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Open Arms With Grasping Fists Not A Welcoming Appearance

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So by now you have probably heard about the ill-advised job posting made by the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields which said they were “…seeking a director who would work not only to attract a more diverse audience but to maintain its “traditional, core, white art audience.’”

My first thought was, this the type of faux pas that is bound to occur more often because organizations know they need to be more diverse but don’t have someone to advise them on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Or if the company does, the staff member’s advice is either not heeded or the person doesn’t feel empowered to point out how problematic this type of language is.

Even though they were making a mess of it, I viewed it as a sign of progress that people were starting to say the quiet part aloud as it were, and admitting they needed to actively pursue creating a welcoming environment instead of claiming everyone is welcome and they don’t discriminate.

While the museum has revised the job description to omit the word “white,” I don’t think it helped matters that the CEO of the museum was quoted in the NY Times article saying that the use of “white” was “..intended to indicate that the museum would not abandon its existing audience as part of its efforts toward greater diversity, equity and inclusion.”

That makes DEI efforts sound like a zero sum game where one group must lose out if another group is to gain something. For years the message has been that arts and culture enriches everyone’s lives so theoretically diversifying programming should offer a broader range of opportunities for enrichment, correct? So why is there an automatic assumption and implication that someone is going to lose?

I think back to the talks Nina Simon has given where she talks about creating new doorways through which people can experience a cultural institution. She does mention that not everything is for everyone. Certainly given the limits of time, space and resources there is a good chance there will be less of some content. But if it was assumed everyone had the capacity to enjoy the content that was previously offered, they are likely equally capable of enjoying new content.

So of course, I should have known Nina would be able to summarize all of this in just a couple tweets.

 

The Secret Lives Of Museum Tour Guides

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Long times readers know that when I was living in Ohio I had a close relationship with a local group called the Creative Cult. We did a number of projects together and I participated in the events they sponsored. The local art museum wisely decided to bring one of the cult’s inner circle, Nick, on staff and he has been making some great contributions to the organization.

This week the museum has made a series of Facebook posts under the title “Things Written At The Front Desk,” with some pictures from Nick’s journal/sketchbook and other projects he has worked on while at the desk. Today was the second post in the series and really caught my attention because it featured Nick’s illustrations of a guide to a gallery exhibit.   At first I was excited because I thought perhaps the museum had reopened for socially distanced exhibitions, but the guide was made for a pre-Covid exhibit.

Regardless of when it was made, the concept of walking into a museum and picking up a guide to an exhibition which was hand illustrated by one of the people greeting you struck me as something that would make the whole experience feel more welcoming and accessible.  The pamphlet Nick illustrated reflects his quirky aesthetic, presenting the visitor with Marty, a cartoon figure who will accompany on your journey complete with a map of Marty’s suggested route through the exhibition.

Then things take a strange turn and some of the illustrations reference to Marty’s diary and a beast being hunted down by a classic mob armed with pitchforks and torches. Clearly the whole guide isn’t depicted so we are missing parts of the story, but that makes you want to learn more, right?

Not only that, wouldn’t you be interested in seeing a museum exhibition framed by an information pamphlet that implied your tour guide may have a monstrous alter-ego….or perhaps it was all just a strange dream?

https://www.facebook.com/southern.ohio.museum/posts/5655438514481520

 

NEA Re-Opening Guide – You’re Not Alone

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The National Endowment for the Arts has released their “Art of Reopening” guide. Looking through it, it doesn’t substantially differ from other re-opening guides about which I have written. In fact, it actually references many of them as additional resources that are available.

However, if you are just now getting to a place where you can start to think about reopening now that vaccine distribution has started, the NEA guide can be a good place to start your plans.

The bulk of the guide is a list of best practices supported by case study interviews conducted with arts organizations of various disciplines around the country. I am not going to quote extensively from the guide because I feel like I have written some of these topics to death by now. I did want to highlight the fact that the first lesson listed is to strengthen ties with your immediate community. While I have written that to death, I don’t feel anything is lost by repeating it until it people can’t remember a time it wasn’t a core tenet of their practice.

Another lesson learned I wanted to emphasize is:

The unexpected will continue to happen. Be transparent when it does. Adapting quickly to new circumstances and information, and communicating those lessons promptly and effectively to artists/staff, board members, donors, and the public will attract greater confidence in your endeavor.

One thing in the NEA guide you won’t find in any other guide is a survey of National Service Organizations (i.e. American Alliance of Museums, Association of Performing Arts Professionals, Association of Writers & Writing Programs, Dance/USA, Film Festival Alliance, League of American Orchestras, National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, OPERA America, etc) about how their members were coping with the pandemic and what they were seeing.

You’ll find this in Appendix A. It can be worth reading to know you are not alone in the troubles you are facing.

For example:

NSOs also reported these key difficulties for members in reengaging with audiences or visitors:

◽Navigating local or state government reopening protocols (e.g., limitations on gatherings)
◽Securing union permissions
◽Audiences/visitors not following safety guidelines
◽Creating one-way flow in buildings not designed to accommodate routing
◽Cost of retrofitting and preparing safe venues for audiences
◽Accessibility issues that can result from reserved/advance ticketing policies

Maybe They Could Increase Residency By Offering A Pastry Of The Month Subscripton?

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A little bit of amplification of my local community today. Next City ran an article on the Mill Hill artist village that is developing in one of Macon’s original neighborhoods, Ft. Hawkins. The project is a partnership between Macon-Bibb Urban Development Authority, Macon Arts Alliance and the Historic Macon Foundation which has developed renovated houses once used by mill workers into artist housing.

They also turned the auditorium building that once served the mill community into an activity space which includes a large industrial kitchen which is being used by a baking collective, but is also available for hourly rental on a more casual basis.

The industrial kitchen was installed as a result of interviews done with the local community when the project had barely been conceived. People had mentioned their mode of creative expression was related to food and that they were running businesses out of their home kitchens.

When the project first began, the people behind what would become Mill Hill worked with the local Roving Listeners group. They went door to door in 2015 for six months, getting stories from people. This included talking with people at Davis Homes, a 184-unit public housing development down the street from Mill Hill.

“We weren’t even talking about a forthcoming project,” Olive says. “It’s pretty common for development projects to go in and say, ‘We’re going to do this planning effort. We’re going to have community meetings. We’re going to do this.’ And it’s all sort of framed around ‘because we’re going to do this project in the future.’ And really, with the Roving Listeners phase, it wasn’t through any lens. It was just knocking on people’s doors.”

They recorded people’s stories and compiled some of them along with photos in a book called “Heard on the East Side,” distributing it to residents. They also referred back to those conversations when creating the Mill Hill master plan, which was completed in 2018.

Currently, there isn’t a lot of occupancy in the artist village. Of the seven houses that have been restored, only one has been purchased by a private individual. One the Arts Alliance owns for use by its artist-in-residence. As those interviewed for the article indicated, there hasn’t been a lot of marketing done to make people aware of the spaces. As a result, they haven’t reached a critical mass of interest.

I will confess to possibly contributing to that. When I was looking to buy a house around this time last year, I was seriously considering some of those houses but the fact listings indicated they had been on the market for over a year raised concerns about how easy it would be to resell a house if I decided to move.

However, one of the great benefits those houses have is that they are located right next to a pedestrian and maintenance gate into the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park. It is basically a private entrance into an historic site with miles of walking & biking trails which also hooks up to an expanding community trail.  I used that entrance a number of times when I was living in Macon’s downtown. Even when the historical park is closed, you can pick up the community trail about 1/4 mile away.

I should also mention that the houses are pretty nice with a lot of open space making them well suited for studio use.

While the houses might not be occupied, the former auditorium space gets used a lot for events, classes and meetings of all sorts. The kitchen the bakers used is HUGE and well-equipped. The best events are those which show off the talents of those bakers.

So overall the project definitely has potential for great growth and is something worth watching.

Economists Don’t Like Economic Impact Studies?

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Michael Rushton is singing my song. Today he posted a critique of using economic impact as a measure of the value of the arts. It is “quick and dirty” as he says, so it won’t take much time to read the whole thing.

I have made many similar posts before, but what I appreciated about his post was that he points out not only are arts and culture not so special that something else can’t be substituted in its place, but the economic impact data is not useful for making policy decisions. I had noted the substitution problem 13 years ago, but the issue of usefulness of the data for policy making hadn’t gelled for me before today. (Rushton’s emphasis)

And so, to consider an arts example, suppose a mayor says “we should spend money building a new performing arts center. Construction costs would be $3 million, and the total economic impact of the construction would be $7.5 million”. An economist would say: “you could do a lot with $3 million: you could repair infrastructure, you could expand after school programs, you could lower taxes by $3 million and leave it to individuals to have more money to spend. Any of those options would also have ‘economic impact’. So ‘economic impact’ doesn’t justify spending on the performing arts center. What would justify a new PAC would be if the public benefits from using it exceeded the costs of building it and running it, i.e. a proper cost-benefit analysis. Building a PAC is a cost, it is not the benefit.”

Economists don’t like “Economic Impact” studies – they know that the conception of them is wrong, and they lead to bad reasoning.

[…]

…I’ve studied this subject for twenty-five years, and have never seen evidence that economic studies have informed decisions on public spending on the arts.

