by happily suffering through its execution.

But soon I got to thinking, why not let them? Not that you should welcome an under-captialized organization with unrealistic expectations, but if there was someone qualified who thought they could do a better job, maybe your organization should hand over your files to them.

I started to wonder if many non-profits had really ever thought of this. Most organizations are aware of people doing similar work in their region, whether they are viewed as competitors or providing parallel services. If you are being faced with having to eliminate a program, but are conflicted and a little guilty thinking about all those whom you serve losing something they valued, perhaps it is best to give your program materials to a group that possesses better resources or sees that program as one of their core competencies.

Once you no longer view each other as competitors, there may be room for constructive partnerships. For example, a performance venue who is seeing their K12 school show program flounder due to decreasing availability of bus money might direct their clients to a group that performs in schools, but doesn’t have their own facility.

The traveling group may benefit from the additional contact list, as well as costumes and props that the venue will no longer be using. In return, however, the traveling group may still do an occasional school show for the venue or may produce a series of weekend family matinees at the venue, allowing the venue to continue offering family programming without having to bankroll the development.

Or perhaps both groups wanted to do an after school program, but neither had all the resources they needed to pull it off. Yet as partners, they do.

By the end of my musing, I started to think that trying to do more with less and hold on all your programs might not only be harmful to your organization, it might also impede constructive partnerships.

Instead of looking around at other groups as competitors for the same pie, which granted is increasingly becoming the case, it may be more productive to evaluate what other people are doing as well, if not better than you, with an eye to possibly having to cede that to them.

Times when things are going well are probably best to consider these issues because it also allows the time to evaluate potential partnership options while free of financial panic.

Perhaps you will decide to transition things away before a critical decision ever needs to be made, when your program still remains vibrant and is a worthwhile addition to another company.

No organization should be in a mode of constantly contemplating its demise. I know many elderly start mentally ear marking who will get what when they die, if they haven’t already started actively giving things away. I don’t think that is a healthy way for a non-profit to operate.

It should know where its strengths lay, what its core functions are and what things occupy a more secondary role. Strive for excellence in everything and shine in the community, but be consistently clear about what the priorities of the organization are.

Boards and staff members are likely to have strong emotional attachments to the work that your organization is doing, and probably rightfully so. An open and ongoing conversation about what another organization is doing well can help to motivate your organization to step their game up and do a little better.

But having an open conversation about the organizational priorities as well as what other organizations are doing well may ease the decision to cede/transition a program away if the staff and board has regularly acknowledged the worthiness of another organization to do the work that is being set aside.

No, Humanities Don’t Suck

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Some of you may be aware that there is a fairly active debate about the utility of humanities degrees in progress. Some governors are proposing students pursuing STEM majors pay a lower tuition than those pursuing humanities degrees.

There are studies that show while humanities majors make less than business and science majors right out of graduation, they end up making more 10-15 years down the road.

“Undergraduate professional degrees frequently lead to relatively high starting salaries and relatively flat pay scales thereafter. Humanities undergraduates may struggle more in the first few years after graduation, but in the long run they frequently find career paths with greater long-term growth potential; the skills in reading, writing, and critical thinking that we all talk about turn out to have real-world uses. Students and the general public legitimately worry about employability, but there’s no reason for us to surrender to the mistaken belief that humanities degrees are a poor investment.”

Studies like this and the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) are helping to collect data to refute the idea that humanities majors are useless.

The technical director for my performing arts center and I were talking last week when the conversation turned quickly to the value of the performing arts as a major that confers real world skills.

If you are reading this blog, you are likely already aware of most of them: You learn to plan a project invested with your own personal vision; research your portion of the project; present and execute your part of the project as part of a team.

Some arts disciplines require you to cross train in both technical and performance roles. All performing arts disciplines require the practitioner to possess some degree of empathy.

These are all skills that pretty much every business desires in an employee.

Then there is the big benefit–the unambiguous deadline.

One of the things I know drives college professors crazy is when a student says they can’t finish the paper and can they hand it in on Monday. If this option is denied, the student often enlists parents and administrators on their behalf. For all the good reasons the professor may have for not allowing this exception, a Friday versus Monday deadline appears to be somewhat arbitrary.

But when the performance time comes, that is the inescapable deadline. Well, I suppose it is escapable, but the time to “hand in” your assignment comes and passes with or without you. Whether it is submitted and what the quality of the work is apparent as are the consequences, if any.

One can always fake it and one’s parents will frequently speak praises regardless of whether they are earned. There is no guarantee a student will graduate with good organizational skills.

However, performance is an area where practical skills applicable to the real world are taught because the end product is meant to be consumed in the real world.

These are all skills that clearly do matter and have real world applications. The message that the humanities don’t matter undermines the teaching of these skills.

In the process of getting someone ready to give a public performance, there are many smaller scale performances conducted in more private environments. The stakes are much lower so it is easier to be irresponsible about handling your contribution.

But each one of these times instills the abilities needed for that big public performance. For many people that culminating event may not be on stage, but pitching an idea in the boardroom of Johnson & Johnson.

I Will Fear No Photoshop

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Last December Seth Godin made an entry on his blog, True professionals don’t fear amateurs in which he says,

“A few years ago, typesetting, wedding photography, graphic design and other endeavors that were previously off limits to all but the most passionate amateurs started to become more common. The insecure careerists fought off the amateurs at the gate, insisting that it was both a degradation of their art as well as a waste of time for the amateurs. The professionals, though, those with real talent, used the technological shift to move up the food chain. It was easy to encourage amateurs to go ahead and explore and experiment… professionals bring more than just good tools to their work as professionals.”

I wrote briefly about creativity on Monday and how different cultures may have different definitions of creative work, some of which may encompass activities that don’t take a lot of thought and effort.

I think Godin’s comment wraps up a lot of the concerns shared by people in the arts. Among those concerns are not only that people are creating things of little value and degrading their work by association, but that people would eventually be unable to discern what real quality was and seek out professionals when the time came as Godin suggests.

I had a conversation recently that illustrates both this fear and Godin’s assertion that there is still a place for work by experienced professionals in this world.

I was in a cafe for lunch and stopped by the table of the muralist who has done all of the floodwall murals in town. I commented that I saw a story in the paper that there was a guy who was also from Louisiana doing a mural in town and wondered if it wasn’t some state industry I wasn’t aware of.

He told me the other guy was actually someone who grew up here locally, joined him in working on the murals and then eventually moved to Louisiana to work for him. It was only in the last few years the other guy had struck out on his own.

He went on to say that murals are getting to be a popular thing these days and there were a lot of people who were selling themselves as muralists. The problem is, not only is it a much bigger undertaking than you realize to work in such a large scale, you also have to know your materials, medium and siting as well as work with the community. As a result, there are a lot of angry communities out there with murals no one visits that are peeling off the walls after a few years.

I had actually been to a talk he had given about painting the murals a few weeks earlier and quickly realized that I had no idea about all the engineering and site and materials preparation that went into creating a mural.

It is also pretty interesting to hear how helpful iPads are in providing research and reference assistance without having to leave the scaffolding.

But as I said, his comments illustrated the value of experience and professionalism in artists. It also showed how difficult it is for people to discern the value of a skilled practitioner.

I guess that is true across all professions. The high visibility and reputation of skilled doctors has never really prevented people touting bottled miracle cures.

Still it may be worth exploring, as Godin suggests, where you can position yourself in the spectrum of practitioners in order to be available when someone of your skills is really needed.

When You Invite An Artist To Dinner

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Last week I was invited to dinner to meet with a muralist who is in town painting the floodwall murals. I don’t mean to constantly harp on the small town charm I am experiencing here at my new job, but you write what you know, eh?

I have been thinking recently back to my childhood when my parents would regularly invite our teachers home for dinner. It wasn’t just my family. Every kid’s family seemed to take turns. We were all horrified because not only were our teachers invading our personal sanctums, but given we were Catholic school kids, our homes were being visited by nuns who kept us at the edge of terror!

I am not sure anyone does this any more, but this was the type of grassroots effort that let both the kids and the teachers know the community valued education.

I wonder if it might be effective to do the same thing with the arts where you invited your neighbors over to meet an artist.

I know a few groups that have house concerts by guest musicians as fund raising events. While that sort of intimacy offers a great experience, the type of people invited and the expectations placed upon them by the fund raising format aren’t really conducive to what I have in mind.

Having the party at the biggest mansion in the most exclusive neighborhood probably won’t make the arts appear accessible to new segments of the community either.

But a back yard cook out or dinner you would invite your friends to anyway, but in this instance you say, I would like you to come to dinner to meet this local/visiting artist, provides a low pressure environment that communicates that you value the arts.

The artist doesn’t need to perform or have their work on display. Just the fact they are the guest of honor to whom everyone is introduced at a gathering with good food and good company can be sufficient to influence attitudes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLfb9hgmufI

The Apprenticeship Option

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Recently Marginal Revolution blogger and economist Alex Tabbarok linked to an article he wrote a year ago suggesting that the United States would be well served by adding a focus on putting students into technical apprenticeships to the current push to get kids into college.

He starts out by applauding the now familiar push by governors in many states to provide incentives to students pursuing STEM fields over Liberal Arts. “We should focus higher-education dollars on the fields most likely to benefit everyone, not just the students who earn the degrees.”

I particularly oriented in on the part of the article where he notes,

“In 2009 the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual-and-performing-arts graduates in 1985.”

Wow, that is pretty great, huh? But he goes on,

There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology, and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math. Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees, and those graduates don’t get a big income boost from having gone to college.

Most important, graduates in the arts, psychology, and journalism are less likely to create the kinds of innovations that drive economic growth.

I initially felt a little indignant at the idea that graduates in the arts aren’t spurring innovation. But then I started wondering if the arts sector needs to take a little responsibility for this. It seems this might be a result of a lack of training and good public relations.

There is an on going conservation about training arts students to take a more entrepreneurial approach to their work so there is already an acknowledgment that this is an area to be improved. Perhaps part of that training should emphasize not undervaluing your work so that people don’t undervalue the work that artists do.

In terms of public relations, I think there is a lack of circulation of stories about successful creatives like those I recently cited about the winners of MIT’s Entrepreneurship Competition (one with a BA in East Asian Studies and Chinese Lit., the other with a BA in Aerospace Engineering) and the Rotman School of Management’s design competition.

The main thrust of Tabbarok’s argument isn’t so much to diminish the liberal arts degree as to advocate for apprenticeships. He notes that some people are simply not suited for college but vocational education programs have a stigma of being the dumping ground for high risk kids. He points to the model of Germany (among other European countries) where students normally opt for technical training and apprenticeships that provide real world work experience while the students are in high school.

What appealed to me about this was the idea that if there is room in the day for a high school student to receive vocational training, then you have to allow that there is time in the day for arts classes.

But I am not suggesting that some kids be allowed to paint while the other kids go learn to weld. I think high school vocational training should seek to provide opportunities for students to train and apprentice at local arts organizations as well. Who says you can’t take some of your welding classes in a scene shop or art studio or that you have to do your apprenticeship in a shipyard?

Apprenticeship programs like this could strengthen ties between schools and arts organizations and reinforce the idea that vocational skills don’t have to be applied in purely practical ways.

On the other side of the coin, I have a vague recollection of reading an article that suggested many visual artists today don’t have a good understanding of the materials they use because they haven’t had a lengthy exposure working/playing with them. Even if my recollection isn’t correct, the opportunity to work with materials still exists.

The reality is, four years of college isn’t the entire key to becoming an artist either.

You Wanna Be Where Everybody Knows Your Name

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As I have stated before, I grew up in a rural setting in upstate NY and just before I started blogging, I worked at a rural arts and music center. But now that I am paying much closer attention to the lives of arts organizations and the communities they try to serve, moving to work in a rural environment has given much greater insight into the impetus behind Scott Walters’ efforts on behalf of rural arts organizations that lead to the creation of the Center for Rural Arts Development and Leadership Education (CRADLE).

There may not be the financial support or audience attendance in numbers that larger cities and communities enjoy, but the impact of arts programs and opportunities can be much more immediate and apparent. This is not to say there isn’t just as profound an impact in other places, just that the feedback loop is that much smaller. Because everyone knows everyone, even if a person doesn’t make a comment about their experience to you, you are likely to hear about it from someone else.

Case in point, I met an administrator at the university early one Friday, later that day he got his haircut. That night his hairdresser, whom I had never met before, said he made positive remarks about me.

What has been interesting to me is to have confirmation of many of the benefits we in the arts claim we bring to the community.

People from the local hospital told me my arts center is important to the health of their organization because they generally don’t have problems attracting doctors to the area, but after a year or two pressure from their families often sees them moving away due to lack of activities. The better a job I do, the better it is for them.

The community board which helps us fund the bulk of our presenting was invited to have a fund raiser at a local wine store. The board had a band playing and the store owner had wine and beer tasting. The community board made quite a respectable amount of money that night so they were happy.

The owner of the shop said the arts people attracted the type of clientele he was looking for. They came, they chatted, they browsed, they bought. He was happy. I think everyone hopes there will be another opportunity to do that again.

Yeah, you can say this only reinforces the stereotype of arts people as effete wine drinkers, but you can grab a six pack of Bud in the supermarket. This business owner is focused on attracting people who drink wine and craft brewed beer and smoke cigars and the arts board helped to deliver them.

On the other hand, there were many people to just stopped in to grab a six pack and bottles who picked up performance season information and bought raffle tickets so the store potentially delivered new audiences to the theatre.

The last incident falls into the “big impact/change of life” category. This past weekend the local arts council had its first ever community arts awards event in my theatre. It was actually pretty well put together for a first attempt. Each award was interspersed with performances by youth performers.

I was surprised to learn that not only does this small town have an organization that teaches kids to do aerial acrobatics, but that the school is under the umbrella of the local museum. I am going to have to check it out. It may give Nina Simon and her Museum 2.0 a run for her money.

Probably the most conspicuous example of the arts impacting lives was the honoree who had been teaching piano for 60 years and so had a legion of people, from music teachers to kids attending top music conservatories, speaking her praises.

Among the other honorees were the Irish owners of the local pub who declared “what good is a pub without stories and music to fill it?” and the owners of a plumbing supply house who between them have sat on the boards of just about every arts organization in town.

There was a visual artist who had moved from Seattle and was instrumental in the founding of the local visual arts center. Known to be something of a recluse, the awards organizers went to his studio and made a really nice video of him talking about his art and his process. I wondered if the reception the film received from the audience emboldened him a little because he spoke a fair bit when he went on stage to accept the award.

Granted, there is a big fish in a small pond element to all of this. In terms of reaching numbers, a performer doing a show in Tampa impacts the lives of more people in one night than one of those honorees might in a year. Many times that is what foundations and granting organization are looking for.

But as I sat there Saturday night, I couldn’t help but think that what was happening in this town was what many arts organizations dreamed of. The results of an interaction with the arts, both positive and negative, and the bonds it creates between people are so easy to observe.

Person A and Person B may leave an event and separately speak about their experience with Persons C and D, respectively. No only is there a high chance that C and D will meet and speak about the experience related to them second hand, there is a good chance C will meet B, another person who actually attended, and get their view on the experience. All four then share a common bond around the experience.

Unless all four travel in the same circles, what is the chance that this interaction will happen often in a city of 300,000? Here it happens many times every day.

Obviously, there is a downside to this lack of anonymity. I was both amused and a little uneasy about having the an opinion of me by someone I just met come back to me via their hair stylist at a wine tasting that same afternoon. I am certainly going to have to step carefully at times.

But it also strikes me that for those willing to listen, it can be very easy to collect a fairly accurate view of the community without the need to resort to a lot of guess work.

Speaking of drinking wine and beer, this entry title brought to you by Cheers, of course

Info You Can Use: Let’s Play Find The Exploitative Clause

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About a month ago, I wrote about webcomic Penny Arcade’s online reality competition Strip Search which is aimed at finding the next great webcomic artist. (By the way, both the comic and the show are often NSFW)

I had mentioned that it seemed like the aim of the show was to use the Penny Arcade fame to help advance the careers of these artists.

I think their most recent episode of Strip Search provides a model for teaching arts students of all stripes about contracts.

Penny Arcade has famously signed away the rights to their intellectual property at least twice and only regained it by dumb luck. This is a topic near and dear to their hearts. I have seen the creators, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, and their business manager, Robert Khoo, talk about it in interviews and convention panels a number of times.

Khoo is probably the only business manager in the gaming world to achieve hero status for saving Krahulik and Holkins from themselves and helping to grow their company.

In this episode they have the contestants read through an exploitative contract and then go in and talk to Khoo about what they want struck or changed. Khoo basically plays a bumbling idiot in the negotiations because the whole point was to get the artists to evaluate the contract rather than necessarily deal with a combative negotiation environment.

Also, because it was a contest they only had a set amount of time to evaluate the contract and conduct negotiations. In real life situations everybody acknowledges the importance of investing all due care reading contracts and consulting with an attorney.

After the contestants spoke with him, Khoo mentioned that there were two basic approaches to the contract they could have taken. Either decided what their core values were and question whether the contract achieved or impeded those values or go through line by line analyzing each condition (or obviously a hybrid of both).

Because a classroom setting is similar to the contest environment with only a limited time to evaluate a contract (even if a student gets to take it home over the weekend), having a similar opportunity to look at a contract with many elements not in the artist or organization’s best interest and then roleplay a negotiation could certainly be helpful to arts students.

One of the things I never thought I got enough of in grad school was contracts. We got to look at a few contracts to see the sort of things that went into them and I got to read all the Actors Equity handbooks I wanted.

There really wasn’t a discussion about the type of things you would want to change because it wasn’t in your best interest.

Many people may be under the impression that a contract is something that you need to comply with as best you can if you want to do business with them at all. I think there is a basic assumption that the other party is acting in completely good faith and little acknowledgment of the possibility that the other guy may be trying to fleece you to the fullest extent possible.

Most people acting good faith with a reasonable bias toward themselves, but you had still better read the contract every single time it gets set before you.

Drop And Give Me A Sonnet

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Recently, (though it could have been 6 months ago the way time flies for me) Howard Sherman pointed back to a Huffington Post entry he did a few years ago about how the theater community looks derisively upon community theater.

I don’t know that this will ever change. But I recently got to thinking in the context of the Pro-Am trend where people are making greater efforts to hone their skills and knowledge, should community theaters be pushed to do and expect more to serve the needs of Pro-Ams and improve their own proficiencies?

Even though this proposal may see funding diverted away from larger established organizations (which has actually been suggested often in any case), in the long term it may benefit the arts in general.

Now that I am back living in a rural setting, I drive past volunteer firehouses regularly. It got me to thinking, not only are these firemen volunteering to run into burning buildings, they have to undergo 50-100 hours of training, refresher training, maintain good physical condition and show up to a certain percentage of calls to qualify for the privilege of risking their lives.

Not to mention mundane maintenance, housekeeping and fund raising duties.

I started wondering if maybe there needed to be a bit of a cultural shift for community theater groups toward requiring people to take classes and training in order to participate. I know there are many organizations that are pretty substantial and offer classes, but most come together on a project by project basis and don’t engage in a larger education effort.

Those who work backstage have the best chance of gaining additional skills because they are often being taught by people with some sort of construction background. Still, often novices are integrated into the effort without much safety training in advance. And they can be limited to only learning the techniques the most experienced person knows if there isn’t any effort to bring in outside experts.

I think actors might suffer most if they are only involved on per project basis. They gain the experience of performing and can certainly advance. But since the director is responsible for guiding many people, there is really no opportunity to instruct actors about techniques and the process of experimenting and exploring one’s options.

Having classes can enhance the value of the organization overall. Teaching is an effective path to learning so even if the group handles the classes entirely internally, they end up a little better off than when they started.

Bringing in guest teachers for seminars, whether it is a person from the community theatre the next county over, a professor at the local college or a designer from the big city, is even more ideal. (And maybe the experience will cut down on the derision a little.)

Now you may think it an awful idea to require people to attend classes if they want to participate in a performance because it puts up a barrier to entry at a time when the arts are trying to be welcoming to all.

But I wonder if a lack of this sort of rigor has resulted in the attitude we are seeing today that artists shouldn’t want to be paid because they engaged in a fun activity. Taking a class won’t necessarily guarantee a person will become any more skillful, but they will be more aware of the dedication and investment involved.

I don’t think having a requirement that if you want to participate, you should want to get better, is that onerous.

The classes don’t even necessarily need to be separate from the rehearsal process, though only having them as part of the process is actually more elitist because the training is limited to those who are cast.

When you think about it, when sports teams practice they don’t arrive at the field and move to their assigned roles. There are a lot of drills that focus on the fundamental skills of the game, improving physical condition and endurance. Players are asked to perform outside of their accustomed roles. There are clinics occasionally given by skilled practitioners.

This happens at all levels of play because the expectation is that you will strive to be a better player at the end of the season than you were when you came to the first training session. People who aren’t willing to make that commitment get cut from the team.

So that is why I wonder what sort of results would we see if funding and influence were directed toward creating an environment where honing skills became the norm.

I have been thinking for 20 minutes of a way to say it without it sounding condescending without much luck, but this bringing influence to bear would of necessity include a culture shift which saw “professional groups” partnering with community groups to provide training and assistance. As I said, I don’t think there will ever be a time when community theater will be viewed with complete parity by professional groups, but the gap will never close without increased interaction.

Modulating the Flow

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A few years back I was reflecting on a study that found arts administrators sought online data and learning opportunities that were relevant to the challenges they face. The problem, as you might imagine, is that they didn’t feel there was enough time in the day to sit down and read articles, much less seek them out. They wanted some sort of information delivery system, but didn’t quite know what those tools looked like.

At the time, I had the insight that this was the same challenge many potential audience members faced. People who may not have participated or attended arts events, upon maturing personally and financially, might desire to start becoming involved but don’t know where to learn about doing so.

At the time my suspicion was that whatever delivery system solved the arts administrators’ problem could probably be used to provide information to audiences.

But now, 6-7 years on, I am not sure a solution as arrived for either group. If anything, the situation has become even more difficult due to need to choose from among a greater proliferation of choices. There is far more information flowing from arts bloggers, forum discussion groups and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. But there are no consolidated, dependable sources of information to tap into. The individual must attempt to curate their own information.

Even though I am judicious in who I follow on Twitter and via my news reader, it is often all I can do to keep up with the flow of information coming to me. If I weren’t motivated both by a desire for professional development and material to blog about, I think I might give up on making a serious effort to stay current.

But your mileage may vary as they say. If anyone has found a method to gain the professional guidance and information they seek and not become overwhelmed by the experience, please share it.

Likewise, if you know of a good resource for audiences seeking orientation about the arts that doesn’t condescend, let me know as well.

Going Back To The Farm

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One of my favorite posts was one I did covering a grant report made to the University of Wisconsin-Extension, Putting Culture Back into Agriculture.

One of the great things about the report is that it talks about the impact of the Wisconsin Idea on the arts in that state with artists crisscrossing the state helping farmers and townspeople learn how to paint, write plays and learn how to sing together.

I put a number of great quotes in my entry, but one I omitted which seems just as relevant now as it was when UW-Madison President Glenn Frank said it in 1925:

There’s a gap somewhere in the soul of the people that troops into the theater but never produces a folk drama…. The arts are vital, if in the years ahead we are to master instead of being mastered by the vast complex and swiftly moving technical civilization born of science and the machine….

Even if you don’t see your organization as serving a rural community, the reflections by the grantees about what they did wrong in their approach to serving their community, how they rectified it and how things turned out splendidly just the same.

It isn’t often you see this sort of humility in grant reports and it can serve as an example of what to emulate.

What Happens When We Lock 12 Artists In A House And Make Them…Draw!

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I am a long time reader of the web comic, Penny Arcade (sometimes NSFW) which is focused on gaming culture (online, console, tabletop) The creators, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, have been among the few people to actually make a living at it, though they have said it was a near thing a few times in their careers.

They have used their success to found charity that mobilizes the gaming industry to benefit kids and a successful series of conventions started in response to what they felt were inequities in gaming conventions.

They recently started an online reality competition, Strip Search, to find the next great web comic artist. The competition basically seems to be an attempt to give web comic artists exposure while making fun of the whole reality competition format.

They have them do goofy challenges like remembering trivia from a tour of Seattle and a drawing version of the telephone game in return for prizes. The elimination challenges are more focused toward an artist’s professional life- designing t-shirts and skateboard art to a client’s specs, interviews by the media and cultivating your brand by responding to social media praise and criticism.

The winner of the elimination challenge has to go before Holkins and Krahulik to draw a comic strip based on randomly drawn topics. The one drawing the worst strip has to leave the show.

This is where things really veer from the traditional format. While the artists draw, Holkins and Krahulik ask them all sorts of questions looking to unnerve them a little. Krahulik especially likes to say stuff like “CONTESTANTS 10 MINUTES! is what you will have in 30 minutes.” Then they make the contestants sit in the “shame hole” which is an SUV parked outside, while they judge the strips.

This may sound a bit torturous, but my view is that it is an attempt to satirize many elements of format. At the end of each episode, Holkins and Krahulik jump into the SUV with the loser and really encourage them to keep working and talk about their own experiences trying to get their careers off the ground. In a recent episode, Holkins gave one of the guys his contact information and encouraged him to contact him at any time for advice.

I think their aim is to both encourage the artist to continue and encourage their fans to support the artist. When I visited some of the artists’ sites, it appears they all got invited to the Penny Arcade Exchange conventions to speak on panels and gain more exposure.

Compared to most reality competitions, you might find this one a bit amateurish and unpolished. The production values aren’t high and Holkins and Krahulik aren’t the poised panel of judges you find on most shows. The result is some honest moments like a recent episode with audio of Krahulik cursing off camera at the prospect of having to choose between two well-executed pieces.

Ultimately, they do send someone home, but Krahulik refuses to enact the ritual destruction of the losing piece and instead gives it back to the artist to keep.

While manipulation of events and environment are the hallmarks of reality competitions, it seems like there are places Penny Arcade doesn’t want to go. For instance, while I have been watching, I found myself thinking that the contestants were being too nice to each other and complimenting their competitors’ skills.

It got me to thinking about why I thought it was necessary for them to less supportive of each other –or at least be edited to appear that way. Isn’t it tough enough to be in a competition that is broadcast all over the internet for everyone to comment on?

Heck, isn’t it tough enough just trying to make a living from being a visual artist?

It may not bring the prestige of a cable show like Top Chef, but in terms of artists using their success and following to help other artists, I think there is something there worth emulating.

Info You Can Use: Kickstarting Your Taxes

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Salon has an important article to read if you are an artist trying to use Kickstarter to fund a project. Apparently people don’t realize the money they receive via Kickstarter is considered taxable income by the IRS.

In short, money raised from Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms is considered to be taxable income. Amazon Payments, which handles the credit card transactions for Kickstarter, disburses the funds to the project creator and sends them a 1099-K, a tax form that reports “Merchant Card and Third Party Network Payments” to the IRS. In this particular case, a pledge made by a fan to a project would be considered a third-party network payment.

[..]

“Although musicians may not necessarily be selling something via Kickstarter, they are still entering into a transaction with their backers,” he noted. “If they reach their goal of ‘X’ amount of dollars, they have certain conditions they’ve agreed to make. They should consider the money as income because the IRS defines gross income from ‘whatever source derived,’ unless specially excluded.”

The article also notes that artists often underestimate the cost and logistics of making good on their promises. One woman promised her supporters tickets to a show so when she exceeded her allocation of comp tickets, she had to buy the rest herself. Another ended up spending $10,000 in postage mailing out the items she promised.

Kickstarter also brings an issue artists have faced with their patrons since time immemorial–their desire to be involved in all the decisions.