Second, the numbers don’t give any policy guidance. Suppose I were to tell you that the annual economic impact of the nonprofit arts sector in Bloomington is $73 million. If you were on city council, what would that tell you? That arts support should be increased? Or decreased? That this is a very big number? Or about what one would expect? That we should increase spending on arts program X but decrease it on arts program Y? I have never seen a policy decision where the economic impact number made a difference. (To see this, imagine that I told you “I’m sorry, I made a typing mistake, it’s not $73 million, it is $63 million”. How would that correction affect any arts policy decision?).

Verdi At Bat

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Maybe we should be keeping an eye on Tulsa Opera. Back in August I wrote about a film that was screened in my venue about Tulsa Opera’s casting a transgender person as Don Giovanni. A couple weeks ago, I saw link to an interview with Tulsa Opera Artistic Director Tobias Picker about a production of Rigoletto they staged in October on a baseball field so that they could have socially distanced performances.

The Tulsa Drillers minor league team offered the use of their field to the opera. Looking at the pictures attached to a review of the production, it looks like the opera embraced the opportunity fully. Performers strode out on to the field wielding baseball bats, toting beers and wearing jerseys proclaiming their membership in “The Dukes” baseball team.  The conductor wore a Maestro jersey.

The English translation appeared on the screen of the jumbotron and apparently the program consisted of “packs of trading cards that included photos of the cast, along with their operatic “stats” (character descriptions and past roles).” The Tulsa Driller’s announcer served as narrator.

I found a couple short Facebook videos of the production so you could see it in action, but there are also quite a few photos attached to the review.

It looks like Tulsa Opera only had one performance, but they managed to get an audience of 1800 people. (There are indications they had some preview performances so attendees at those performances might be part of their total production attendance.) The show was cut to a 90 minute performance and was followed by a fireworks display.

You have to applaud their creativity and efforts to find a way to mount a socially distanced production. I haven’t come across any definitive numbers indicating whether they attracted people who don’t normally attend opera.  I have to wonder if they found it rewarding enough to try something similar in the future.

It’s More Than Just Naming A Minster of Culture And Other Measures To Help Creative Industries

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To continue where I left off from yesterday’s post about the UNESCO document, Culture in crisis: Policy guide for a resilient creative sector, the next section addresses providing support for cultural and creative industries in the wake of the Covid epidemic. Whereas the policies covered in yesterday’s post were more targeted toward helping individual artists and organizations, this section is more focused on broader sectors. This part of the document has seven separate sections, but I don’t intend to take screenshots of them all.  Some of the proposals aren’t as relevant to non-profit arts organizations so I will summarize rather than going into detail.

The measures proposed in this section include: Accelerated payment of aid and subsidies; Temporary relief from regulatory obligations; compensation for business interruption losses; relief from taxes and social charges; stimulating demand; preferential loans; strengthening infrastructure and facilities.

Since I am writing from the bias of a U.S. based non-profit, some of these measures aren’t as significant as others.  Accelerated payment of aid is basically the suggestion to pay disbursements on grants already in place rather than waiting for final reports or the completion of services in order to allow organizations to remain liquid and finish all that stuff.

Relief from regulatory obligations as described in the document are focused on broadcast networks. I am not sure there are a lot of regulations in the U.S. that are inhibiting organizations from staying liquid and aren’t important for protecting workers and participants (i.e. those that deal with employment, health and safety, supervision of children in camps).

Similarly, relief from taxes doesn’t impact a lot of non-profit arts organizations. In some locations where the organization is making a voluntary payment to local government to support infrastructure, some discussion about payment is probably worthwhile. For those organizations that pay local/state sales tax, getting that removed in a time when tax receipts are way down is probably an extremely difficult conversation.

The preferential loans section is a valuable proposal, but the content of that section can be summarized as: The loans should be made, but the banking sector has insufficient understanding of the variations in creative organizations necessary to evaluate them for creditworthiness for loans so the banks need to be trained first.

Compensation for business interruption loss of course is a big issue, especially in terms of insurance paying claims. This section definitely is definitely worth reading since it is so relevant and balances the concerns of both government and industry.

Stimulating demand is a really interesting section and something folks in the U.S would love to see the government embrace. Look at that first line “The State is sending a clear message that the art and culture are essential services to which all citizens must have access.”

I appreciated the fact they noted change and results wouldn’t happen immediately and counseled a long term view.

I also think the observation that ministries of culture (or the NEA in the case of the US) does not have the expertise to stimulate demand is valuable to note. This is something extremely important to acknowledge when it comes to discussions about elevating arts & culture to Cabinet level position in the U.S. government. It isn’t enough to have someone in the position, the overall policy and practice of the government must be aligned toward cultivating both supply and demand. Even if the culture secretary/minister portfolio doesn’t have the ability to stimulate demand, government policy should be that those that do work hand-in-hand with the culture secretary/minister toward that end.

I debated whether to take a screenshot of the Infrastructure section because it states the well-known and easily summarized “Edifice Complex” truism. People like to fund impressive looking structures, but don’t want to fund the programs or people or programs that will inhabit the structures. However, I feel like we can all use the vindication:

Don’t Forget Lessons Learned About Business Insurance

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One of the panel sessions at the recent Arts Midwest-Western Arts Alliance virtual conference was on Reopening. The one panelist that really caught my attention was Anna Glass, Executive Director of Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH).

She said when the Covid emergency hit, the Cultural Institutions Group, a collection of major arts institutions in NYC area which had been organized some years prior, provided a great resource for information sharing during the crisis.  Apparently there were group calls seven days a week for the first two months to discuss the issues and they have scaled back to four times a week now. The group organized itself into various working groups to help figure out solutions to problems and organize advocacy efforts.

Glass is the co-leader of the insurance working group and spoke about the rude awakening groups like hers had when they discovered how lacking their insurance policies were.  One thing they didn’t realize was that there were caps on the amount of money their policies would pay out. So while DTH face the cancellations of events that annually brought in over $1 million, their policies were capped at $30,000. On top of that, while they were so sure that they could make a business interruption claim based on government action due to Gov. Cuomo’s executive order, they learned their policies would only cover them if there was physical damage to their buildings.

Glass said her insurance working group provided a lot of information to the greater Cultural Institutions Group membership about how to read their policies, make claims, etc. The working group encouraged everyone to make a claim even if they didn’t think they had a chance of having it approved just to make some noise about the issues with business insurance.

Glass said she paying greater attention to her insurance policies and really pushed back on her (previous) insurance broker for “not working for me.” She is determined not to make the same mistake twice.

The brief silver lining Glass sees in all this is that arts organizations in the NYC area are cooperating, collaborating and advocating as a unified groups in a way they hadn’t before. She hopes that becomes an ingrained habit/practice moving forward.

I wanted to bring this up in general for the broader lessons about cooperation and advocacy this has for us all, but specifically to remind people to pay attention to things like insurance policies and contracts moving forward. I am sure it will be nigh impossible to get appropriate coverage for epidemics, but you still need to think seriously about what types of coverage you need and what you will or won’t accept from a policy. There is so much other crap going on right now, it will be hard to effect change but eventually there will likely be a movement to reform insurance coverage.

The Most Important People Social Distance In The Penalty Box

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I mentioned last week that I was in the middle of virtually attending the combined Arts Midwest-Western Arts Alliance Conference. I will probably have a couple entries of observations on particular sessions. However, I wanted to throw out two smaller bits of information I came across that I didn’t think could fill an entire entry.

First, as much as everyone is talking about streaming being the wave of the future and the only way arts organizations can survive, an attendee from Mississippi noted that a significant portion of the community she served did not have reliable high speed internet.

There was a fair bit of talk at the conference about the Covid environment providing the opportunity/forcing organizations to provide experiences that connected with a greater range of their local community.  For some communities, this means that the live experience may be the only viable experience.

Likewise, it is important to remember that even though contactless payment like tapping and swiping might be the safest, there are a lot of people in our communities who are unbanked or underbanked for whom cash is the only possible medium of exchange. Be sure to consider these challenges when pledging people will find you welcoming and more accessible in the future.

Further up the Mississippi River, in Grand Rapids. MN was my favorite story about leveraging local features and assets to meet the challenges of live performance during Covid-times. Shantel Dow, Executive Director of the Reif Center said they were holding “boat-in” concerts on lake shores where the audience arrived on pontoon boats to watch the land based performance.

She also mentioned they were holding events at an outdoor hockey rink. It is roofed against rain, but open air on the sides to allow for important ventilation and air exchange.  What I really loved was that they were selling the penalty boxes as VIP seating. From the pictures I saw, it looked like most people bring their own chairs and arrange themselves at a safe distance from others around the rink.

I don’t remember the exact number of events she said they had done since Covid restrictions began, but it seemed impossibly high. However, looking at their Facebook page, between the boat-in concerts, the ice hockey arena events and the movies they are projecting on the side of their building, a high number of events seemed within the realm of possibility. I am happy they were able to make so much work for them.

 

Meanwhile, Next Door In Austria

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The title of today’s post references the fact yesterday’s post was about cultural funding in Germany. I hadn’t planned it this way, but I wanted to draw attention to the lengths various venues in Austria went to this summer in order to perform in front of live audiences.

According to a piece on Vox, the Salzburg Festival in Vienna went ahead with their centiennial anniversary festival with audiences subject to the following conditions:

Among the rules: Audience members were asked to wear masks and social distance at one meter. Seating capacities were reduced, and every second seat in every concert hall was locked so people couldn’t get around the restrictions. There were no intermissions at performances, or refreshments available.

Simply buying a ticket meant agreeing to engage in contact tracing, if it came to that: Tickets were personalized with names, and audience members had to show an ID when they entered any venue. ..