The issue for Dawn was intensified by her raising five times the amount of her set goal. Suddenly, fans were complaining that she didn’t really need the whole $104,000 to record the album. Dawn countered by noting that not only did she use all of her Kickstarter funds, but she also opened four separate credit cards and dipped into her life savings to cover the difference.

One of those interviewed for the article suggested that anyone thinking of launching a campaign consult with an accountant or business manager first to plan for the tax liabilities and expenses the campaign will entail.

Kids Say The Same Old Things

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I heard a kid tell a joke the other day that was probably pretty old when I told it to my parents 30 odd years ago. I frequently amaze my nephews by beating them to the punchline on knock knock jokes and riddles that I remember from my childhood.

But recently, I got to wondering who is preserving the valuable fart humor and bad puns of our youth? I am guessing parents aren’t largely responsible for teaching jokes like “How do you make a tissue dance? Put some boogie in it.”

My guess is that older kids/siblings pass these things on to the younger ones insuring the continuity of the best and worst kids jokes around. Even if each successive generation is learning these jokes from adults, the kids are enthusiastically passing them around their schools and playgrounds.

This makes me think it is all the more important to get kids involved with seeing and participating in arts and cultural activities when they are young. Not only does it introduce the idea that this is something people do, it can help to acculturate their friends as well.

Granted, kids chatting about their experience all over the school yard isn’t going to immediately transform into increased admissions at performing arts centers and museums. An adult tells another adult that his kids had fun at a Colonial times reenactment village, they might go next weekend. A kid tells another kid about the musket and cannon demonstration and imaginations are fired for hours, maybe days to come.

Arts and culture doesn’t have a lock on firing kids’ imaginations. There are a lot of things that will, and in the grand scheme of things, a few incidents as a kid aren’t going to make a specific impression that carries over to adulthood. After all, one hopes people’s sense of humor will evolve past the bad jokes of their youth.

But I have this itching suspicion that word of mouth among kids is greatly underestimated in its power to influence the adult that kid will become. The oral history preservation of these bad jokes hints at this.

Seeing a play may not be as compelling to a kid as talking about farts, but whatever a kid feels about their experience, they will share if they see it makes a connection with another kid. If the other kid has had a comparable experience and can talk about it, then both kids learn at an early age that these experiences can be used as a the basis of a relationship with someone else.

Good Reason To Create Art Isn’t Always To Create Good Art

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We are often warned that art, and solutions in general, created by committee isn’t any good and doesn’t please anyone. But I wonder, if everyone involved feels ownership in what is produced and it strengthens the community, does it necessarily have to be of high quality aesthetically?

The wide gazing eyes of Thomas Cott fell upon a project sponsored in Mexico by the Scribe paper company. The company attached a small apartment to a billboard to house the artist who would be painting an advertisement for the company.

Over the course of 10 days the artist took suggestions about what to paint submitted over Twitter. The result may never be hailed as a work of genius, but the project garnered a lot of attention for Scribe. (You can see section details here) I am guessing it also strengthened the company’s relationship with a good segment of their customer base.

I am not sure what sort of guidance the artist was given by Scribe about integrating suggestions into her work, but apparently about 50 were used on the billboard.

Let’s pursue art for art sake and strive for excellence always. But for as much as we talk about connecting with our communities, it can often have the subtext of “but only on our own terms.” As Howard Sherman pointed out, there is a lot of disdain for anything tinged as low populism community theatre.

The primary goal of a community theatre production may have less to do with creating good art than spending time accomplishing something in cooperation with your neighbors. Heck, most guys who go fishing don’t want to actually catch something, they want to drink beer with their buddies.

So we may talk about how the arts need to connect with their community, but are we really ready to produce art for community sake, rather than art for art sake, and run the risk of creating really bad art that results in people feeling more connected with each other?

It likely takes starting from a place where you put community connections first and the pride and ego of the organization second. Scribe could have ended up in a situation where they had their name attached to a really ugly billboard in a prominent spot and they had to figure out what was the minimum amount of time they had to leave it up before they could paint it over.

It takes courage to cede control in a very public way. Just as not every masterful artist has the ability to teach what they know to others, not every artist and arts organization has the ability to lead a project like this to a good outcome.

Be The Propaganda You Wish To See

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Last Monday was March 4, according to my grandmother, the most commanding day of the year. (March Forth!). I am guessing other people’s grandmothers must have used the same line because last Monday there were a lot of hits on the post I did nine years earlier called The Most Commanding Day of the Year.

My grandmother had a lot of funny turns of phrase that she used to entertain and trick her grandkids. She was also very proud of being Irish (though she was second or third generation in the U.S.).

Now I have more German than Irish in my background from grandparents on both sides, but I didn’t realize that until I was much older thanks to my grandmother’s constant propaganda about how wonderful the Irish are and how wonderful it was that we were Irish.

I never recognized how much influence that had over my life. I have never been rabidly Irish, even on St. Patrick’s Day. However, two weeks ago I was listening to a Deutsche Welle report on how successful Ireland has been at achieving their goals while holding the European Union presidency. I felt a this sense of pride in Ireland’s accomplishment even though I only have a vague idea of how the EU presidency works.

I have generally been cynical about the effectiveness of constantly telling kids that they are smartest and most talented because reality tends to rear its ugly head a vast majority of the time and they realize they don’t measure up to the billing.

My recognition of my reaction to the Ireland story gave me some insight into the power of reinforcing ideas for kids as the grow up. It has started me thinking about the long term benefits of encouragement absent of specific value, consistently telling kids they can be artistic and creative without necessarily saying they are the most creative in class or specifying what being a successful artist looks like.

I know this sounds very vague and touchie-feelie and I will be the first to admit that I have no data to back this up.

I do know that many experts encourage parents to praise the process rather than the result– praise the hard work that went into preparing for a test rather than telling a kid they are smart for scoring so high. That way there is a sense of cause and effect behind a failure and how it might be resolved rather than a total sense of loss and bewilderment when the natural ability you have been told you possess seems to have abandoned you.

The idea that exposing and involving kids in the arts at a young age is important is barely news to any of us. My purpose in writing this post is to point to just how subtle and pervasive cultivating part a person’s identity as a child can be.

In terms of my Irishness, my grandmother’s influence was reinforced by the fact I lived an hour outside of NYC, one of the great bastions of Irish identity in the U.S.

But though my grandmother has been dead over a decade now, my immediate family, uncles and cousins inevitably bond over obscure “holidays” like March 4. My mother and I talked about it on March 3 and though neither of us spoke to my sister, she emailed out about the most commanding day of the year to my siblings and cousins on March 4.

If you think about it, there is probably some equally peculiar element from your own upbringing that influences you to this day. Considering all this, it may be helpful over the long term to include phrases like “what do you like to do?,” “what have you created lately?” in every day conversation with kids of all ages.

(By the way, I haven’t appropriated the saying commonly attributed to Gandhi for my title. There is no evidence he said it. But as with all evidence debunking misattributions, the research is pretty interesting.)

Brush Up Your Suetonius

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The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media’s Marketplace recently commissioned a study about the value placed on higher education by employers.

I initially only scanned the article, but listening to the Marketplace report on the radio on the way home brought me back to read it again when I heard the president of a technology company talk about how they make their new hires read Cato the Elder and Suetonius. He mentioned they were looking for people who could talk about the process of putting an idea forward, supporting it and problem solving.

“We do that because we ask them to look at the process – the abstract process – of organizing ideas,” Boyes says.

Sounds a lot like an argument for liberal arts education, at a time when more students are being told to study science and technology as a path to a career. Maguire Associates, the firm that conducted the survey, says the findings suggest colleges should break down the “false dichotomy of liberal arts and career development,” saying they’re “intrinsically linked.”

Or, as Boyes puts it: “We don’t need mono-focused people. We need well-rounded people.” And that’s from a tech employer.”

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about how college students need to focus on practical majors like business and STEM fields rather than wasting their time on Liberal Arts. But businesses keep saying they need well rounded problem solvers, not just people with technical knowledge.

Yet that technical knowledge and specific experience is becoming ever more important, predominantly in the form of internships. The Chronicle of Higher Education addresses that specifically in a separate section of their report. What I really liked about it is that it starts by relating a story about a student failing in her internship and learning from it. I think that is a hallmark of a good internship experience.

What I was a little taken aback by was the fact this woman had six internships. My concern is based on the fact that it takes considerable resources to support oneself while they are participating in an internship. Cost of college and the necessity of attending is certainly revealing the gap between the wealthy and those with fewer means. Now to learn that incurring the cost of internships is increasingly important for employment and to see that one woman has worked six of them presumably to make herself more marketable, is somewhat disheartening to someone like myself whose family didn’t have a lot.

I have written about internships a fair bit over the course of this blog discussing the laws that apply to them as well as some interesting ideas for giving arts majors more practical skills through the design of their training programs.

As I read and listened to the sections of this report, it occurred to me that arts training programs need to insure their education and internship opportunities are providing is relevant and valuable. But it also occurred to me that arts organizations offering the internship opportunities would benefit by marketing them to students outside the arts.

The interns from other disciplines can gain the practical experience and educational “leavening” they need to become more well-rounded. The arts organization can benefit in turn by having someone with a non-arts perspective working for their company.

True, this may reduce the number of internships available for people pursuing arts careers, but those students can also benefit from working for a non-arts company to become well rounded in other areas and pick up skills they can bring back to the arts.

Let me tell you, I wouldn’t have thought doing semi-farm work as a teenager would have translated into anything useful for the arts until it came time to drive a farm tractor around while setting up the grounds for an outdoor arts and music festival.

The Chronicle article mentions much the same thing:

Such exercises don’t always ensure connections, at least at first. Jacquelyn M. Lomp, who graduated from UConn last May with a B.A. in English, initially wasn’t sure how her internship, in which she wrote newsletters for the university’s pharmacy department, related to her studies. “I’d go from dissecting different pharmaceutical research,” she says, “to studying Norse mythology.”

Only after college did she come to recognize that both her academic work and her internship required intense focus and the ability to analyze language for deeper meaning.

The title of this post, inspired of course, by the song from Kiss Me Kate:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJIpp2Jj8AQ&w=420&h=315]

Don’t Blame Arcane Terminology and Practice

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Andrew Taylor touches upon a little of what I was thinking about this weekend in his post today. He quotes a recent piece by Marian Godfrey where she talks about how the language used by arts managers and grant makers is alienating and soul sucking.

…like any professional jargon, it puts up barriers and makes people who are unfamiliar with our dialect feel like outsiders, including the very people we are trying to support — artists and engaged people in our communities. I believe we need more humane language to describe ourselves and our visions: words and meanings that are shared by artists, administrators, and the public.

I had been thinking about the specialized language and terminologies used in the arts this weekend. I believe Godfrey was referring to the institutional and general language used to discuss the benefits of the arts as a whole, (I read the whole piece as Andrew Taylor enjoined his readers to do), whereas I was thinking about the terms specific to each arts discipline. As such, I don’t know that I can say I directly disagree with what Godfrey says.

The conclusion I came to this weekend is that while there is quite a bit of vocabulary one must learn in order to comfortably participate in a conversation about a discipline, I don’t think the need to learn a complex set of terms really comprises a significant impediment to becoming an participant or spectator. I think it is just a convenient excuse.

There are plenty of instances where people willingly engage in the time consuming process of learning special terminology. Take MMORPGs like W.O.W. where people will be exposed to terms like: tank, buff/debuff, AoE, aggro, autoloot, cooldown, PvE, PvP, grinding, griefing, among thousands of others. Players are expected to master the terminology, understand the role their character fills and how to use their abilities alongside others to achieve a goal.

Thousands of people happily undertake this challenge every day.

You might argue that people playing online games gain a sense of personal accomplishment that motivates them. But watching sports is often just as passive an activity as watching a performance, (okay, granted you can’t jump up and yell at a ballerina the moment the spirit moves you like you can with an athlete), and requires learning all sorts of arcane rules specific to each game. Often the rules are a little different for each level of play.

People learn these rules and terms because they want to. If they don’t know them, they can seek help from friends or go online to look up the information.

To illustrate this, I intentionally didn’t link to any resource with the gaming terms. Did you look them up or think about looking them up if you didn’t know what they were?

Sometimes this information is collated by the company/team/organization providing the activity. Often these days, people sharing a common interest join together to contribute information to a wiki which exists independently of the organization or activity it covers.

So when people express trepidation about learning the vocabulary and rituals of the performing and visual arts, I think the question really should be why this is so? My impulse is to respond that it is because there are not enough people they are acquainted with either personally or virtually providing a message that it is worth the trouble to learn about it.

I also don’t think there are enough informational resources out there to make it easy for people to learn if they so desire. I just did a Google search for the term “first position” because I can never remember the feet placement for the different positions. I couldn’t find it until I searched for the term “second position.” (Though I did discover A LOT of dance schools are named First Position.)

This is not to say that there aren’t many wikis and specialized dictionaries online which cover arts terminology. American Ballet Theatre has a pretty good dictionary of dance terms. It is just a coincidence that first position doesn’t appear there.

You would have to know to look there though because everyone’s go to source, Wikipedia, only has about 24 terms on it and there isn’t a good dance wiki that I could find. Information sources on theatre terminology are only slightly better.

As much as people say television shows like Glee, Smash and Bunheads don’t reflect reality, they do serve to disseminate the message that singing, theatre and dance are things people should be interested in learning more about.

Like I said, the idea that there isn’t enough of a visible trend and readily available information was something of a primary impression I had. I’d be happy to hear other theories.

While I think some of the terminology and practices might need a change, I do feel fairly strongly that people’s reticence to learn more about arts disciplines can’t be laid primarily at the feet of specialized vocabulary and unfamiliar practices.

People take the necessity of doing this in stride if they are motivated to learn something. Simplifying the language and altering the practices isn’t going to result in a sudden deluge of attendees because the initial motivating impulse will be absent.

Secret Isn’t Thinking Out Of The Box, It IS The Box

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You have all heard, or even told, a story where you get a great toy for a child only to have them play with the box. The moral of the story is often to get simple stuff for kids to play with because they will be far more satisfied with that than anything else you can get them.

I recently started to suspect the same thing probably applies to arts experiences with kids. Adults have all these expectations for a high quality, well designed product that they impose on the experience. While the kids are thrilled with the whole experience, including the simple ancillary wrappings that adults will ignore or discard.

My nephews were going to the Museum of Natural History when they had off on Presidents’ Day. When they told me this, I commented “Oh, to see the dinosaurs?” They asked how I knew and without thinking, I replied, “Because that is what I remember from my visit.”

Actually, that isn’t entirely true as I will explain later, but the dinos make a big impression on kids my nephews’ age. I was the same age when I first went to Museum of Natural History.

When I asked them about how they liked the museum, my one nephew asked when he would get to see real dinosaurs (because, you know the skeletons alone are a disappointment to anyone with a vivid imagination). They also talked about riding the A train. Because the train is express at certain points, it rides the middle track which means at times you have one train zipping by in the opposite direction on one side of the train. But on the other side of the car, you have another train traveling in the same direction just “floating” alongside as it keeps pace. Honestly, even at my age I think it is a pretty cool phenomenon.

They actually loved running around Central Park more than the museum. Or at least, they talked about that about as much as the museum, if not a little more.

Talking to them reminded me that while many aspects of the experience are frustrating for adults, (including keeping on eye on the kids), almost every part of the experience can be magical and memorable for the kids.

Talking to them altered my thinking slightly. It isn’t important to expose kids to the arts, it is important to expose them to the whole experience and make it memorable. It doesn’t take much to make it memorable.

The attendance and participation experience as a kid, the whole experience, is what helps grow adults who love the arts. That my nephews and I were able to connect easily and immediately over the memory of the dinos hints at that.

The thing that is really most memorable about my first trip to the Museum of Natural History is both simpler and more complex. We made the visit around Christmas time and there was a huge tree in the lobby. At a table near the tree were a number of Japanese women teaching people to do origami. There were origami ornaments on the tree.

I know I must have spent at least an hour watching them. I had never seen anything like it before. I had no conception you could do that with paper. That was over 30 years ago and I still have the ornaments, both those I made and those the women gave me. I still remember being amazed they gave me the ornaments they folded. Given how hard it was to fold (for a 10 year old, at least) they seemed like precious objects to me.

Info You Can Use: NP Orgs Exist In Shadow Universe (Great Resource Guides Too)

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My Twitter feed delivered me two great resources for arts professionals on the same day this week.

The first came courtesy of Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group. I guess I should have known that when they talked about a guide developed for “WA Artists” they meant Western Australia and not Washington State. In my defense, they link to a lot of prominent U.S. arts sources (like me!).

The guide they shared, Amplifier: The Arts Business Guide for Creative People, from Propel Youth Arts, is really one of the best guides for creatives just starting out that I have come across. If you cut out the resource guide at the end of the booklet, 98% of it is applicable to a creative anywhere.

The guide is really accessible with fun illustrations and interviews that will probably make you want to move to Western Australia. It also walks you through all sorts of planning processes with questions and checklists: project management, business plans, identifying markets, goal setting, evaluation, finances & funding, legal, product, pricing, place and promotion.

It doesn’t just deal with performance, but also tackles film, visual art and publishing, delves into copyright law (which appears almost identical to U.S. law) and licenses.

The guide also spends a few pages on risk assessment and insurance for events which is something I have never really seen in similar guides even though it is very important.

The second resource comes from the Wallace Foundation. This one is more geared toward arts groups rather than individuals starting out and is focused on administrative issues like finances, board oversight and administration.

You may have seen some tweets about it but not followed the link. It is really worth stopping by to take a look.

Some of the guides and case studies are what you might expect “Building Stronger Nonprofits Through Better Financial Management” and How to Talk About Finances So Non-Financial Folks Will Listen.

But there are some with more intriguing titles like: “Efficiency” and “Not-for-Profit” Can Go Hand in Hand,  and The Looking-Glass World of Nonprofit Money: Managing in For-Profits’ Shadow Universe.  

The latter is described as” Especially useful overview for board members with little exposure to the unique nature of finance in a nonprofit context.” I  never really thought of NP orgs as operating in a shadow universe. Sounds so cool! Does that mean Rocco Landesman was the dark emperor or something while he headed the National Endowment for the Arts?

There are also proposals like “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle” which advocate for changes in the way foundations support non-profits.

The part of this resource I have seldom seen in other places was a whole section of five articles, including a podcast, on figuring out the True Cost of programs. They specifically have a calculator for figuring out the cost of after school programs, but following the steps outlined in some of the other articles can help reveal truths like social media isn’t actually free.

I haven’t read through everything in the guide, but I am definitely going to bookmark it for future reference.

Want To Pursue A Creative Career?..Uhm, The Brits Will Help You Decide

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Finder of interesting things, Thomas Cott, tweeted a link to an article about creative apprenticeships in the UK. While unpaid non profit internships are not against the law in the U.S., they have been something of a hot topic in England.

According to the article Cott linked to, the creation of the National Skills Academy is not a reaction to the internship scandal, but given that many businesses in creative industries heavily depend on unpaid labor, it does provide a response to that problem. Essentially, it allows young people to gain the skills they lack in professional settings and provide organizations with some labor without running afoul the law.

I am not quite sure how this is arranged. Apprentices are entitled to a special apprenticeship minimum wage. Whether the company using their labor pays it directly or indirectly, or the training program does isn’t clear to me.

What interested me was some of the things the National Skills Academy was doing to provide training. Whereas getting a degree in the arts is increasingly seen as not marketable in the U.S. given rising tuition, the National Skills Academy has done their research and are working with creative industries to answer the demand. They have even built a training and rehearsal facility.

We’ve encouraged a shift in education away from courses of over-supply towards training that fulfils a clear demand from the industry. In the theatre and live music sectors, our members told us they needed new backstage staff more than anything else (and they weren’t at all worried about performers). But lots of colleges were offering over-subscribed performing arts courses first and foremost. We had a look at this, and our education members now deliver quality backstage courses approved by industry and popular with students.

Our members also felt the live events, music and theatre industries needed somewhere to train and rehearse. Together we made the case for a £13m investment to build an industry-spec new building for industry and students, The Backstage Centre.

The situation in the UK isn’t that much different than in the U.S. in terms of what is needed to do the job. One section of the site observes that even though 58% of those working in creativity industries have degrees, they ironically valued experience over education because there are gaps in the education people are receiving.

They also observe, as in the U.S., unpaid internships are not a viable option for people who don’t have the money to support themselves while they work. They strive to shift that dynamic.

But that’s not what we’re being told – a quarter of employers we asked said they were experiencing skills gaps and shortages in key areas. As a result, we’ve seen a rapid growth in unpaid internships – now much longer than the traditional three-month placement.

We’re concerned that there’s a disconnect here between employers and the education sector supplying them with staff. We’ve also seen that unpaid work is unsustainable for anyone without private support.

The overall picture shows under-employment, unemployment and unfair access.

Changing recruitment culture

Our membership network led the campaign to encourage a change in recruitment culture. In 2009, we created the first specialist apprenticeship frameworks, to supply employers with staff who have the specialist skills they want.

There are whole sections on associated websites devoted to helping young people make decisions about what creative careers they might want to pursue and what opportunities are out there. There are two sites devoted specifically to theatre work and another to music.

It is not just online resources, they have a series of in person sessions around the UK young people can attend. Some are targeted at students as young as 13. Many of them are fully booked.

So if you are like me, your first reaction is probably something along the lines of “Why don’t we have something like this in the U.S.?” I think even with all the talk about how the arts councils are continuing to be defunded in the U.K. and how cultural organizations may have to look to the U.S. model of garnering private support for their work, there exists an immense fundamental gap between how arts and culture are valued in the respective countries.

This program was only created five years ago and it already has 1,800 apprentices and the Backstage Centre built. Now admittedly, it remains to be seen whether there are jobs for all these people. My suspicion is that they expect/hope some of these people to end up creating their own companies and to help drive a shift to a creative economy.

Can You Pursue The Intrinsic Value of Arts Alone?

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There was a post by KCET columnist Corbett Barklie last fall that has had me thinking and wondering if there hasn’t been enough conversation about this topic.

In short, Barklie feels that arts organizations are sacrificing a focus on the intrinsic value of art in the pursuit of “social service” related activities. (my emphasis)

Arts groups exist to interpret the past, elucidate the present, and imagine the future. To borrow from Dewitt H. Parker’s The Principles of Aesthetics, “The intrinsic value of art must be unique, for it is the value of a unique activity — the free expression of experience in a form delightful and permanent, mediating communication.”

Nonprofit arts groups and the artists that run them are not reactionary entities. They are visionary entities.

You may be thinking, “But what about art groups who work in schools? Artists who work in hospitals?” In my opinion, those are arts service organizations — a rarely made but critical distinction. Arts service organizations exist to create and provide ancillary programs that help fulfill the missions of social service nonprofits such as schools, community centers, hospitals, etc…

[…]

Because no distinction has been made between arts groups and arts service organizations, the general arts and arts policy conversation (set by funders and designated leaders) is getting more and more muddled. And artists who exist in organizations that are only concerned with artistic excellence are beginning to feel marginalized.

[…]

Unless and until arts groups find their voice of disagreement and set aside fear of funding or political ramifications long enough to speak up for themselves, the conversation will continue to focus less and less on challenges facing arts groups that are committed solely to artistic excellence. Eventually these arts groups will fade from view completely.

My first thought was, but isn’t an educational component the way it is supposed to be? Most non-profit organizations are organized under the aegis of the education part of 501 (c) 3. In a time when there is less arts education in schools, isn’t it in our best long term interest to be providing educational services? But then again, by Barklie’s definition, I have been working for arts service organizations for the last 20 odd years so this is the normal for me.

So my question to my larger audience; is it as Barklie suggests (and most recently echoed by Diane Ragsdale), have funders and others lead the arts in this direction?

After all, at one time, art was presented for arts sake and there wasn’t any efforts to supplement the efforts of education and health care.

Is this an improvement or a dilution of our effort? It can be argued that pursuing education programs helps put arts organizations in touch with their and constituencies, helping to remove ivory tower mentality and acculturate the community.

But there is also the issue of diverting resources from the core competency and mission of the company. For profit businesses aren’t expected to do this. Many get immense tax breaks with no expectation that they serve the public good.

Is it the new normal that arts organizations must split their focus in order to maintain their existence? Is there an egotism inherent to believing you should be able to pursue the intrinsic value of art alone?

Shaping oneself as an arts service organization seems about the only option for garnering foundation funding and mollifying governmental entities who want something more than pursuit of artistic excellence as a justification for being.

Thoughts?

Then What Are We Fighting For Anyway?

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The quote that this entry’s title comes from, Churchill’s response to the suggestion that funding for the arts be cut to save money during the Second World War, is unfortunately apocryphal.

He did however, refuse to send the art from the National Gallery to Canada on the belief that the Axis powers would be beaten.

The closest to the quote that he got was in 1938:

“The arts are essen­tial to any com­plete national life. The State owes it to itself to sus­tain and encour­age them….Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the rev­er­ence and delight which are their due.”

Granted this is before the war started so he may not have felt as strongly about cutting funding once hostilities got underway.

However, funding art during troubled times has been seen as a way to reassure the populace. I found the following on the National Performing Arts Convention website:

“In the third year of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln ordered work to go ahead on the completion of the dome of the Capitol. When critics protested the diversion of labor and money from the prosecution of the war, Lincoln said, ‘If people see the capitol going on, it is a sign that we intend this Union shall go on.’ Franklin Roosevelt recalled this story in 1941 when, with the world in the blaze of war, he dedicated the National Gallery in Washington. And John Kennedy recalled both these stories when he asked for public support for the arts in 1962. Lincoln and Roosevelt, Kennedy said, ‘understood that the life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of the nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose- and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.”

–Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

While Churchill may not have advocated for arts funding during the war, the predecessor of the Arts Council of England was formed and funded in those early years with John Maynard Keynes leading the organization.

…In December 1939, in a world darkened by war, winter and blackout, a small group of civil servants and educators met to discuss the crisis in the arts. Great museums and galleries were empty, their contents packed off to safety from bombing. The theatres were shut, orchestras about to disband. The committee agreed that it was essential “to show publicly and unmistakably that the Government cares about the cultural life of the country. This country is supposed to be fighting for civilisation.”

In 1940, with an initial budget of £50,000 (about £2 million in today’s values) the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, mother to today’s Arts Council, was born. The Daily Express thundered: “What madness is this? There is no such thing as culture in wartime.”

When the earthquake struck Haiti a couple years ago, one thing I noticed during the news stories was that people were coming together and singing. It didn’t stop the bleeding or miraculously heal broken bones, but it brought people together and gave them strength to hold on until help arrived.

And when people were rally help for Haiti and those impacted by Hurricane Sandy, musicians and other artists and professionals were the public voice and face of the appeal in so many instances. These people didn’t just emerge from a vacuum fully formed, they are a result of environments which cultivated and valued their talent across decades of careers.

Ian McKellen was recently quoted as saying there will no longer be great actors of the calibre like himself, Derek Jacobi and Judi Dench because the repertory theatre movement which cultivated these people has died out.

Sure, it may be a case of a septuagenarian complaining “kids today…” but he reminds us that he and his colleagues weren’t born fantastic and imbued with gravitas but worked toward it over time.

Granted, it is difficult to plan and invest resources long term at the expense of the present. By the same token, laying a little bit away now for the future sends a message you have a vision of a future worth investing in. There is value in that on many fronts.

Age And Artistic Taste–Discuss

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Writing about the concept of music discovery, Tyler Hayes suggests that after a certain age, most people are pretty set in their music tastes and in terms of paying for recordings of music, are better served by buying and owning rather than “renting” the music from a service like Spotify.

He argues that technology currently does a poor job of creating an environment for music discovery.