In the end, the festival attracted more than 76,000 visitors — a little more than a quarter of last year’s — from 39 countries during August. According to the festival’s final report on the event, “not a single positive case has been reported to the authorities.” And of the 3,600 coronavirus tests carried out on the 1,400 people involved in festival preparation, just one came back positive in early July.

What was more interesting to me was the process the Vienna State Opera used to determine the testing schedule for their employees. Encouraged by the success of the Salzburg Festival, they planned to reopen last month and implemented a system of color-coded lanyards to indicate which employees were most at risk for exposure to the Covid virus.

Singers and people working directly with the singers are part of the red group and are tested every week (since they can’t always wear masks or keep distance onstage). Administrators are part of the orange group and are tested every four weeks. The yellow and white groups — people who don’t have close contact with artists, such as delivery people — are only tested if there’s a known exposure. And everyone wears colored lanyards to denote their risk, while groups are instructed to stay apart.

Read the whole article because there are interviews with individual artists about how they are impacted. The tl;dnr version is – artists are risking their health for even less pay than before

The Grass Is Greener In Someone Else’s Museum

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I just want to take a moment to brag on some museum friends and also reinforce the idea that one shouldn’t discount the experiences found in small towns as of lower quality.

Long time readers know that before I moved to Georgia, I lived in Portsmouth, OH, a fairly rural town in Appalachia which has often had the misfortune of being the go-to poster child for the opioid epidemic despite having started rebounding from its worst point before other communities even recognized they were in crisis.

When I was living there, the local museum presented the work of Elijah Pierce, a man who started wood carving and barbering at a fairly young age. He did a number of biblical scenes whose imagery he used to support his work as a traveling preacher. Pierce had been born in Mississippi, but settled in Columbus, OH. When the work came to the local museum, they had a couple people talk about Pierce’s work, including a gentleman who would often walk over from the nearby Columbus College of Art and Design where he taught to chat with Pierce in his barber shop, surrounded by many of the carvings.

Last week there was a story in The Art Newspaper about a big show of Pierce’s work at The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia that contained the following quote (my emphasis):

But when Nancy Ireson, the chief curator of Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, first saw them in 2018 she was amazed she had not encountered the work before. Ireson asked her fellow curator Zoé Whitley, the director of London’s Chisenhale Gallery, what she knew about Pierce. “Neither of us had come across his carvings in the siloed contexts of so-called ‘fine art’ exhibitions of 19th and 20th century artists,” Whitley says.

If you type Elijah Pierce’s name into a web search engine now, you will see this show is a big deal with many news stories written about it. (Granted, in the cultural news vacuum created by Covid, this may be less of a feat than it seems. Though the civil rights themes of the work would have likely still gotten traction.)

When I think about the fact I could wander in to look at Pierce’s work for free multiple times at my leisure, which I definitely did, and was able to learn about the work with people who really knew it well–and now people are swooning over the significance of Pierce and his work, it goes to my original point about not discounting the potential quality of an experience.

Gaining access to Pierce’s work was not an anomaly for this museum. There were a number of artists whose work showed there and got picked up by galleries. Some of them I bought before they gained greater notoriety, some I didn’t. Sometimes I regretted that later. I know for a fact that I walked out the door past two gallery owners who were coming down to look at the painting I had purchased and was carrying. Though certainly it wasn’t the only or most prestigious work they were coming to see that trip.

In this particular case, the community benefits from the fact museum directors were people who had curated good relationships over the course of their careers and were able to arrange for some interesting art to show. Likewise, gallery owners trust their judgment and check out work they display–or work with the museum to display the work of artists they represent.

I am sure the number of pieces of Pierce’s work that I saw are just a small portion of what you might see in Philadelphia so I wasn’t getting the blockbuster experience The Barnes Foundation might be offering. However, to drive into Portsmouth, it would be easy to assume you wouldn’t get to experience that small portion. What you definitely wouldn’t get in Philadelphia is an invitation to wander across the street to the museum directors’ home/gallery to nosh on some food and chat–something everyone who showed up for the opening got whether you were an old friend or new.

Dip Your Toe, But Probably Not The Time To Take The Plunge

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As I was driving into work today, I heard an NPR story about the 92nd St Y, an event/education space in NYC, and how they have gone virtual during Covid-19.  According to NPR, in a typical year 92 Street Y has about 300,000 people participate in their events. In the last 6 months they have had over 3.4 million people engage with their virtual programming.

My first inclination was to think that if they had successfully monetized their offerings, it was likely due to the fact they are located in NYC and are such a marquee name that Hugh Jackman takes classes there.

It turns out that even with those numbers, they haven’t been financially successful.

BLAIR: And they’re selling tickets. Some programming is free, but they’ve also generated over $3 million in revenue. Still, CEO Seth Pinsky says, despite the income and the massive audience increase, they’ve had to furlough staff and cut salaries.

PINSKY: The hardest part of all of this is that, in spite of all the successes that we’re having, the economics still don’t work. And we’ve been operating on fumes.

BLAIR: Pinsky says he hopes, going forward, the 92nd Street Y can crack the code on how to make this new virtual, now global model a sustainable one. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.

It should be noted that while $3 million seems great revenue for a lot of us, it is all relative. According to 92nd Street Y’s  financial reports, (much love to them for making it so easy to find), they had $45 million in earned revenue in fiscal year 2019.

For as much as people are saying virtual content is the future, you don’t want to necessarily go all in on this right now. Though obviously, investing energy in in-person content ain’t generating $3 million right now.

Broadway producer Ken Davenport is of the mind that the more paid virtual content that is offered, the quicker that mode of engaging with content will be normalized. He uses the example of younger people paying to watch people stream themselves playing video games.

I am not sure that is the most apt comparison when it comes to streaming live content. I think using your computer to watch someone play a game you, yourself can play on a computer involves a different mode of thinking. There is no live substitute that exists for that experience. Even if you attended a video game tournament in person, and people pack arenas to do just that, you would still end up watching the action play out on a huge screen.

That said, Davenport seems to think there is a separate audience out there that may not necessarily overlap with existing audiences. I am put in mind of the fact that among the top impediments to attending a live event are not having anyone who will accompany them; transportation/distance difficulties; not having the time. There may, in fact, be a local demographic that will engage with a performance that is livestreamed for them.

Davenport writes:

Well first, if you’re a TheaterGoer and you see a TheaterMaker doing something with a price tag attached (and it’ll be much less than a live ticket – because they have to be), considering paying.  You’ll be helping a TheaterMaker.  And TheaterMakers?  Help your peers.  Attend their shows.  Support and you’ll be supported.

But if you want more specifics, then here are my three giant takeaways for TheaterMakers that you MUST do to get on the ground floor of the paid streaming revolution that is coming.

  1. Build a following. You need your own tribe, your own fans, your own community to have a successful career in streaming your art. (That tribe can be any size, but you need to know where they are and be able to communicate with them daily – and yes, social media is great, but nothing beats email.
  2. Stream something. Anything. Start experimenting. Plays. Concerts. One person shows. Try to make it a unique experience for the streaming market so it feels created for it.
  3. Repeat.  Keep doing different things until you find what works for YOU. And after a while you will find something that supports your live stage work. Wouldn’t that be nice?

At my venue we are going to experiment along these lines with a speaker series in October. We will have a live event that is streamed. We are putting the stream on sale a little later than the live event tickets under the philosophy that live streaming is an overflow space to some degree.

After the speaker finishes, there will be a curated Q&A. A half hour after the Q&A we will host online discussions of the topic in Zoom breakout rooms as a way to simulate an after event discussion. The half hour is to allow in-person attendees a little time to get home and log in. The goal is to try to bring the two methods of interaction together in one place. I will let you know how things turn out.

Cirque Got Back In The Air In China

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Many have probably heard about the Broadway productions in South Korea which only experienced a brief shutdown thanks to the swift and fairly comprehensive measures the government and productions put in place to combat Covid-19. Come to find out, there is a Cirque du Soleil production in Hangzhou, China which managed to get back into production in May despite China being an early epicenter of the disease. The China show didn’t start performing again until July, however.  It was one of two Cirque productions performing at the time of the article was written. (I am not sure what the other production is. I see Mystere is running in Vegas, but the other Vegas productions don’t start until October.)

During the shutdown period, many of acrobats cobbled together practice routines to maintain their strength and flexibility since their normal training faculties were unavailable. One of the biggest challenges the production faced was that many of their foreign performers had left the country and couldn’t re-enter in order to rejoin the show.  They ended up having to basically revamp the performances and supporting technology to integrate all the changes into the overarching narrative concept.

Over a manic three-week period, “X” hired over a dozen replacement actors and acrobats from troupes across China, who had to be trained and taught the show in its entirety.

Scenes containing foreign stars were replaced and re-choreographed. A duo of figure-skating Russians was swapped out for a group of Cyr wheel performers, who roll around the stage inside giant metal hoops. The high-flying bungee rope artists were substituted for a “water meteor” juggling act. Local trampoline specialists created a simplified version of the show’s original “trampowall” segment, in which the experienced foreign artists would flip and spin off of a high vertical wall.

Changing or cutting acts is routine during Cirque shows, but making so many changes while remaining faithful to the “X” storyline was a huge challenge, according to Chouinard.

[…]

The hardest-working crewmembers were the technical team, who had to adjust the music, graphics, lighting, and animations to fit with the altered show. Each change, meanwhile, had to be discussed and approved by Cirque’s headquarters back in Canada.

What was most surprising to learn was that the Chinese producers, Xintiandi,  were able to continue paying the bills for their idled production even as Cirque du Soleil was filing for bankruptcy protection. Still, despite Xintiandi’s substantial cash reserves, they have been renting out their performance facility to other events in an attempt to offset the reduced income resulting from a mandatory 50% seating capacity and weakened tourism outlook for Hangzhou.

Between February and June, Xintiandi continued to pay staff wages, venue bills, financial payments, and maintenance costs, without earning 1 yuan in income.

The Chinese firm, meanwhile, still has to pay Cirque an annual licensing fee for the show. When Sixth Tone spoke with Xia in July, she said the company was currently negotiating this year’s payment with its Canadian partner, with a slight grimace.

The deep pockets of Xintiandi have enabled the show to absorb these losses, but the current 50% attendance limit means the show can’t run profitably.

Live From Our Fire Escape

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Today Drew McManus had a post on Adaptistration titled “In the Age Of COVID, Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention.” This was pretty timely because I had my own tale of adapting to the times to tell.

This weekend at my venue, we hosted our first live event since March -an outdoor cabaret performance on our fire escape. (Not so much an invention, I suppose since the first thing people did when the pandemic started was sing from their apartment windows and fire escapes.)

As you can see from the pictures below, we have a pretty substantial fire escape with multiple levels that can be used for performance. Since this was our first time out and we didn’t want to expose more of our equipment to the summer heat and possible rain than necessary, we limited our activities to one level.

The audience sat in our parking lot. As you can see, we prepped the parking lot by chalking out seating pods. The seating was general admission and we undersold what we imagined our capacity to be in order to provide both our audience and ourselves with the flexibility to see how things developed.

We determined the size and number of pods to create by analyzing the ticket purchasing patterns. We drew out two person, four person, six person and in one case 10 person, pods based on how people purchased their tickets. The pods were spaced to allow six feet between groups of unrelated people. Then we allowed enough room on the perimeter for people who felt the need for greater distancing to set up as they wanted.

Our aim was to observe how many people chose the pods versus the open areas in order to get a sense of what our actual capacity for the space might be while ensuring good sightlines. We capped the event at 175 people, but now figure we can get up to about 250 and still ensure appropriate spacing and flexibility in seating location.

Our local mask ordinance requires that if you are anywhere outside your home within six feet of a person with whom you do not live, you must wear a mask. The example given is if you are waiting at a crosswalk alone, you don’t have to wear a mask, but if someone arrives to wait with you, you need to be wearing one.

Since people were coming with picnic set-ups or could grab food from partner restaurants and didn’t have to wear a mask while eating, our policy was you could only sit with people in your household and could remove your mask while seated in your pod with them. Since moving to and from that space requires becoming closer to others, you needed to wear a mask as you moved about everywhere else. By and large everyone heeded the rule and those that didn’t we firmly prodded to comply.

One bit of fortunate timing was about three weeks ago the local government expanded permission to have open containers on downtown streets from First Friday only to every night between 4 pm-10 pm to allow bar patrons to use sidewalk tables restaurants and the downtown association had deployed. This allowed us to serve alcohol out of our own bar which helped improve the financial situation of the event.

Overall, it was regarded as a success and we are planning to run at least one more before it gets too cool this Fall. Stay tuned.

Going To A Museum To Gather Information

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I saw an article about an interview with Kimberly Drew on Slate that I really liked. Drew had a book come out, This Is What I Know About Art .

What grabbed my attention was Drew defining a museum experience as information gathering in the same sense as entering a library.

Museums fall within the larger field of GLAM—art galleries, libraries, and museums—where you’re not supposed to go there knowing everything. That’s the myth of museums. You don’t have to know every single book when you go into a library. You go to a library to gather information, and we should be looking at museums in the same way. We go into museums or enter museum websites to garner information, and hopefully we leave knowing more than what we came in with. But somewhere along the line, it became like, “I don’t get it,” or, “If I don’t know this, this, or this, then I shouldn’t go.” That’s one of the greater barriers to access

Drew is pretty passionate about museums. In the conversation between her and the interviewer, there is a fair bit of discussion about all the expectations of what an experience is supposed to be that weigh down the experience. They say that not only can’t a museum account for all contexts influencing how people are interacting with art, sometimes the person who normally spends hours in a gallery is coming in to get out of the rain for a half hour or because they feel like getting out during their lunch hour.

This is obviously applicable to all disciplines and their respective audiences. Along those lines, Drew acknowledges sometimes timing is everything. She says despite there being hundreds of visual arts related blogs out there before her’s, when she started her Black Contemporary Art Tumblr page, it aligned with a need from people who were passionate and curious, but didn’t have the resources to learn and were alienated by the way art was presented in museums and galleries.

Based on this, Drew is an advocate for providing different paths which allow people to interact with your organization: website, blog, video content, etc., as an accompaniment for the physical experience you offer.

There is a recording of the full interview from which the article is excerpted if you want to absorb the whole conversation. (There is also a transcript, but it is auto-generated by software and attributes Drew’s words to 4-5 separate speakers which gets confusing.)

We Are More Accepting Of Disease Spreading In Large Crowds Than I Thought

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A recent study looking at a connection between influenza mortality and professional sports leagues provides some insights into the possible impact of the more highly contagious Covid-19 virus if large group assemblies were permitted.

The researchers looked at influenza rates and sports activity from 1962 through 2016. They do a lot of work with their data taking into account geography (a number of New York teams that play(ed) in NJ), the entry of new sports franchises in that time period, the extent of public transit lines, impact of people gathering at bars to watch competitions, and the fact that some sports seasons occur outside of flu season, among many other factors.

What they found is:

The results show cities acquiring one new professional sports team experienced 4% to 24% increases in local influenza mortality across all age groups compared to cities without professional sports teams, suggesting that sports-related changes in social distancing patterns represent important influenza transmission mechanisms. These results are in line with Stoecker et al. (2016) who estimated an 18% increase in flu mortality among the local population age 65 or older in MSAs that sent an NFL team to the Super Bowl. In addition, local flu mortality fell in some years when work stoppages occurred in sports leagues, further buttressing the evidence that games played by professional sports teams make substantial contributions to local seasonal flu mortality.

My first thought was that we have been pretty blase about the potential impact of these large gathering on influenza mortality. Though I guess that was sort of clear back in March/April when people were saying Covid-19 wasn’t worse than the flu. There was already an acceptance that a number of people die every year. Perhaps that will happen one day with Covid-19 as we become acclimated to its impact.

One interesting thing to note – while there was an 18% increase in mortality among the 65+ population of MSAs that sent teams to the Super Bowl, in that earlier Stoecker et al. (2016) study they cite, there wasn’t an increase in mortality for the city that hosted the Super Bowl.

…suggesting that changes in travel patterns bringing large numbers of spectators to the host city play a small role in the process. This result does not completely rule out changes in travel patterns as a mechanism for transmission. It is possible that the mechanism works in the opposite direction: fans who travel to the host city for the Super Bowl become infected there and bring the virus back home with them..

One thing to keep in mind, and the study authors point this out, is that all large gatherings are not created equal. They suggest future research do a deeper dive into distinctions like size, age and amenities of facilities. Some sports are played in larger, younger facilities with better HVAC systems and more enclosed seating areas than others. All these things can impact the spread of disease. Likewise, some of these facilities also host concerts and other events with large attendance. Different activities spread disease at varying rates even if they are held in the same facilities with similar attendance.

Also, apparently not all work stoppages are created the same. Flu mortality fell during the 1982 NFL and 2011 NBA stoppage, but there was no impact from the 2004 NHL work stoppage. They theorize fans engaged in substitute activities which exposed them to the flu.

So overall this some clearer information verifying for arts organizations, who I suspect are already doing pretty well at proceeding with caution, the importance of paying attention to the attendance and spacing at your events.

Even Covid Can’t Stop Translating Plan Into Action

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If readers have been paying close attention, you probably know I currently run an historic theater in Macon, GA. Last week, the Macon Arts Alliance released the cultural master plan the community had been working on for the previous year or so. It won’t surprise you to learn that it had originally been slated to be released at the start of March, but concerns over coronavirus delayed that. There is likely some argument to be made that the plan should have been released at a later time when things were more stable, especially since it calls for the creation of a cultural liaison staff position by a county government facing a financially problematic environment.

However, the plan was developed in parallel with the next iteration of the county master plan and the current election cycle will see a change of mayor and council members so it was important to get the cultural master plan into circulation.

I participated in about 90% of the public meetings that were held for the plan, plus served on a subcommittee so I have some investment in it. Macon is fortunate in that it is one of the communities in which the Knight Foundation is highly active. They, alongside a number of other local foundations, provided the funding needed to bring a team from Lord Cultural Resources to conduct all the meetings and data crunching.

One thing I feel the cultural plan does well is acknowledge the connection between race, household income and access to cultural assets:

The majority of assets are located in or around downtown Macon. Average income in the downtown area is in a lower tier ($14,700-60,600); this is because, despite higher rents in new downtown developments, many students live in the downtown area. Beyond downtown, most cultural assets are located west of the Ocmulgee River, where income is higher on average. Macon’s large African-American community can be better served, as currently most assets are clustered in areas with whiter populations. The east side, where incomes are generally lower, has relatively few cultural assets beyond key attractions such the Ocmulgee Mounds, Fort Hawkins, and the recently renovated Mill Hill Community Arts Center.