The problem with Pandora is that it may replace the radio for some, or a lot of people, but there is no spark the same way when a friend says “Hey, you should check out this band, they’re great.” A computer can’t replace that, yet. There will be an app or site or service that does fix and solve discovery… But that isn’t now or even this year.

Music discovery should be a verb or an accident, through active looking or serendipitous stumbling, but it shouldn’t be paraded around only as a marketing term.

A number of thoughts that occurred to me as I read this. First was that idea that new music discovery tapers off after a certain age. There are studies that show that people often mature into an appreciation for classical music. But I wonder if the ground work for that appreciation isn’t laid when people are younger and attend live performances in general with their family and classmates.

Yeah, I know the arts for the kids discussion has been beaten to death. I am just suggesting that even though you turned out okay and appreciate art even though you had minimal exposure when you were younger, the general environment has greatly changed since then.

If you are in your 40s as I am, or older you and your parents watched many of the same television shows because that was all that was available. Even though I didn’t go to many Broadway shows in my youth, my mother would often play Fiddler on the Roof, Camelot and Godspell records. I would dance around singing the chorus of “If I Were A Rich Man” when I resented having to do chores.

Your parents had a fairly strong influence on your taste and you shared many of the same experiences. While it may have been to a lesser degree, you probably gravitated toward some of the same general arts genres your parents did as you got older. Even if you rebelled against sharing their aesthetic taste, you were still engaged by art to some degree.

I am not sure we can necessarily count on the same effect with the current generation. Lacking any exposure from any quarter, their tastes may solidify as they are and never include traditional/classical art forms as they mature.

I am open to hearing counter arguments, but if you are older than 30ish, be honest, are you as voracious a consumer of music/art as you were when you were younger or are your choices pretty much explorations along general lines you established in the past with some interesting, but not radical deviations?

Second thing I began to ponder was whether terms like audience/community engagement and discovery are largely marketing terms that are being used to add a little luster to the same general programs as before or if arts organizations have started making a more directed effort in these directions. This isn’t something I can opine upon even generally because I don’t have any really solid data. It is a good question to ask ourselves, though.

I do think that the thing arts organizations offer over any other entertainment form is the opportunity to experience the frisson of personal discovery. I love Tyler Hayes’ definition of musical discovery as “a verb or an accident, through active looking or serendipitous stumbling.”

You absolutely miss something when you try to experience it via a small screen or ear buds vs. going into a performance hall or gallery. Even if you don’t understand Dali, you have an experience standing in front of one of his wall sized works that you don’t by seeing a picture of it.

The challenge has always been trying to communicate that through media insufficient to the task without under or overselling it. The other part of the challenge is whether people will continue to value the seeking process.

Who Really Values Diversity In The Arts?

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Last month Springboard for the Arts tweeted that the attendance at the Guthrie Theatre’s attendance last year exceeded the Minnesota Vikings’ home game attendance, 425,932 to 421,668.

Springboard Executive Director Laura Zabel blogged about these numbers suggesting the 400k Guthrie audience members should manifest their love for the theater in the same way Vikings’ fans do–jerseys and facepaint.

One of my first thoughts, based on some of Zabel’s observations, was about whether tax dollars were better spent building a stadium which is only used 8 times a year by 400,000 people or a theatre which is used hundreds of nights a year by the same number.

But I quickly remembered the big to do about the lack of diversity in Guthrie’s current season. I wondered if the attendance numbers reflected any push back against that.

Based on a calendar year comparison, it hasn’t. At the end of 2011 their attendance was 421,982. That, however, was down from 2010 when their attendance was 435,877.

I don’t have any numbers comparing their seasons which run September – August. There could have been a precipitous drop off September – December 2012 that isn’t readily apparent. My suspicion, however, is that audiences by and large don’t care about diversity, or the lack thereof, as much as people in the arts sector do.

Diversity is an internal concern driven by economic and philosophic motivations rather than by external audience demands. Audiences do want works that speak to them so arts organizations pursue diversity in order to bolster attendance by expanding the appeal of their works.

Non-profit arts organizations are also widely motivated by their educational mission to expose their audiences to new ideas which is often manifested by who is chosen to perform and whose ideas are chosen to be presented.

While arts organizations have to be responsive to the tastes and interests of their audiences, the audiences take a pretty passive role when it comes to programming. They aren’t widely clamoring for their local arts organizations to bring in new faces and new ideas.

If they were, it would actually be easier to program a season because you would have an idea of what people wanted instead of having an empty theatre teach you what they didn’t.

The Guthrie’s artistic director, Joe Dowling noted that many of the shows in their current season were brought to him by the directors. That is how the programming decisions of most arts organizations are driven, artists and agents, rather than audiences approach decision makers with ideas.

In fact, one of the things artistic directors probably cringe most at is being approached by an audience member who says “I know this group…” I would have sworn it would never come to pass, but this season we are actually doing a show based on a usher coming up and essentially saying, “I am in this band…” It does happen, but often audience suggestions don’t reflect an understanding of the organization’s artistic and business models.

Just the same, that feedback can provide insight into the type of experience the audience member is looking for. Presenting Lady Gaga may be totally wrong for the Guthrie Theater, but a show where the audience can vicariously identify with the protagonist’s rise to celebrity might work great.

As you are all well aware, arts organizations are in the unenviable position of having to figure it all out. It is difficult to pursue any one agenda as wholeheartedly as you might wish. Program too conservatively and audiences will say the arts are arrogant and out of touch for telling them they ought to value antiquated works by Mozart and Shakespeare. Program too progressively and audiences will say the arts are arrogant for telling them they ought to value works challenging notions of gender, race and politics.

I don’t mean to champion a middle of the road approach. I could easily argue, as many people did regarding the Guthrie’s season, that I have far more diversity on my stage and in my audiences just by cultivating locally available artistic resources. I also know that may be harder to achieve in the next job I hold. A balance between leading and following has to be struck and recalibrated all the time.

Info You Can Use: In House Professional Development

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I came across a piece by the Bridgespan Group about creating professional development opportunities for non-profit organization staff members when you don’t have the money to send them to conferences.

Some of their suggestions included cross-training, job shadowing and stretch assignments which give people responsibilities outside their usual scope so that they can begin to develop in areas they are lacking.

One thing that caught my attention was the suggestion that employees be given the responsibility for organizing internal gatherings. In addition to having employees take turns organizing and running staff meetings, the article discusses companies where the staff arranges for speakers and other activities for in house professional development, training and team building exercises.

As I was thinking about this idea and who might the staff invite to speak or provide training, it occurred to me that this practice might be helpful in promoting greater understanding between non-profits, their boards and the community.

One of the first thoughts I had was that board members might either attend or be speakers at these events. The experience might either be very informative and help the organization move forward or reveal the gaps in understanding.

This is where things might get tricky. In the best possible situation, board members might come to an understanding of how the organization is run and the challenges it faces. Staff might learn new practices for the way forward.

On the other side, people may realize there is a huge lack of understanding. Staff may realize that a board member presenting a talk has no concept of the business model non-profits follow as they encourage the organization to embrace practices to move them toward greater profitability. How to approach them diplomatically and clarify matters may not initially be clear. However, it may provide a realization that a better board education program is needed.

The same thing can happen involving the public sphere. Staff may become aware of new trends applicable to their organization. Using these talks as an example, the non-profit staff could turn around and create/join a speakers bureau to raise awareness about their organization.

Finally, having read many excellent arts social media postings and blog entries by arts leaders, it is clear there are many very intelligent, well informed people out there in the non-profit world. If they are able to get up in front of their own company and speak objectively (rather than with a subtext about where the staff is failing to live up to expectations) about general philosophy and practice in their industry, I would bet those they work with would see them in an entirely different light.

It is so easy to get bogged down with the day to day details of running the organization, few in the organization may be aware of breadth of knowledge and passion their colleagues have. People may suddenly realize they have a unexpected source of expertise and inspiration readily available.

Of course, no matter what you do, you run the risk of he internal development/training sessions being entirely inappropriate and boring. But you can get that at a conference you pay to attend, too.

Price Higher Than You Are Prepared To Pay?

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Angry White Guy in Chicago, Don Hall, recently re-printed a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to an aspiring writer. It made me think a bit about the definition of the professional vs. amateur both in 1938 and today.

Quoth Fitzgerald: (my emphasis)

“I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner….

[…]

The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming — the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is ‘nice’ is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the ‘works.’ You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

[…]

P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent — which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.

One of my first thoughts was to wonder how Fitzgerald might react if he were alive today when it seems that the public will accept and reward the work of artists who haven’t paid the price and have really only committed to half measures. While people won’t become invested in the soldier who is only a little brave, flash can be substituted for substance.

I am sure Fitzgerald would have said the same about some people during his time and maybe we would like to think that back in his day, even the worst would possess better qualities of some of the most highly acclaimed today. We don’t know if that is true or not.

I do think that regardless of the time, we can all agree like Fitzgerald that a professional has honed his skill that she makes everything look easy because they have internalized their skill. Amateurs are left trying to replicate the outer appearance of what professionals do.

But if the audience can’t discern between the two or aren’t bothered by the difference enough not to reward the lesser quality? Does the difference matter?

I am not just referring to what is produced by experienced and inexperienced individuals. Music played over an iPod loses a lot of the qualities that can be experienced with a bigger sound system but people are willing to sacrifice quality for portability. Now we have music being intentionally recorded so it sounds good on iPod that is bereft of the subtleties that made past compositions intriguing and exciting.

Fitzgerald’s post script gave me a little chuckle. Being a little talented and charming like being in good physical condition is rare enough to be recognized. But not so rare that like those admitted to West Point, there aren’t 1000 or so others possessing the exact same qualifications.

But as we know, diligence and talent isn’t enough to set you apart, nor does the lack guarantee obscurity.

Still, Fitzgerald’s letter reminds us there is a difference even if it isn’t recognized and so a reason to remain a little humble and continue to hone our skills.

There Go The Brains of The Operation

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I had been pondering on whether to post on this topic but Thomas Cott’s link to a Bloomberg News story about how leaders of arts organizations in the U.S. remain in that position far longer than colleagues in the UK.

The story weighs the benefits of leaders having long term relationships with donors vs. concerns about leadership becoming staid and slow to be responsive to changing times.

My concern comes from a slightly different, though related, direction. Over Christmas I received an email from a long time friend saying she was leaving the performing arts sector to take another job. We had been students together and I had initially modeled my career path after her’s until I realized I really didn’t want her career path. She was essentially the founding executive director for her organization and had held the job for over a decade before deciding to make the job change.

I have heard similar stories from other colleagues, including those in my cohort at Arts Presenters’ Emerging Leadership Institute. People ended up leaving performing arts, some only a few years after having earned a master’s in arts administration.

While I am pleased to see that a master’s in arts administration can get you jobs in other sectors, I am a little concerned about what this bodes for the future. I am not calling for long term arts leaders to vacate their positions and let others get their chance, though that is something that is frequently mentioned.

My concern is that there is going to be a huge leadership gap when the long time arts leaders do retire. My long time friend had about 20 years experience before she made her decision to leave the arts sector. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her assume a state or regional arts policy leadership position. Granted, she could easily return to assume such a role in the future. I wouldn’t discount it happening.

My knowledge of people leaving the arts is anecdotal and not backed by hard statistics, but I have to imagine there are quite a few others out there of whom I am not aware who are likewise leaving the arts. If so, there is a going to be a huge gap to fill if people with 10-20 years experience leave the sector with only those with less than 10 years experience to replace them.

And lets not forget, there is research showing that many people don’t want to become executive directors. There may be few of any level of experience who are willing to step up. This is where the research and the reasons given by my colleagues intersect–lack of opportunity and work-life balance are dissuading people.

I have written about this topic a number of times before throughout the years, but it was largely theoretical. Now I begin to see signs of the problem impacting my own experience and the repercussions become less abstract and more worrisome.

In terms of a solution, I look back to my post last month on the executive leadership as my best suggestion at this juncture. There I suggested there might be benefits in adopting emerging business models and changing job descriptions so that responsibility and involvement in marketing and development permeate the entire organization rather than being siloed.

Context And Environment Matter

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NPR recently teamed up with the TED people to present the TED Radio Hour which takes three TED talks on a similar theme to revisits them with the speakers. The one I heard run this weekend was about how our brains trick us and confuse us about what we value. It was the second segment with psychologist Paul Bloom which caught my attention because it deal with how so much of what we value about art depends on the context.

It started with the story about Joshua Bell playing in the subway station and no one paying him much mind or money, for that matter. When I talked about this experiment before, I mentioned that context and the environment played large roles in people’s enjoyment.

Bloom talked about the Dutch art dealer who was convicted of treason for selling Hermann Goring a Vermeer–until he confessed and proved the painting was a forgery–after which he was deemed a hero.

Bloom also spoke about Marla Olmstead who was painting works at 3 years old that people were paying tens of thousands of dollars for until 60 Minutes came to visit and it was discovered her father was prompting (and perhaps even helping) with the painting.

A common question was raised about each of these. If Joshua Bell is such a great performer which people pay great amounts of money to hear perform, why wasn’t his quality recognized as an anonymous performer in a D.C. subway? Why is it treasonous to sell a Nazi a real Vermeer but heroic to sell him a fake if you can’t tell the difference between the paintings? If you like the painting, why does it matter if a 3 year old or a 30 year old paints it?

The answer has to do with authenticity, the story which accompanies the experience and a willingness to receive. Classical music doesn’t have to be experienced in a formal performance hall or art in a museum gallery. There are successful programs that bring classical music and opera to bars.

But people go to those events expecting to listen to music. There are entirely different expectations and agendas as you move through a subway station which inhibits a person’s readiness to receive the experience.

Art like wine and food is more enjoyable and valuable when the authenticity of provenance is beyond question. You are buying the story as well as the physical object and that makes all the difference. According to Bloom, there are parts of the brain that light up when you believe you are drinking expensive wine that don’t light up when you believe you are drinking cheap wine even if it is the same wine. So it isn’t that you think it is better, you are actually having an entirely different experience.