The video that accompanies the plan almost immediately acknowledges the perception of crime and blight associated with the community. These same issues came up repeatedly in the community conversations that informed the plan. In fact, one of the biggest lingering image problems that exists is that the downtown isn’t safe. So while a lot of the cultural assets may be downtown, they may not be accessed as much as they could be. (I obviously have a vested interest being the leader of one of those assets.)

While I think the plan is still oriented too much on a conventional concept of arts and culture, (I grumble at the Bach underscoring a video for a community that boasts significant rock and soul roots), even before the protests surrounding George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, there was an acknowledgement of the work that needed to be done to create a more equitable environment in the community.

Keeping in mind my frequent refrain not to engaged in whole cloth adoption of bylaws, policies, etc of other organizations as your own, I link to the plan for communities that might be considering similar efforts so you can get a sense of the things you need to be considering and addressing.

 

Please Yield To Oncoming Road Boxes Before Proceeding To Dance On Stage

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I had a post today on ArtsHacker with the click-baity title, You Can’t Just Let People Tear Your Clothes Off Anymore. The post talks about the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) reopening guideline which were released last month.

Since I have been reading and writing about different guidelines, as well as reviewing our state governor’s orders, I didn’t feel like there was anything unexpected or onerous proposed in the first half of their document.

As I write in the ArtsHacker article, if your organization interacts with IATSE personnel, it is helpful to know what their expectations will be when you work with them. I also thought it would be useful for organizations that hadn’t formulated human resource policies regarding “…training, testing, reporting, quarantine length and leave policies, the guide provides a good framework for creating them, including some information on paid leave laws in the U.S. and Quebec.”

Where I thought the guide is most valuable is in the second half where it applies all the standard best practices that are general knowledge to some of the specific activities associated with putting on a performance. This can be especially true for touring performances. When you are operating out of a different physical space every night or so, there is always a bit of reinvention required. When that is complicated by the need to take care to limit exposure to a virus, the level of attention to detail required increases many times over, especially when you are actively participating in a live performance experience.

It is no longer acceptable to rush up to a mirror, apply make-up and discard kleenex and cotton balls with the intention of cleaning it up later. At the very least, you have to hand it off to someone wearing gloves or holding a trashbag. As the title of the ArtsHacker post suggests, even having wardrobe personnel standing by in the wings to pull off one set of clothes and help you don another set needs to be planned and executed with even greater discipline than usual.

Given the restricted space of many theater backstages and the pauses in movement of personnel and equipment throughout a space required by Covid-19 guidelines, I anticipate a not insubstantial amount of time will be required to effect the load-in and load-out process. This may mean tours will need to scale back the amount of equipment they travel with,  add more days between performances, or travel shorter distances between event dates. This may translate into fewer cities being included in a tour due to time constraints or the economics of needing to pay more personnel for longer hours.

You Can’t Just Let People Tear Your Clothes Off Anymore

You’re Invited To My Pool For A Concert

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I am sure a lot of people are wondering what other people are doing about performances as you plan for the day you can actually start again. Classicfm.com shared a number of images and videos of the way different venues have been spacing both musicians and audiences.

To me the most novel idea and location was a cello concert at the bottom of an empty pool in Germany. Are the acoustics of a pool conducive to the cello range?  There is another article with more pictures from other angles. The lane markers made for good spacing guides and the grade of the floor as it moved toward the shallow end helped with sightlines.

In Hong Kong, they had plexiglass between orchestra members, but in The Netherlands, they had empty seats and dividers to separate audience members.

There are a number of pictures of people arrayed in seating at social distance which may strike many as a bit depressing given the appearance of sparse attendance.

One image I found very striking was that of the London Mozart Players performing in a church. While there was no audience because they were video taping, when I saw all the musicians wearing vibrant red facemasks and bits of red clothing, my first thought was that they really made it work even spaced apart. Granted, some of that is due to good audio and video editing and the ability to zoom in close to the musicians, but for most of the video it is pretty clear everyone is spaced further apart than usual.

 

 

Culture Track Report Says The Same People Won’t Be Returning

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You may have seen the news today that the results of the Culture Track Covid-19 report were publicly released today. While some of the data about audience willingness to return to arts and culture organizations is a little dated due to the survey being conducted at the end of April through May 19, the majority of the findings can be very valuable to arts and cultural organizations.

They had only expected about 50,000 people to participate but had over 124,000 respondents to the survey. Participants ranged from knitting groups and walking clubs to organizations you might typically associate with arts and culture activities. Back on June 17, Advisory Board for the Arts hosted a webinar where staff from Slover Linnet and LaPlaca Cohen gave an early preview of the results to organizations that had participated in the study. If you want a deeper view of the results, you can watch the webinar.

The infographic layout of the report that came out today does a good job presenting the data, but there is one thing I don’t think they made clear enough which may cause people to question the results. Especially since the methodology is explained in a separate document rather than included as an appendix to the Key Finding report.

Since so many of the respondents were people on the mailing lists of arts and culture organizations around the country, you would correctly assume that it might skew the data. The Culture Track folks worked with another organization to distribute the survey a representative sample of the US population. The results you see in the key findings report are weighted to be representative of the US population.

The webinar presents both the core subscriber/ticket buyer response percentages and weighted percentages.  While the core supporters are much more likely to say the arts are important and worthy of preservation than the general population, they also more likely to expect organizations to implement strict health and safety protocols upon re-opening.

A couple of the bigger takeaways for me:

• People said they were feeling lonely, bored and disconnected and one of the things they missed most was sharing experiences with family and friends. In the webinar, the presenters suggested if there were a way for arts organizations to digitally allow people to share experiences, it would potentially serve a large need.

• Something to keep in mind is that people may want a much more interactive experience in the future. 81% of respondents said they were doing something creative while quarantined. Cooking, singing, handcrafting (knitting, painting, pottery, woodwork, etc), photography and writing were among the top responses.

• Many people were engaging in digital cultural experiences in the 30 days prior to taking the survey. In the webinar, the speakers noted that the demographics of people participating digitally was more diverse in terms of education, gender, race/ethnicity than those attending in person. They suggested that digital content might be a way to attract more diverse groups to in person experiences over the long term. (Obviously online content needs to align with an in-person experience–including how welcome one feels.)  There are also some who appreciated digital content as a solution to concerns about affordability, transportation and schedule.

• Unfortunately few people reported paying for digital content. In the webinar, they said 2% of people reported they paid for digital content, but in the Key Findings report that came out today, it says 13% have paid for content. It made me wonder if they received additional or corrected data since June 17. Most of the other numbers I was using to cross reference the webinar and Key Findings report remained the same.

• In general, what people crave the most upon an anticipated return to in-person experiences is ability to enjoy oneself/de-stress in the company of family and friends.

Obviously, a lot of nuance and detail not included here so take a look at the report and/or webinar. Overall the the title of this post reflects the reality of the next normal. Those that physically engage in-person won’t be the same as before in both the literal sense demographically and metaphoric “no one can enter the same river twice” sense. The faces may be familiar, but they will have different expectations.

 

 

It’s A Good Time To Broaden Board Composition Too

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Tyler Green’s tweet today about art museums acting like corporations rather than charities got me to look at the full series of tweets on the subject.  He is angered by the fact that instead of stepping up to support museums in a time of crisis, the billionaire members of boards are voting for mass lay-offs of staffs.

In brief, his argument seems to be that while museum boards are comprised of people who make the largest individual donations to museums, they are not the largest sources of support for those museums.

He notes that many charities have board members who represent the membership or community the organization serves, but institutions like San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) don’t have any.

All this is worth serious consideration as our organizations seek to move on to the next normal. Those who have supported our organizations in the past with their participation may no longer feel safe engaging with the general public. There is an opportunity to start working toward oft expressed ideals of engaging a broader audience with whom you haven’t had the time and resources to initiate a conversation. Because they are increasingly likely to be your new audience.

Their numbers may not be as large as your old audience, but social distancing rules have reduced your top capacity so you have some cover to explain the smaller crowds.

I wrote about Nina Simon’s talk on this effort earlier this month.

But perhaps most importantly in the context of Tyler Green’s posts, it is probably time to broaden the membership of the board. This is likely to necessitate a shift in corporate/board culture. Even if your board isn’t comprised of billionaires, it is highly likely that the group dynamics of the board are going to feel alienating to any new members chosen to represent the core demographics served by your organization.

Psychology of Re-Opening

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Artsjournal.com linked to a Washington Post story about all the psychological considerations some movie theater operators are factoring into re-opening their spaces for screenings. To paraphrase one of those interviewed, there may be a whole series of conditions that have to be met to admit audiences, but you don’t want people to feel like they are undergoing an airport screening just to see a movie.

An owner of a movie chain in Omaha has decided to rely on a mix of subtle imagery and social proof:

One conclusion: Leaning in to safety messaging is a surefire way to turn off customers.

“If you’re leading off the pitch with ‘It’s so clean you’re not going to get sick’ then you’ve already lost the argument,” said Barstow, whose company is about to open a new Omaha location. Instead of talking about disinfectant and distancing, he says, he believes it more effective to roll out traditional marketing that slips in the requisite information — an image of a shiny lobby with an employee in the background who just happens to be wearing a mask, for instance.

“You let people know you’re taking care of them, but very subtly,” he said.

Barstow said he and his daughter, who runs the company’s marketing operation, have discovered that the best weapon for luring customers might be not what the theater is doing at all — it’s the sight of other customers.

[…]

“Seeing someone like a mom bring her three kids to a matinee is I think going to be the best tool to make people feel comfortable about coming themselves.” Of course, he acknowledges, such events need to happen organically, captured instead of contrived on social media.

At my venue, we had already been planning to start showing movies in late July before our governor added live performance venues alongside movie theaters as places that are allowed to hold events. One of the major points of concern for employees was whether customers would wear masks. We weren’t sure how forceful we could be, but the recent decision by the AMC movie theater chain to make masks mandatory gives us a little more support, regardless of how insistent we decide to be.

One interesting observation from the Washington Post article I hadn’t really considered was the importance of having mask wearing staff communicate reassurance with their eyes and posture since the rest of the face won’t be visible. In this, perhaps the performing arts have a competitive advantage.

“You have to train staff how to reassure customers with their eyes, because no one will be able to see their mouths,” said Barstow, who is mandating employees wear masks.

“Maybe,” he mused, “we should hire local drama students.”

You Don’t Know You Are In Water

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Seth Godin made a post today that addresses the current climate of Black Lives Matter, policing, statues, etc without directly naming any of these things.  (A week ago he mentioned he generally tries to write posts that were evergreen rather than specific to the times in which they were penned, but felt he had to unequivocally state Black Lives Matter.)

Today he points out that when you are part of the dominant culture, you don’t see it around you like the proverbial fish that aren’t aware they are in water. It isn’t until you go to another country that you recognize every small assumption comprising your daily routine needs to be examined closely just to cross the street to get breakfast.

This experience can be part of what is fun and engaging about your visit. But part of what makes it fun is that you know you can return to a familiar environment later where you will have many stories to tell. The prospect of living in that foreign place for a longer time can be more daunting.

When media images, policies and corporate standards tell someone that they are an outsider who needs to fit in in non-relevant ways, we’re establishing patterns of inequity and stress. We need to be clear about the job that needs to be done, the utility we’re seeking to create, but not erect irrelevant barriers, especially ones we can’t see without effort.

Good systems are resilient and designed to benefit the people who use them.

If the dominant culture makes it harder for people who don’t match the prevailing irrelevant metrics to contribute and thrive, it’s painful and wasteful and wrong.

If you think about the above quote from Godin a bit, you might see that there are a good many times when the dominant culture shows little regard about alienating its own members. We have seen it happen often in recent years in both large and small ways. Currently we are in a period where many people are realizing their membership isn’t as secure as they thought or that they are no longer in synch with the terms of membership. The result is, they are finding greater common cause with those who have felt themselves outsiders.

But also, lest it get lost in the macro level big societal questions being wrestled with on the national and international stage, Godin’s admonishment about good systems being resilient and designed to benefit the users is just as applicable on the micro level of your organizational business hours and admission practices.

Putting Some O’ That Theory Into Practice

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I arrived in my office last Friday to find a heck of a lot more emails in my Inbox than I am used to. It turned out the evening before the governor had announced a change of guidelines that would allow performing arts organizations to open after July 1 and people immediately started scrambling trying to ascertain what it all meant.  Ultimately, nothing the new order contained deviated from our expectations by much at all in terms of how it would impact seating capacity or operational practices. We were on a Zoom call with the county attorney today and he had nothing surprising to say in his reading of the order, but it was good to have our understanding confirmed.

Like me, you may have heard that Texas’ governor had issued guidance on performing arts centers last week.  However, I was surprised to learn that Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, FL was having concerts last week. I hadn’t heard that things had opened that far in any other state.

The performances in Clearwater were in their lobby in a cabaret type setting  with attendance capped at 80 people. It looks like the three shows on June 11 sold out quickly and the added shows on June 14,  19 & 25 sold out as well. I was wondering if there are any readers in Florida who may have attended who could talk about the show and what their experience was. I see from an article on the show there were some screening procedures and people were seated at a social distance.

Fans were offered face masks at the gate, temperature-checked upon entry, and delivered drinks and snacks by servers in gloves and black masks. They sat in groups of four or fewer, and for the most part, only got up to hit the head.

The venue is also communicating their safety policies in the events scheduled this month which include the following.

– Venue staff will be wearing face masks; we encourage patrons to do the same. Face masks are available at the door upon request.
– Hand sanitizer stations are readily available. If you are in need of an attendant with cleaning supplies, please ask the wait staff.
– Table selection is on a first-come/first-served basis. We ask that you not change tables once you are seated.
– We encourage remaining at your table during the show. If you wish to stand, you will be asked to move behind the seated area and maintain social distancing.
– All food and beverage service will be table-side. There will be no walk-up service available.
– If you suspect you are ill or reside with someone who is ill with flu-like symptoms, we ask you to exchange for a future show.
– While we are committed to providing a clean and safe environment, it is impossible to eliminate all health risk in any location so please use discretion.

This seems a good example upon which to base your own venue communications as you start to open so that you don’t have to invent it all from scratch.

Do We Need Hysterical Strength To Bring About Required Change?

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It appears Indiana University’s Center for Cultural Affairs was having some sort of virtual convening around the topic of New. Not Normal: Artists, the Creative Sector, and Innovation after the Pandemic. I only became aware of it because I was starting to see the videos recorded by some of the featured speakers appear in my Twitter feed today.

I watched the videos by economist Tyler Cowen and self-described philanthropy wonk Lucy Bernholz, both of whom had some thoughts about what the post-Covid future held for the arts. However, the person who envisioned the greatest necessity for transformational change was artist/activity Marc Bamuthi Joseph.

His suggestion was that instead of paying artists to create new works, they should be contracted to lead organizational leadership and stakeholders through a process of envisioning the role the organization should play in the community. In his words, rethinking theater as a site for creative wellness. This is based on the assumption that performing arts organizations can no longer exist with the goal of filling every seat. Even absent restrictions by governments, people will be reticent to return.

As an aside, something that has occurred to me that one has mentioned. If there is any group that turns out to attend performances in sufficient numbers to make an event financially viable, assuming they don’t become severely ill, their influence on what happens in arts and cultural may be cemented for decades to come. Depending on who constitutes that group of attendees, it could either be productive or detrimental in the long term.

Joseph says the smart performing arts entities will be those that embrace

“…social practice artistry, public health, fiscal health, brand expansion, digital production, embodied creative commons…how could currently empty theatres and music halls be utilized in service of social health, used as food service platforms, or testing sites or polling places or spill over waiting rooms for hospitals.”

Near the end of his video, citing the superhuman feats people are capable of when faced with a situation of alarming urgency, he suggests that the pandemic provides both the motivation and “hysterical strength” to rescue the collective arts and culture community from the threat being faced. Though he likens the strength of courage to that of survival so he may not be suggesting we are experiencing a type of disaster that gives rise to instinctive terror.

 

Guides For Reopening Planning

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Last week I had a post on Arts Hacker featuring the Event Safety Alliance’s (ESA)  Reopening Guide for live event venues. You may have already seen the guide being passed around by a lot of people. Given the times, I feel like distribution hasn’t reached the point of over-saturation. When I start seeing it more frequently than ads for the presidential campaign, I’ll know it is time to stop.

In my Arts Hacker post, I focused on the idea of legal duty of care. I had been on a webinar with Steven Adleman, a lawyer who serves as Vice President of ESA, and he addressed the concerns many people had regarding their liability if people were exposed to Covid-19 while at their event.

In addressing that, he said firstly, that if someone is social enough to attend a live event, they probably interacted with others so much that it would be difficult to prove your event was the source of their illness.

None of which excuses you from sanitizing the hell out of everything in sight and implementing diligent operating practices.

Which bring us to the ESA Reopening Guide’s statement about a duty of care. I suspect Adleman wrote it because much the same content appeared in the webinar he conducted. I quoted it in my ArtsHacker post, but feel it is significant enough to repeat here:

“As a matter of common law, everyone has a duty to behave reasonably under their own circumstances.  Consequently, there is no such thing as ‘best’ practices.  There are only practices that are reasonable for this venue, this event, this crowd, this time and place, during this pandemic.  Because few operational bright lines would make sense, The Event Safety Alliance Reopening Guide is designed to help event professionals think through their own circumstances.  In the order than one plans an event, the Reopening Guide looks closely at the health and safety risks involved in reopening public spaces, then proposes risk mitigation measures that are likely to be reasonable under the circumstances of the smaller events and venues that will reopen first.”

Even though it just appeared last week, I wrote and submitted my Arts Hacker post around May 15. In the interim, the Performing Arts Center Consortium (PACC) released their own reopening guide. It is a little nicer than the ESA guide, especially in regard to the color coded charts outlining what should be done in different phases of reopening.

I am not going to even pretend to hide my annoyance at the existence of these two guidebooks released around the same time.

It would really have been great if the ESA and PACC guides had been combined. Lest you think they were separate efforts developed independently of each other, the PACC board of advisors is listed as contributors to the ESA guide, together, in the exact same order as they appear in the PACC guide. There is no excuse that they were unaware of the separate efforts.

In the past, I would just shrug at similar duplicative efforts by competing groups. But during these times when half the day is spent trying to figure out how our organizations and/or individual practices might manifest in the next normals and the other half of the day is spent trying to understand how to keep employees/co-workers/family/friends safe in the face of uncertainty about the threat the virus poses, the need to be aware of and expend effort to track down two sources of advice contributes to the problem, not the solution.