The lesson for arts organizations and performers is to help your audience to that mindset. Whether you are in a formal performance space or not, there are things you must do in respect to the environment and interactions to help transition people toward the experience.

You could argue that flashmob performances don’t do that with their audiences and they are often well received. But I would say it isn’t the quality of the performance that people are necessarily responding to but the quality of the planning and execution that brought them the experience.

It is akin to crossing a stream and finding a diamond ring in the water. It is the enjoyment of finding an unexpected treasure that pleases. I think you would find people react just as delighted if an accomplished high school orchestra popped out of the woodwork as they would for the Philadelphia Orchestra revealing themselves in the same manner.

What I really appreciated was Bloom’s late addendum to his TED Talk. In the radio program he said the thing he didn’t emphasize enough in his TED Talk, and was pleased to be able to now, was that most people see it as a glitch or flaw that our perceptions and values can be manipulated by such factors. If we were perfect, these things wouldn’t sway us so easily.

Bloom’s view is that this “flexibility” actually allows us to experience more pleasure in life. He feels that taste can be developed through study and learning. The more you know, the more pleasure you can derive. So if you want to get more pleasure from wine or art, you need to do more than just expose yourself by drinking lots of wine and seeing lots of art, you need intentionally educate yourself.

That seems to align with the findings of the Knight Foundation’s Magic of Music report from six years ago which said exposure in the form of lecture/demos didn’t seem to have as long lasting impact on participation and attendance as participatory programs including instruction.

This, of course, reinforces the importance and sense of desperation to get art back into schools.

New Year’s Resolution: Play With Your Family

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A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I often mis-credit my role in my 8th grade play as the start of involvement in performance and that it all really started when my siblings and I put on plays for the rest of our family.

Back in November there was a great article by Lawrence McCullough on Creativity Post about how families can use play making as a communication and learning tool. I was interested to see him suggest this is something you could do with kids as young as four.

Even if you have been in the performing arts for 15 years and think you know what you are doing, it is worth reading the article. These are your kids, not adult professionals or even students you are working with and the goals for the activity are much different. For example, one of the things McCullough warns against is getting an idea and then casting the show before you have any dialogue written.

Even though you don’t work that way professionally, it might be something you would be apt to do with a story the while family knows–telling the story of why Santa delivers presents and deciding who will play Santa, the elves, etc.

If you cast before you know what characters are going to say or really be about, you’re painting children into a corner, locking them into thinking about just one part of the play when they should be exercising their creative abilities to the max.

McCullough talks about many of the benefits of these activities from showing events from your kids’ points of view to providing a tool for resolving problems and, of course, nurturing creativity.

The thing that I oriented most on was his suggestion of using playmaking to tell the family’s stories. I wondered how many families really communicate their stories these days. Are grandparents fulfilling their stereotypical roles of telling stories about the old days for their grandkids to groan about? Since 60 is the new 40 (or whatever) grandparents may be leading too active a life to bother their grandkids with such things.

Yet there is a lot to be learned and bonds to be formed by these stories. My family has a lot of stories: my Sicilian great grandmother being “taught” to speak English resulting in her cursing out her work supervisor instead of wishing him good morning; my father being rewarded for helping out a customer after he clocked out for lunch; my mother and her roommates at an all-girls Catholic college being far more mischievous than my father and his college drinking buddies.

I credit my knowledge of these stories and their attendant lessons to the fact there was no cable television, much less internet when I was growing up. Nowadays, you probably have to make a special effort just to bring everyone together to communicate your family’s struggles and triumphs. Which is why I am suggesting this as a potential New Year’s Resolution.

Dancing On The Street Where You Live

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Producer David Binder did a short TED Talk about arts festivals. He mentions a number of new festivals which are engaging directly with communities in site specific events.

However, it was the first one he mentioned, Minto: Live Sydney Festival 2011, that fired my imagination most. The people of Minto, accompanied by some cooperating artists, performed on their lawns, driveways and garages as the audience moved by. I am not sure if it was planned or spontaneous, but one story Binder relates almost sounds like some residents who weren’t part of the original tour got caught up in the spirit and began performing on their lawn.

I saw a lot of applicability to the current discussions about creative placemaking and community engagement.

But what I saw as the most compelling element of this practice is that it reinforces the value of the arts and play for kids right where they live. When asked about what got me started in the arts, I often refer back to a role in my 8th grade play.

But like a lot of people in the arts, the reality is, my siblings and I would perform for our family and friends at gatherings.

A festival like this would demand greater sophistication, but heck with arts in schools, performing at home would reinforce the value of the arts for the kids, the parents and the whole community literally right where they live. It would be interesting to see if residents of Minto felt the experience changed their perception and participation in arts activities.

Just as annual tours of historic homes emphasizes the value of their presence and engenders a sense of pride in the neighborhood, (though perhaps some resentment in the kids who have to help clean their home in preparation), a neighborhood arts festival could advance the cause of the arts, inspire pride and perhaps surprise people with the hidden talents of their neighbors.

I don’t really think this would or should be a substitute of arts in schools, though it might spur renewed community interest in offering instruction. Rather, I was thinking that at one time a home piano was once the center of family activity. Participation in a neighborhood arts festival might serve to fill that absence to a small degree.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rttG3xyHcw&w=560&h=315]

Your Personal Board of Directors

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The Drucker Exchange has an animated interpretation of a speech Jim Collins (Good to Great, Built to Last) delivered in 2009. The speech is titled “Ten To-Dos For Young People” but I am pretty sure it is good advice for people of any age.

The first thing Collins suggests is getting a personal board of directors where the members are chosen not for their accomplishments but for their character. These people don’t necessarily need to know they are on your board of directors.

This struck me as an oft overlooked aspect of personal development. We are often told to find mentors and network to advance our careers, seldom does the character of these mentors and the necessity of moral and value guidance get mentioned.

People in the arts often need this type of guidance because establishing a career is so difficult and subject to so many conflicting pressures. It is not only a matter of whether you appear nude in an “art film” to pay the rent but also the question of whether you are a sell out if you faced with an opportunity for commercial success. Are you a bad person for choosing either of these paths? Professional mentors may not provide the same advice as personal mentors.

He also proposed examining yourself as objectively and dispassionately as a scientist would a bug. Just as a scientist doesn’t make judgments about how the bug would be better bug if it only worked harder or learned more, you should just look at yourself as you are at this moment and simply catalog the features you and others observe.

I thought this was especially apt advice for people in the arts since so much self evaluation is derived from qualitative, often emotionally based criteria. Detachment can be difficult to achieve, but the results can be both valuable and comforting.

Although I have often heard the advice to perform objective self-evaluation and had it compared to a scientific approach, I found it helpful to be reminded that a scientist doesn’t generally wish the insects they are observing were as fast as cheetahs and intelligent as dolphins. They hunker down and try to discover what the bug can teach us about the world.

I also liked Collins advice to look at your statement to question ratio and see how you can double it. He says he was once told that he was spending a lot of time trying to be interesting and that perhaps he should shift his effort toward being interested.

Now I will say that while there is that stereotype of the self-impressed artistic type who makes statements about the “true meaning” of something, I think this is part of the learning process. Often these statements are just an attempt to test one’s view of the world.

I think everyone is allowed to be an unsufferable egoist for while to work themselves out. The problem arises if you don’t realize this is a method of learning and not the default mode of social interaction.

Collins advice is apt both personally and professionally as a method of teaching yourself how to learn from everyone you meet. I think this dovetails well with my post last week about the importance of asking audiences and the community about their experience with the arts rather than telling people what their experience will or should be.

Finally, (and if you have been counting, you know I have covered fewer than 10 points–watch the video it is only 4:30 minutes long and a cartoon for goodness sakes), Collins advice is to find something that you have so much passion for you are willing to endure the pain.

If you are involved with the arts, you have probably already made this decision. Even if Collins wasn’t thinking specifically about the arts when he said this, the animation team was and depicted this point with a ballerina dancing and then massaging her feet.

Getting “A Real Job” Thanks To Your Arts Job

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Last month the LA Stage Times had a two part series on work and the arts. One was on jobs at alternative theatres, but the one that piqued my interest was about the benefits former arts managers felt their arts experiences brought to their for profit finance jobs.

As much as I am sad to hear that people can’t support themselves in arts related jobs, I am always interested in information that makes a case for the value of the arts. Whole entries can be devoted to the brain and talent drain the arts sector suffers due to inability to pay a living wage, but I won’t delve into that here since the two profiled who left for the for profit sector are still very invested in the organizations they left.

One gentleman stepped down from his position, though he stayed on the organization’s board, to pursue an MBA and eventually work for Citibank. He felt his experience helped him develop interpersonal skills that enhance his value to the bank. Returning to work in the arts using the skills he learned in banking is always at the corner of his mind.

“But Tarlow observes how his managing director experiences at Celebration still feed into his current job. “Because it’s not only numbers now,” he says. “It’s about meeting with people and doing things more like I did at the theater. Building relationships…I have to work with people in the same way.”
[…]
“[Celebration] was a lot of work, but the rewards I got from it were a great gift,” reflects Tarlow. “When you get to do that kind of theater, you really make what you want out of it. It was a gift for me.” And it’s possible that this “gift” could eventually return him to theater — but in a better-paying job. “I have thought about becoming the finance director of a large arts organization someday. The skills I’m learning at the bank are definitely preparing me for a role like this.”

The second person profiled is also still very much involved with the theatre group he started out with and uses his day job as an auditor to inform the advice he gives to his arts organization and vice versa. Talking to arts people with no background in accounting and finance about those concerns helps him become a better all around communicator on the subject.

“His position takes him to a wide range of companies, both non-profit and for-profit, in all parts of LA. “I’ve worked on audits for much larger arts organizations with ‘real’ budgets,” he says. “Then I look at the smaller Rogue budgets and see where we have opportunities for…growth,” he adds.

Seeing differences between for-profit and non-profit models on a regular basis puts Maes in a constant state of noting challenges for the Rogues, and most small theaters, particularly in terms of keeping theater staff and managers focused on fundraising.

[…]

With his added CPA training and work experience, Maes imposes a tougher financial regimen on the Rogues than he did in the beginning. He is particularly geared toward thinking in terms of risk management, a quality he recommends for all small theaters, where even the smallest mishap — such as a show’s underperforming box office or an unforeseen loss of assets — can wipe out a company’s already anemic bank account.

[…]

Maes wants every theater company to remember that financial people engaging in a small non-profit are most likely not there because of the numbers. Personal meetings and being involved with creative people is what makes the arts rewarding for everyone, not just the artists….

…It’s also helpful being a good communicator and coming from a communication-driven art form. Being able to explain accounting to artists helps me even if I have to talk to someone with an accounting background.”

The third person profiled has worked in the arts sector for a number of years but is now wondering if she should parlay that experience in marketing, development and producing into a job in the for profit sector or continue working for non-profits. She has the confidence that the skills she brings from her non-profit experience can land her a job in a pro-profit studio or marketing firm and finds herself caught in the classic “passion or pocketbook” internal debate.

Can We Do Lunch?

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I frequently reference the positive interactions and contributions that have resulted from one of the visual arts teachers eating his lunch backstage. He says he eats here because his students can’t find him to bug him while he is eating. While he does often eat peacefully in our building, he gets himself involved in providing advice or direct assistance on some project or another on a pretty regular basis during his meal. It leads me to suspect he is exaggerating his desire to flee his students.

I get a warm feeling when I hear him chatting with people backstage, even if it is about something entirely unrelated to performing/visual arts like remembrances of past vacation trips. I know there are relationships being strengthened in those conversations and that will manifest to our mutual benefit somewhere down the road.

I got to thinking about how this dynamic which evolved through no effort of our own could be intentionally be replicated elsewhere.

One thing that occurred to me was that K12 schools might set up a program where students could have lunch with artists once or twice a week. They could just hang out together without any expectation of some sort of “artistic experience” occurring and talk about sports or the weather. Maybe the artist would give some sort of advice on a project a student was working on, maybe they would just complain about the cafeteria food.

Of course, this is predicated half on the assumption there is still a music/drama/art studio in the school to hang out in and half on the assumption the arts programs in the school are either non-existent or on the wane. Obviously, this could be a great complement to school arts programs which are already vibrant. But really, one of the benefits I saw to this idea was that if the school can’t support anything else arts related, maybe they could scrape some dollars together to pay for the artist’s gas and lunch over the course of a year.

My other thought was that this could provide the most regular, unintimidating interaction with the arts a student might get. They get to hang out with a knowledgeable artist who isn’t grading or placing expectations on them on a consistent basis. There is an opportunity to actively engage with an artist in a manner that assembly performances and lecture demos by visiting artists don’t provide.

The benefit to the artist is that they gain some insight in to what younger people in the community (and perhaps the community at large) is thinking and experiencing about the arts informally over a longer period of time rather than in the short span of a Q&A or reception which impose constraints and expectations on the interaction.

Unlike a one off outreach concert/lec-dem, there is no pressure on the artist to provide an experience replete with meaning to make the kids love the arts because it might be the only experience they get at all this year.

Students having a rich and varied experience with the arts is the ideal, but maybe this simple interactions over lunch across a student’s educational career is what is needed to normalize the idea that one would go to or be involved in performance, museum, gallery opening when one got older and had the time and resources to do so.

I talk about this idea in relation to K12 schools, but obviously there is nothing to keep an arts organization anywhere from having weekly lunches anyone could attend without any preconceived expectations about the experience. Obviously it would be ideal if it could happen in an arts center so people get used to the idea of just wandering in and so you can jump up and grab something to demonstrate with if someone asks a question.

But if an arts center is physically in a bad location or people just won’t consider it as part of their lunch plans, having a weekly gathering at the local coffee shop/diner to talk about whatever can be just as effective. (Not to mention, the coffee shop owner will love your arts organization all the more.)

Thoughts about this? Ways it can be improved? This entry was about 85% stream of consciousness so I am likely to have overlooked some problems or additional opportunities.

Passion About Your Work Is Hard Work

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Apropos of my post a few weeks back about people thinking creativity as a lightning strike gift rather than a process of work over time is a piece on Harvard Business Review blog site in which the author, Cal Newport, makes a similar observation about the idea one should follow their passion when looking for a job.

Newport notes that following ones passion has become common career advice and includes a Google N-Gram charting the explosive rise of the phrase in print use during the 2000s.

“Why is this a problem? This simple phrase, “follow your passion,” turns out to be surprisingly pernicious…The verb “follow” implies that you start by identifying a passion and then match this preexisting calling to a job. Because the passion precedes the job, it stands to reason that you should love your work from the very first day.

It’s this final implication that causes damage. When I studied people who love what they do for a living, I found that in most cases their passion developed slowly, often over unexpected and complicated paths. It’s rare, for example, to find someone who loves their career before they’ve become very good at it — expertise generates many different engaging traits, such as respect, impact, autonomy — and the process of becoming good can be frustrating and take years.

The early stages of a fantastic career might not feel fantastic at all, a reality that clashes with the fantasy world implied by the advice to “follow your passion” — an alternate universe where there’s a perfect job waiting for you, one that you’ll love right away once you discover it. It shouldn’t be surprising that members of Generation Y demand a lot from their working life right away and are frequently disappointed about what they experience instead.”

The arts career path has long had a “paying your dues” period of near slavery labor for low or no pay internship followed by successfully transitioning to a near poverty level pay. I joke, but only because I don’t want to confuse the poor treatment many entry level people are subject to with the genuine need to actually go through an unsatisfying process of improving your abilities.

The dream of being discovered and making it big is what causes many to pursue a career in the arts. The fact that there are some who can make it big with no apparent effort is something of a plague on the arts industry.

Still for many people, this dues paying process gives people a realistic view of what is expected in the arts career path and they choose to leave it.

Pursuing an arts career with its abysmal pay can be something of a blessing in disguise as part of the dues paying process. The fact we have the stereotype of the actor who waits tables shows that many creative types are picking up other skills in the process of pursuing the dream.

Of course, the benefit of this all hinges on heeding the advice of our grandparents to do everything we do well. It is easy to fall into the practice of not taking a job seriously figuring your effort doesn’t matter since you will be gone soon enough. Then when you revise your career plans, you may suddenly find that as a result of your inattentiveness no one will credit you as having paid some dues.

One of my first jobs was doing yard work which involved everything from mowing and weeding to mucking out horse stalls and polishing brass and bronze pots. I don’t think it directly prepared me for a job in the arts, (though I did end up driving a farm tractor a lot the rural arts center I worked at), it probably instilled a work ethic, taught me about a lot uncommon practices like beekeeping and gave me many problem solving abilities. (Like the time I set fire to the…erm, well I have said too much already.)

Cal Newport calls for career advice to reference the inevitable sour period before you feel inspired by your work.

In some respects, I think the arts are blessed with the stereotype of the wait staff who wants to act. Even though no one believes they will ever have to work in a restaurant to support themselves, that waiter is in our collective unconscious and can’t be exorcised. Part of us always knows that possibility exists. Some may even be motivated to pursue excellence to ensure it doesn’t happen to them.

Still more discussion of that metaphorical waiter needs to happen to make people aware that the pursuit of their passion may not come easily or as directly as they imagine.

Many performing artists would acknowledge their awareness that the pursuit doesn’t come easily since many of them start working hard at eight or nine years old. The problem is that “practice hard to be a success” has been used to motivate them for all those years and it is not a foregone conclusion, especially in relation to orchestras these days.

Arts and culture industries needs to emphasize the fact that the path to success may not be as direct as it has been represented to encourage people to think about and be open to alternative routes.

Info You Can Use: Playing With Your Volunteers

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About a month ago I wrote about how our accreditation team used games to get the leadership ready for the accreditation process coming up this year. I had noted that while accreditation is a pretty oppressive and mind numbing subject, the games made learning about it easier. I had suggested that this was a good approach for tackling administrative and governance processes.

This weekend, we actually used a similar approach during the much more pleasant process of volunteer training so I thought I would share what we did.

We held a brunch in our lobby. My assistant theatre manager and I made Belgian waffles and pancakes to order for our volunteers (we also had eggs, breakfast meats and a pretty good toppings bar.) After eating our fill, we talked about the upcoming season of shows and why each was so interesting.

Then we had a scavenger hunt which actually proved to be a good tool for making people more aware of many aspects of their jobs and the theatre building. Some of the questions were just fun and silly like getting a picture of a prop backstage and some information from a set model. Others were more directly related to things we wanted our volunteers to know.

For example we asked how many theatre seats were in a row that had empty spots for wheelchairs so they were aware that the number on the right most seat wasn’t actually the seat count for the row.

Because there is construction next to the theatre we had them take a picture of one of the large signs directing people along the detour from the disabilities parking to the lobby which forced the volunteers to walk the path a wheelchair would have to follow.

We asked for the name of the person who sponsored the Green Room so that the volunteers knew where the green room was and were familiar with the name of one of our important donors.

And of course, we made sure they knew that most crucial of all information–where the bathrooms are–by making them count all the stalls available for use by audience members. (Which also helped them know which restrooms had the most capacity.)

I think this was a much more effective technique to simply giving a tour and pointing things out because it forced the volunteers to pay closer attention to the surroundings as they sought out our grand piano and the 2005-2006 season brochures hidden around the building. It also promoted team work and helped the volunteers bond over activities other than ripping tickets and stuffing program books.

Though to be clear, this doesn’t replace our orientation tours. Every volunteer is given a tour of the facility which points out the location of emergency exits and life safety equipment along with instruction about the procedures.

Nearly all of the volunteers are interested in going around the building again if provided the opportunity. Opening all the doors and turning on all the lights to let them scurry around looking for things changes their relationship with the facility and infuses the experience with a bit of the playfulness and fun that characterize the arts.

Teach First, Ask Questions Later

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Along the theme of my post yesterday about good ideas, I wanted to point out some interesting ideas about higher education for arts majors suggested by David Cutler on The Savvy Musician blog.

I won’t say all the ideas are completely viable, Cutler doesn’t make that claim either, but some implementation of the basic intent might be practical enough to break up the status quo a little.

One of the common themes of Cutler’s suggestions is predicated on the fact students looking for a career in the arts need to be more than just talented artists. They need to be good collaborators and have some basic entrepreneurial ambitions. He proposes evaluating those factors right from the time of auditions.

He also suggests multidisciplinary approaches including more allowances for electives, having at least two areas of specialty and working with different specialists.

“Encourage or require students to select at least two areas of specialty throughout their single degree program. This priority reflects the real world, where artists must possess multiple skill sets to survive and thrive.

[…]

“For at least one semester, each student studies with someone from another artistic specialty. Imagine the lessons a violinist might learn from a cellist, trombonist, dancer, or painter.”

This idea appealed to me because one of my former employers ran a residential arts and music camp where students had one major (an area they were already good at) and two minors (areas the want to explore.) The focus there was more about letting kids explore disciplines they had no experience in but were curious about. They might learn they were really awful at it or might gain a new interest.

A more rigorous approach in higher education could give students cross-training they may need in their careers but also provide the basis of increased avenues for creative expression.

What really interested me were some of Cutler’s ideas about what the educational experience might look like:

Paradigm 4: CLASSES & ASSIGNMENTS

Traditional model. Classes are typically built around a lecture. Students are assigned homework or projects to complete on their own time.
An alternative. On their own time, students watch lectures online. During class, the teacher works interactively with them on homework, projects, and other experiential endeavors.

If this alternative model sounds like wishful thinking, let me assure you what he suggests is very close to how some math classes are being taught on my campus right now. The approach has been very successful in terms of improved grades and student persistence.

Paradigm 5: PRIVATE LESSONS

Traditional model. Music students typically take a one hour lesson with a specialist in their area each week (i.e. violinist study with violin professors).
[…]

Alternative C. Teachers are in their office for certain hours each week. Students are free to show up as often as they want, and stay as long as they desire. If unprepared one week, perhaps they shouldn’t waste the teacher’s time with a meeting. On the other hand, maybe someone could benefit from 3 lessons a week leading to an audition. This open structure also allows students to observe their teacher interacting with others who face similar/different challenges, teaching valuable lessons in pedagogy and beyond. (This is the model I experienced when studying composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna, Austria).

Cutler also proposes flipping the timing on education students’ teaching semesters and doctoral candidates’ orals from the last semester to the first.

The benefit for student teachers is, “This shows them what needs to be learned early on, and frames their entire college experience.”

For graduate students, “Begin the degree with some version of orals. Get people excited about researching and learning on their own before choosing classes.”

Now granted, I wonder how valuable having a completely inexperienced student teacher would be to the school in which they were placed. That whole experience would probably have to be redesigned.

I do think he is spot on saying that it would show arts ed. students what needed to be learned. I think I have mentioned before that when I was pursuing certification in secondary ed, everyone in my cohort agreed that it would have been helpful to have had a refresher course in grammar rules before we had done our student teaching. We would have paid more attention to that throughout our college careers had we known just how terrifying it would be being uncertain.

In terms of career preparation, he suggests students having a career mentor rather than (or in addition to) an artistic mentor for at least one semester. Instead of doing a summer or semester long internship, “Partner students with an external organization throughout their studies, so they are constantly challenged by real-world, practical concerns and trends.”

I have only covered some of his proposals and I quoted some of his ideas out of their original context (though I feel I accurately represent his overall argument) so you should check out his blog if any of this sounds intriguing.

If you are like me, when you read it you will wonder where in a student’s studies would there be time to implement many of these ideas. But I think his whole point is that the entire approach and prioritization of art student learning needs to be examined and revamped in order to make the experience and the degree granted more relevant.

Still Cool As Hell After All These Years

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Today I am going to point you back to an interview Michael Rice of Cool As Hell Theatre Podcast did with playwright Paula Vogel.

Michael stopped doing his podcast a few years back but keeps the site working because, you know, he is cool as hell.

It is worth listening just to hear his customary lead in, but as I observed when I first wrote about the interview, Vogel has some interesting things to say:

“She does say some interesting things about the messages artists are getting these days. Among them are her feelings that “Darwin and captialism are very bad models for art” (3:15) and art begets art.

I was also intrigued by her idea that even though she was a klutz, she had to learn to play sports and as a result, all athletes today, artists of the flesh she calls them, speak for her inner athlete. She hopes for the day that every creative artist speaks for the inner artist housed in everyone.

[…]

She does present some quotable moments like “art is a dog that you feed that bites you” (7:05) when arguing that art should challenge society but the agenda of arts funders is to make art palatable and devoid of challenge.

Thomas Jefferson, Artist

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On this lovely 4th of July, I point you to the Founding Father’s Musical, 1776. While there are some songs I like a little better, this one appeals to me because:

1- As John Adams and Ben Franklin press Martha Jefferson about what attracted her to Thomas Jefferson, she lists many of his impressive accomplishments as a landowner and statesman. But as to what really smote her, she says it is because he plays the violin. What arts person doesn’t like it when the art gets the girl?

2- I like the concept that playing the violin makes Thomas Jefferson a complete person.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_T23elli1Vc

Right People, Not Right Product Make A Great Company

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So as something of a follow up to my post earlier this week asking if foundation boards embrace non-profit values, I wanted to point to an article about what private enterprises can learn from non-profits.

The five points the article emphasizes are connecting with the community, understanding what motivates your employees, creating long term value, valuing people over the program or product and improvising.

Many of these points are representative of what the arts can bring to private businesses. While I don’t think the arts are exemplary in the diversity of employees and audiences it serves, improving that situation is a major topic of conversation and can help lead others to the questions they should be asking about themselves.

Likewise, while it may seem that non-profits don’t have a sterling record in respect to overworking employees, they do understand what motivates people to dedicate themselves to a cause in return for little material reward.

Lately one subject that seems to come up frequently is the idea that private companies have an unhealthy focus on short term gains at the expense of creating long term value. Many companies are starting to see that focusing on corporate social responsibility (CSR) is crucial for doing business.

It almost seems that if the non-profit sector can come up with an effective program to engender even a partial shift toward a longer view, a great service will be rendered.

The one point I especially liked in the article was that great people have more value to a company than great products and services. I think it can be easy to forget that when you are being evaluated based on the numbers you achieve (which is especially the case for non-profits’ administrative cost ratios)

4. The right people (not the right product or program) make for a great organization (Chris Pullenayagem, Director, Christian Reformed Church)

Many private (for profit) organizations rely on products or processes or programs to be successful in their business. For those that do, this seems to be an inverted way of pursuing excellence. People bring vision, passion and creativity to their work as evidenced in non-profit organizations. If the right people are hired, every organization will move towards excellence in achieving its vision and what it was mandated to do. Any organization can show results, but only this type of organization will thrive with excellence.

Bringing Creative Balance To Business (And Vice Versa)

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There was an interesting piece in Fast Company a couple weeks ago that seems to bolster the idea that creativity is an important component of business success. University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management held a design challenge “To help TD Bank foster lifelong customer relationships with students and recent graduates while encouraging healthy financial behaviors.” They invited participants from other MBA and design programs from across North America.

According to the article’s author and competition judge Melissa Quinn,

Both this year and last–the two years that Rotman invited other schools to participate–business school students were slaughtered by the design school students. Of the 12 Rotman teams this year, not one of them made the final round. And while only seven of the 23 competing teams were from design schools (including California College of Arts, Ontario College of Art and Design, and the University of Cincinnati), design teams scooped the top three places in the competition, doing significantly better than their MBA counterparts. So what does this tell us?

It might tell us that MBAs significantly underestimate the skill and expertise a designer brings to the table.

Later in the article Quinn notes that where the design school teams fell short was in providing a sense of the economic value of their plans,

I should point out that only the winning team from the Institute of Design at IIT actually charged a fee for the service they developed (a fact that was not overlooked by my final-round co-judge Ray Chun, the senior vice president of retail banking at TD). Some competitors were able to offer a vague notion that their ideas would generally create economic value, but crisp articulations of a profit model and underlying assumptions were hard to come by.