 

 

Meeting Your Legal Duty Of Care In Post-Covid Reopening

At Least You Can Put Your Feet Up On The Seat In Front Of You

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There has been a lot of conversation among my peers about how to revamp our venue seating charts to comply with social distancing. Some people were seating in every other row with 3-4 seats between every single person, the latter part which seemed crazy to me.

At my venue, we worked up a plan that skipped every other row and had four seats open and four seats blocked so that families could be seated together. We found a way to set our ticketing system so that if you bought two of four open seats, it would immediately block the adjacent open seats so strangers couldn’t buy the seats next to you.

I figured it would be a month or two before any state got to the point of allowing live performance events to occur.

To my surprise, someone already put this general model into action. I was reading a piece in San Francisco Classical Voice because it extensively quotes Adaptistration author Drew McManus when I came across this bit of information:

In fact, the first test of a live-concert in the U.S. was to have taken place May 18, with a socially-distanced performance by country singer Travis McCready at TempleLive in Fort Smith, Arkansas. However, on May 12 the state’s Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, announced the state’s health department would be issuing a cease-and-desist order for the concert due to the extension of the state’s coronavirus lockdown measures.

Had the concert proceeded, it would have taken place in a hall with a capacity of 1,100 reduced to 229. The audience would have had their temperatures taken when they arrived, been directed to their seats along one-way walkways, with a limit of 10 people in the bathroom at any one time. Seating would be in “pods,” defined as “small gatherings restricted to friends and relatives comfortable with sitting together.” Each group, between two and 12 in number, would be seated together while the rest of the audience sat six feet from one another other. In addition, the concert’s Ticketmaster page said TempleLive planned to sanitize the venue using fog sprayers and would require masks to be worn by the audience and staff. The three-member band would maintain social distancing onstage but had not planned to wear masks.

Even with these limitations, the concert was sold out. Would it have been a preview of coming attractions?

Other than feeling allowing up to twelve people who didn’t regularly live in close quarters to sit together might be problematic to efforts to control the spread, I sort of wish the concert could have happened so we could start to get some tips on traffic control through the different spaces.

Since I am clearly wrong in my assumption no one would be trying to do it yet, has anyone heard of any other instances where someone has actually executed a post-Covid revised seating plan?

Update: Thanks to reader Rachel Condie who pointed out that the concert in Ft. Smith did happen after the venue challenged the governor’s order as inconsistent with the standards applied to churches. A New York Times article provides the details of their audience flow process.

Data Driven In Word, Not Deed

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Interesting article on Harvard Business Review site titled Is Your Business Masquerading as Data-Driven?

Now you probably feel that when are stumbling blind through an environment everyone says is without precedent, no existing data will aid in productive decision making. I suggest this is actually the perfect time to both scrutinize the data you do have on hand very closely to provide you with insights you may have been overlooking for years and to create processes and procedures to more effectively collect and analyze data moving forward.

I have written about data driven decision making before, as has Drew McManus. In most of these posts we both focused on the influence of Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) which often overrides data informed decisions and focuses on simple numbers absent of context and analysis.

The Harvard Business Review takes a different approach focusing more on employees vs. supervisors/board members. In both scenarios, people are acting in a manner that is not conducive to a company wide culture of data.

These organizations are “masquerading” as data-driven, meaning they have the data, technologies, and even the expertise, but their culture and processes are not aligned with those elements to produce the best outcomes. For example, data might be a part of every decision made, but employees may be making decisions first, then looking for data to back them up.

Factors like these explain the disconnect between investment levels and the disappointing results some companies report seeing. Businesses have more data than ever, but a culture rooted in top-down decision making and traditional tools like weekly reports and preconfigured dashboards means they cannot take full advantage of it.

Among the factors the authors say contribute to this situation are:

“Your Employees are Making Decisions Based on the Tyranny of Averages” – this encompasses modeling the average of all cases as the optimal approach rather than making note of significant differences. For example, if you determined in 2013 there was no need to ensure your website looks good on phones because the average ticket buyer uses a desktop computer, not only would you have created a barrier for younger users, you are creating a situation that will reinforce desktop users as an average user because phone users will have no interest visiting the webpage. Given the demographics of people using phones to navigate the web have broadened since 2013, your online purchases would probably have dropped even as the average remained steady.

Everyone Has Their Own Version of the Truth When employees argue that “my truth is better than your truth,” it’s a sign you’re masquerading as data-driven. Each team may be acting on data, but if they have different information, they are bound to disagree and some may even be misled…Getting stakeholders to agree on which data is important establishes a common source of truth to guide decisions and strategy.

More broadly, data should be available uniformly throughout an organization so all teams have access to the same information. The goal is outcomes, not ownership, and this may require a cultural shift that loosens the grip on data among senior managers.

Decisions Precede Data – this is the aforementioned scenario where you make a decision and then seek the data that confirms you are correct.

Employees Have Misguided Incentives – For many organizations this could be a focus on an ingrained subscription model or on optimizing the experience for high level donors which disincentivizes flex/single/group sales or cultivating young professional social groups or significantly changing the way people experience the organization. The way some museums in Philadelphia are using guest docents or with the same cultural background as the artifacts on display immediately comes to mind.

Marquee Messaging For Morale

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A number of theaters around the country have started posting messages on their marquees to bolster the morale of their community. Here at my venue, we were trying to think of a message to post on our marquee so my marketing director did some research and gathered these images. I identified the ones I know or could figure out. I apologize for not knowing every place. I offer this as a bit of inspiration for other places that might want to do something similar.

I wanted to figure out messaging that was more tailored to our community. We discovered that Little Richard, who had been born here in Macon, had said “I love Macon. I love it better than anywhere I’ve ever been in my life,” so we came up with the following images. We had the images up on Friday, May 1 and then Little Richard died a week later which made the whole thing a little bittersweet for us.

The third screen about picking up the beat was something we developed in consultation with the local convention and visitors bureau.

The Visuals Of Open Arts Organizations As A Sign Of Economic Vibrancy

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I noticed something very interesting on Friday morning as I was checking out different news sites. It appears that on at least a subconscious level a number of news outlets equate theaters with a return to economic vibrancy.

On the NBC News site, there was a picture of the Plaza Theatre in Atlanta.  Except for a single mention that movie theaters could open starting today, the entire piece was about the concerns hair salons, tattoo and massage parlors had about being permitted to re-open last Friday. Everyone interviewed for the story was associated with one of these businesses, no one from a theater involved in the story.

palace theatre atlanta

Within five minutes, I came across another article on Vox.com that was about unemployment benefits in Georgia, but used a picture of The Fox Theatre which had no association with the article at all other than being located in Georgia.

I sent an email out to the members of the state presenting consortium pointing out the use of theatre images as a type of shorthand for a return to vibrancy. I suggested we remember this fact when we moved to an operating environment which felt like the next normal. I don’t know if it is the result of good advocacy work by local, regional and national arts entities, but if there are positive associations between the arts organizations re-opening and socioeconomic vibrancy, it is something to leverage in communications with the community, donors, funders, and government.

In response to my group email, a colleague in Marietta, GA sent out a picture of his theater as it appeared on NBC Nightly News the evening before. Again, he said the broadcast didn’t mention the theater directly.

It can definitely worth paying attention to the images being associated with positive narratives to see if arts organizations are included. Perhaps even something to invite if the opportunity presents itself.

While You Worry About Business Slowing Down, Prepare For A Sudden Ramp Up

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The Conversation site had an article about the impact of Covid-19 on entertainment venues and events last month. (h/t to Artsjournal.com)

Authors Chris Gibbs and Louis-Etienne Dubois urge event managers to be cautious about making decisions to lay off or idle staff.  You may have seen similar warnings in other places about losing people who represent institutional memory and crucial relationship points with audiences and donors. The authors additionally note that dismissing the wrong people may hinder responsiveness and agility when everyone ramps up their activity all at once.

Live events and entertainment are people-based businesses that rely on the creation of emotional experiences and human interactions. Shedding too many employees, or the wrong employees, may impede the ability to resume operations when the crisis ends.

The author of an article in Harvard Business Review about management in uncertain times also suggests taking pragmatic actions and cultivating emotional steadiness in order to support employees and make them feel better than doing nothing.

In addition, a common response to crisis is to maintain customer engagements so that they return when the conditions allow. This is even more critical now knowing that companies are likely to relaunch all at the same time and engage in a costly battle for audiences’ limited attention. Employees should be encouraged to keep their companies’ name out there by connecting with customers in surprising and unexpected ways.

Many organizations are already doing a lot in the way of providing content and other touch points which will help keep them at the forefront of people’s minds.

My staff has been having conversations trying to anticipate whether audiences will be clamoring for something to do as soon as restrictions are lifted or if they will be hesitant to venture out until a few weeks later. That is why I have been following Colleen Dilenschneider’s surveying on that question so closely.

The other thing we are concerned about is whether we will have enough stagehands to work larger events. Supermarkets and Amazon are looking for more employees. If people in our stagehand pool find work in these places and decide to stay once things loosen up, it will be great for them to have more consistent employment, but that will impact us.

And if there is a flurry of activity from summer concert series in the region trying to return to activity, we will be competing for staff against organizations with potentially deeper pockets than we possess. So even as we worry about how the epidemic is impacting current operations, we have to be thinking about all the implications a return to activity might hold.

You Know You Have Developed Good Relationships When A Coal Miner Supports A Solar Power Project

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About two years ago I briefly mentioned a presentation made by Ben Fink at a conference about a community solar project Appalshop was working on in the heart of Kentucky coal country. Fink recently had a piece on the Brookings Institution website that went into detail about the where the effort stands today.