In talking about how both MBA and MFA training programs need to change, Quinn expressed the idea we in the arts all love to hate: artists need to focus on being more business minded. But you know, when you are pitching an idea to a bank, highlighting economic benefits are pretty much de rigueur.

What really caught my eye in the article was Quinn’s mention that the design school teams’ approach was effective in convincing “a skeptical panel of experienced professionals about a new idea that doesn’t exist in the world today.” When I read that, I had the sudden realization that creative types aren’t going to necessarily do well in a business environment as part of the structure which keeps things running effectively. The value of the creatives would be in bringing those new ideas for products and services to the fore and getting people engaged.

As Quinn mentions, in order to effectively convince people of the value of these ideas, creative types are going to have to possess enough business knowledge to be able to explain how it might be monetized. When I have read about how important creatives will be to businesses in the future, I have mainly thought about how they might influence the culture to be more nimble and responsive, bolster team building and cultivate creative practices.

This is all true, of course. But even more the value will be in, as Steve Jobs has said, creating products and services for which consumers can’t necessarily express a desire.

The process Quinn says the design school teams used was:

“…they shared real user insights to engage us emotionally, used narrative and stories to compel us, drew sketches and visualizations to inspire us, and simplified the complex to focus us. It’s proof positive that numbers and bullet points, while important, aren’t necessarily what drive executive decision making. “

Some commenters to the article, which included members of the MBA school teams suggest that the differences in the presentations were not as clearcut as Quinn depicts them. I wanted to mention this because it appears from the article’s URL that it may have been retitled from “Need To Solve a Tough Business Problem Don’t Hire An MBA.” From the content of the piece, I don’t think that is anywhere near it’s message.

Regardless of who used the techniques, it appears the storytelling and visualizations approach was viewed as more effective at convincing the judges. I think this fact is generally recognized, but perhaps few think of employing it alongside bullet points and numbers. There definitely needs to be a balance between the two because storytelling can easily slip into attempting to use sentimentality to convince and you don’t want to base business decisions entirely on emotion.

Talking About Your Debates

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I had an interesting conversation the other day that convinced me I don’t spend enough time talking to people from other arts disciplines. We were backstage talking to some visual arts professors about the mural project I wrote about a couple weeks ago.

The wall the mural is on is slated to come down soon. While I think it is is a little too soon, I was a little surprised to learn one of the professors (who wasn’t present) really wanted to preserve the mural and have it mounted. To me, the very media it was on–a plywood construction wall–implied a certain impermanence.

This got us to talking about theories of visual arts preservation and the extent you go to in order to keep art around. For example, if you take the chunk of wall a Banksy is on and put it in a gallery of some sort, aren’t you missing the point and leaving it bereft of its context?

When you restore a painting, how good a job do you do? Should it be absolutely indistinguishable from the original or is that fraudulent?

We talked about how theatre embraces the transitory nature of art. Sure you can have a video of the performance, but we always stress that it isn’t the same as having been there. (As it is with some visual arts pieces.) With the exception of the quest to exactly replicate all the original elements of Shakespeare’s plays, theatre people pretty much strive to find some new way frame a performance. (Some times trying far, far too hard to find an original approach.)

What theatre often obsesses about is the process of creating illusion. How does the performer depict their character? Whose approach do you subscribe to? Strasberg? Adler? Meisner? All of the above? None of the above?

There is a famous story that illustrates the conflicting theories. Dustin Hoffman is said to have stayed up two days while filming Marathon Man in order to fully empathize with his character who had also been awake for two days. Sir Laurence Olivier reportedly said, “Why don’t you try acting?”

Hoffman addresses this story in a 2003 NPR interview (around 15 min mark) giving a great testimony to Olivier.

Where theatre people don’t worry overly much about presentation, visual artists don’t really view embracing another artist’s emotional state as crucial to understanding and replicating their technique. While emotion is important to dancers, discussing how one moves through space is of much greater importance.

Yet the conversation got me thinking that someone could make an interesting project out of focusing on those areas that other disciplines find important. For instance, trying to embody the emotions of a famous painter while creating a painting or explore if improved body awareness impacted sculpting techniques.

I am not sure how it would work in the opposite direction since attempts at preservation would make a performance static and dull.

Really, my concern isn’t really with creating new approaches to artistic expression. My point is that talking about the biggest points of debate in your artistic discipline with people from another discipline can be fun and informative. The folks from the other discipline will have a basic understanding about why things like preservation of an artistic expression would be a concern, but since they are not as emotionally invested in the debate, they can bring interesting perspectives.

Who know, it the conversation might plant the seeds for a collaboration on your next project.

Art Ain’t Easy

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Some members of the Student Media Art Collective (SMAC) we assembled had gotten an idea to create a mural on the construction wall by the college library. At one of the SMAC meetings, they had mentioned they were having a difficult time getting past all the administrative and bureaucratic hurdles. There was a plan to paint the mural at the end of March during the school Spring Break. When it didn’t emerge, I figured the hurdles got the best of the students.

However, I liked the idea and given that construction next to my building would cause a larger construction wall to encroach upon the courtyard in front of the theatre eliminating 1/3 of it for 18 months, I saw a pressing need to make the wall attractive. I broached the subject with the appropriate powers that be last week to lay the groundwork and smooth the road. I also spoke with a couple of the professors who were advocating for the library mural project to get their buy in. Everyone was pretty positive about the idea and the professors figured my involvement would help eliminate some of the barriers the students had faced this go round.

Happily, the students got the green light to do the library mural after all and worked throughout the past weekend to create it. The mural is fairly simple as you can see in the images below. However, it provides proof that the students can pull the project off within the parameters set by the various concerned parties. As much influence as I may or may not have, had they not done a good job it would have been that much more difficult to get a mural on the construction wall in front of my theatre.

 

I stood with to two of the visual arts professors who had been supportive of the work this morning and they were extremely pleased by so many aspects of the project. Just as I might be able to pick out various nuances in a performance, they were making observations about the execution of the piece that were not significant to me at all. (Like the way the black and white merged into each other at the bottom of the “H”.)

Amid all the gushing observations, they expressed pride in the students for pushing the project and their vision to competion despite all the obstacles. One of the group leaders wanted to give up a number of times. One professor pointed out that Christo had faced similar problems getting permission for his public art projects. Much of the professors’ pleasure probably derived from the fact that the impetus to execute the mural was generated entirely by the students rather than a class assignment. They were very happy to see students taking the initiative.

For me the mural represented an argument against those who claim there is little value for art in education. That mural required research, mathematical knowledge to execute in larger scale, politicking and advocacy, understanding the materials and media, artistic choices and team work. There was a lot of problem solving involved, which of course we all know is highly valued by employers these days.

In the middle of the project, one of the students commented that they didn’t realize how much work would be involved. The professor working with them chuckled and replied that he purposely never asked them if they realized how much work would be involved because he didn’t want to dissuade them.

This blog entry comes partially out of an email I sent out to the campus directing their attention to the decision making and problem solving required to bring the mural to fruition.  This was partially to  underscore the role of arts in the education process. I was also addressing the assumption that it was executed almost on the spur of the moment without much planning and preparation. It became apparent after speaking with a few of the people involved that concerns about a reckless execution was the basis for some of the impediments to authorization the students experienced.

Graduation is in a couple weeks and it is usually held in the library courtyard with the stage directly in front of where this wall is. This means the audience is facing the mural the whole time. I hope no one makes the decision to hide or cover it up. I think the sentiment expressed is perfect for a commencement.

 

Dramaturgy Is Everyone’s Responsibility

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When I was studying theatre as an undergrad and grad student, there was one role in the theatre most of my fellow students never got a clear definition of, that of dramaturg. Most of our professors would wryly answer, “nobody really knows” when asked what a dramaturg did.

There was also a sense of guilt and embarrassment. Dramaturg was one of those positions you added when your theatre had money and seemed fated to be first cut when money got tight. Except the dramaturg tended to work closely with the artistic administration who were naturally resistant to the idea of cutting them so it was usually someone in development or marketing that got cut first.

If you look up dramaturgy on Wikipedia or the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA) website, you will learn that a dramaturg is a sort of historian/researcher who helps all those involved with a production, from the creative ensemble to the audience, understand the greater context in which a performance occurs.

The reason why no one knows what a dramaturg does is that the role is so generally defined, the duties can vary vastly from place to place.

I explain all this to provide context for the people I am about to quote. If you think that makes me something of a dramaturg, well Amrita Ramanan, the literary manager at Arena Stage would likely agree. She recently posted a manifesto outlining her vision of role of the literary office of the future on HowlRound.

“…David Dower…talked about dramaturgy as integral to a theater company’s thru line, such that every theater maker holds the mission and vision of the art as their ultimate goal even if they explore different tactics on how to achieve them. A marketing manager practices dramaturgy by communicating to an audience to mission and vision of the art through website blurbs, posters and brochures. A development associate practices dramaturgy when they approach a potential funder, carrying and articulating the mission and vision of the art and why it needs the funders support to thrive. A casting director practices dramaturgy when casting a show by supporting the mission and the vision of the playwright’s intent and director’s concept with every person they call in.

This is a variation on the theme I have often touched upon in my blog that marketing is everyone’s responsibility.

This is one of the reasons why dramaturgy is such a nebulous position at many organizations, if it exists at all. The argument can often be made that the dramaturg’s responsibilities are more suitably performed by a number of other departments in an organization. On the other hand, do the directors of marketing, development and the performance have the time to do all the appropriate research? Is having all these people researching the same subject independently the best way to assemble information? The answers depend on the ambitions of the organization.

Ultimately, whether an arts organization of any discipline has someone acting in the role of a dramaturg (whatever it may be called), everyone involved with the organization takes on some aspects of the dramaturg role in the execution of their duties. Each person needs to be skilled in acquiring the appropriate information and putting it into practice on behalf of the production.

Success in this regard will depend on talent and training, but also opportunity. Some of this opportunity will manifest as access to information sources, but as Howard Sherman recently pointed out on his blog, some of the opportunity can be provided and encouraged by organizational culture. (my emphasis)

“Most every theatre uses the first rehearsal/first reading as a day to introduce the company and the staff of a show, but in my experience, it’s incomplete. I recall being brought into rehearsal rooms, the staff circling the company, seated at tables, as one by one we did the Mouseketeer roll call of our names and titles. There might be a speech…maybe a quick demonstration of the set model – and then we were sent back to our desks to go about our regular business. We were not invited to stay for the first reading, often told that it would make the company too self conscious; I wish that we had been required to stay and listen, that even at the most unformed step, every staffer should be made to be there at the birth of a new production, not just drop by for a wave and a bagel before things got messy. The same should probably hold true for that final rehearsal in the rehearsal hall; it further engages the staff in the creative process, and refamiliarizes the company with a staff that they may not have interacted with for some three weeks. I have heard of some companies that even hold readings of plays long before first rehearsal, with the roles divvied up among the staff – what a marvelous way to connect the staff with what they’ll soon be working on, and to connect the staff with each other.”

I remember years ago reading an entry on Greg Sandow’s blog where he mentioned that those who worked for orchestras rarely attend the performances or come into the office the next morning and talk about the event. I was floored at the time. Given all the acrimony between the administration and musicians at many orchestras these past few years, it has become easier to believe.

Even if people at your organization come in and talk about productions with great enthusiasm, Howard Sherman’s observations show that there are always more opportunities to connect and learn about the projects that can be offered. Even if there isn’t a dramaturg at your organization, sharing the knowledge that individual staff members have collected in preparation for a project can help everyone do their jobs more effectively.

Info You Can Use: Many Views of Shakespeare

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Ah March, when a young man’s thoughts turn to love…or backstabbing betrayal. Those cynics among us might says love and betrayal are pretty much the same thing. However, I was mostly referring to the Ides of March upon which day Julius Caesar was famously assassinated. That fact might not be widely known if not for Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar in which the warning to “beware the ides of March” is discussed at some length.

Or was it Shakespeare’s play after all? Shakespeare’s authorship has long been debated and the details which have lead people to believe one way or another can be hard to keep track of. However, last year Blogging Shakespeare created a page to help people understand the controversy a little better. 60 Minutes with Shakespeare provides 60 one minute answers to questions about Shakespeare’s work. (Actually, 61 minutes. Prince Charles has a one minute special guest commentary of his own.)

As you might imagine, most of the segments on Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays refute the notion that it was anyone but he who wrote them. While it is difficult to answer a complicated question in one minute, the segments provide a good starting point to understand the culture and practices of Elizabethan England.

In particular, I think the page provides a good introduction to Shakespeare for people who aren’t familiar or comfortable with his plays (and enlightening for those who are). The tidbits of information help to humanize a figure whose very name is imbued with a deitific aura.

In presenting the arguments about Shakespeare’s authorship in this format, it makes the works even more intriguing. It is easy to gain a basic understanding of all the arguments. It is amazing how many different elements people use as evidence to challenge the authorship and the number of alternatives authors and collaborators that have been proposed. Everyone from Mark Twain to Sigmund Freud and Henry James are cited as having weighed in on the subject.

While literary scholars will have a deeper understanding and much more to say on the subject, the average person can gain a general enough understanding about the topic to identify the elements being questioned when watching/reading one of the plays. Thanks to the short one minute format, you can view a play and then come back to review a specific topic in the context of your experience.

I was left wondering why there are not any similar controversies surrounding some of the great composers. Other than the discredited claim perpetuated by Mozart’s widow that the music came whole cloth from his mind and he never revised or rewrote, I wasn’t aware many refutations of composers’ creativity.

After a little searching, I quickly discovered some questions have been raised about whether Haydn and Mozart wrote everything attributed to them. However, there isn’t much written and I am not sure how much credence the theory has been given.

There is barely anything I could find written on the topic compared with the theories about Shakespeare. I don’t know if this is a reflection of some differences between the way music and plays are composed and performed or simply that the controversies in music have failed to capture popular imagination as well as Shakespeare’s.

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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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