I wanted to point to it as an example of a cultural organization working in productive partnership with a community whose politics might strongly differ from their own .

The solar project wasn’t something Appalshop decided to do whole-cloth because they thought it was the right thing for the community. It was built on the relationships and trust developed over the course of years while working in partnership on other projects that aligned with the interests and needs of the community.

Results of this community wealth-building work have included expanding an award-winning farmers’ market into a community kitchen, reviving Kentucky’s oldest community square dance, and starting a brick oven bakery where neighbors recovering from addiction and incarceration could find work.

Despite being in the middle of coal fields, one of the biggest challenges facing companies and organizations was rising energy costs that threatened the existence of everything from the local markets to the volunteer firehouse.  While solar provided a solution to this ironic situation, being located in the middle of coal fields also made it a hot button issue.

Bringing solar to coal country was risky. Coal had been king for generations, and there was plenty of propaganda accusing solar supporters of siding with “elite, anti-coal activists.” It would have been easy to assume “the community” would oppose the project—except for the fact that the community was the one running it….

[…]

But the relationships built through the CCED process remained strong; the fire chief, a former strip mine boss and lifelong right-winger, continued to champion the project.

This work is not about changing residents’ political views. It’s about neighbors coming together across differences to create a new story about the place we all live in and love. To some, it’s a story about saving the planet. To others, it’s about saving money or fighting an energy company. But to everyone, it’s about supporting our communities and the centers that keep them strong.

The reference to the fire chief remaining a supporter was a testament to the strengths of the relationships they built. The fire house was a partner in the solar project but backed out when a gas company guaranteed the firehouse would never lose its gas supply. The fact the fire chief remained a supporter illustrates that his involvement wasn’t just motivated by desperate need.

Fink suggests that the relationships they formed helped overcome the perception that life in their community was a zero-sum prospect where what was better for someone else meant you lose.

Being Generous With Your Creativity

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Since I have been on the topic of arts and cultural organizations broadly providing content to anyone who happens by virtually, I figured there is space to point to another voice in the conversation.

Seth Godin made a post recently titled Generous isn’t always the same as free.  I raised the idea yesterday that maybe providing all this content isn’t in the best interests of creative entities in the long term.

Godin’s idea of generous not being the same as free may hold a key to resolving questions about this. He uses examples of a doctor taking the time to understand your needs, a waitress anticipating your needs and a boss who provides the challenging work you need.

In this last case, the generosity might actually result in you working longer and harder than before in order for you to grow. It may be a few years before you recognize that bit of generosity was beneficial and required more of your boss than they need have invested in you.

I don’t bring this up to transition to an argument about suffering contributing to the eventual growth or appreciation of creative organizations or those that participate in their activities. Lord knows there has been plenty of “suffering for your art” conversations throughout history.

Rather, I wanted emphasize Godin’s point that the common element in each of his examples is the contributions to stronger relationships.

Gifts create connection and possibility, but not all gifts have monetary value. In fact, some of the most important gifts involve time, effort and care instead.

[…]

In this moment when we’re so disconnected and afraid, the answer might not be a freebie. That might simply push us further apart. The answer might be showing up to do the difficult work of connection, of caring and of extending ourselves where it’s not expected.

When you are pretty anxious about the future of your organization, you may not feel you have the luxury of the deliberative, multi-week process Nina Simon laid out in her blog post I excerpted yesterday. You should have the time, though, to consider whether choices made and effort expended are generous gestures that will contribute to a relationship, albeit over a long term, or a simple freebie.

When The Docent Is Just As Storied As The Artifact

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Back in November 2018, I wrote about how the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology was hiring refugees from Middle Eastern countries to act as docents for galleries of that region. Last week, NPR ran a story on the program which has expanded to include docents from Africa and Mexico & Central American to guide people through those collections .

The program has proven popular with visitors and peer institutions,

Attendance at the Penn Museum has shot up since the Global Guides’ first tours in 2018. A third of its visitors today attend specifically to take a tour with a Global Guide, according to the institution’s internal research, and the program has attracted attention throughout the museum world. Nearly a dozen other museums have asked about developing similar programs, and there’s already one in place at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford in England.

Something that struck me as valuable to any arts & cultural organization, whether it is a museum or not, was the training these docent received:

The guides received traditional training in archaeology and ancient history. Plus, the museum hired professional storytellers to help the Global Guides lace in personal tales about their lives.

In the quest to make what we do feel more relevant to people in our communities, storytelling is an increasingly valuable skill. I have come to recognize in recent years that while we all have stories which have a powerful resonance for ourselves and others, not everyone is particularly skilled in telling stories. Making storytellers part of staff, volunteer and particularly board training can have some productive results.

Related to that, reading about the museum hiring professional storytellers reminded me of a post I did in 2011 about how the North Carolina Arts Council used folklorists to survey the residents of a county in which they wanted to set up an arts council.

This apparently yielded better results than having a surveying firm canvas the county because the folklorists were able to identify and access niche communities that might normally be missed–especially among those who don’t consider themselves to be artists. So on the flip side, people who are adept at collecting stories may be valuable to surveying efforts.

Folklorists, as it happens, are some of the best trained interviewers out there. They also have a particular advantage when it comes to arts research: folklorists are trained to seek out and recognize creativity in all forms, especially that which comes from people who don’t consider themselves “artists.”

 

 

P.S. Once again, I have missed my blog’s birthday. It was 16 years old yesterday. At least this time I remembered before Drew McManus wished it a Happy Birthday first. Not that this assuaged the blog’s resentment at having its birthday forgotten once again. You know how it is with teenagers

You Can Tap Into The Arts, But No One Will Think It Does Any Good

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In the wake of Kobe Bryant’s death, Dance Magazine related a short anecdote about Bryant taking tap dance lessons to help prevent additional injury to his ankles.

That summer, he researched ways to make his ankles stronger, and landed on tap dancing. “I worked on it all of that summer and benefited for the rest of my career,” he wrote.

Though Bryant continued to suffer from ankle injuries, tap helped him learn to keep his ankles loose and active, which helped prevent injuries elsewhere.

[…]

…Though he stopped dancing after that summer, he says that “for a year there I could tell my feet to do this and they would actually do that.”

Over the last couple weeks I have been thinking about why my initial reaction to this story was that it provides a good example of the value of the arts when I often warn about citing the prescriptive benefits of the arts. Let’s face it, it doesn’t get much more prescriptive than the idea that dance helped Bryant mitigate additional injury.

Ultimately, I realized that as a superb athlete, this was an example of how dance was supplementing his existing capabilities. Often when we hear about arts benefiting test scores, economy, social interactions, etc., there is an implication that the arts are improving things to an acceptable level. That there is some flaw to fix– a kid’s test scores need to be better; the foot traffic in stores & restaurants is tepid; people are having overly aggressive interactions.

With Kobe Bryant though, he is at the top of his field as an athlete and the tap lessons are something he used to provide a benefit his already demanding training regimen didn’t afford. While suffering a problematic injury is just as negative as poor test scores, low economic activity or negative social interactions, I can’t imagine anyone considered Kobe deficient and needed the arts to fix him. Tap was an available option he found suitable to his needs.

The difference between a supplemental activity and a prescriptive one is a bit subtle. In truth, at its base, the supplement is just as prescriptive. The context in which it is presented makes a significant difference. In Kobe’s case, there are no promises of outcome measures that have to be backed by qualitative data. The celebrity association aside, the value of tap dancing and the arts in general aren’t evaluated in terms of his scoring record.

Sure, saying ‘it worked for me” lacks the empirical evidence that people may want to justify funding. (It shouldn’t be used anyway.) Regardless of whether you have empirical data or not, if Shaq and Kobe both took tap together, the benefits each realize will vary based on dozens of variables in their physical, mental and emotional attributes.

For example, Kobe was open to exploring the way people in other disciplines achieve success and employed an approach Shaq probably wouldn’t have. He credits a conversation with composer John Williams for shifting his perception on leadership:

This conversation was held after the Lakers lost to the Boston Celtics in the 2008 NBA Finals. Bryant said the talk helped him become a better leader and that he took some of Williams’ ideas into training camp for the next season. “I felt like there were a lot of similarities between what [Williams] does and what I have to do on the basketball court,” Bryant said. “And some of the things he said to me were fascinating.”

On the other hand, it is assumed that great achievement in one area occurs in a vacuum with no contributions from any other pursuits. You can tell people Einstein as well as myriad other highly accomplished scientists played musical instruments and no one credits any benefit to the music–even if Einstein credits his accomplishments to playing violin.  So even though Kobe said he attributes tap dance for improving his agility and reducing injuries, few people will likely perceive tap as having anything to contribute to basketball.

Because really, no one would consider basketball and tap have any relationship with each other.

 

The Socio-Economic-Ethnically Diverse Audience You Seek Is At The Library

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There was an article on the Arts Professional site urging care in the Arts Council of England’s initiative to increase investment in libraries over the next decade. The author of the piece, Hassan Vawda, expresses concerns that attempts to revitalize libraries using arts may unintentionally damage all the beneficial elements of the library environment.

Statistics from DCMS’s Taking Part survey shows libraries are the only space used proportionally more by Black, Asian and ethnic minority (BAME) audiences than those who identify as White. In contrast, arts organisations and museums are used disproportionately by White audiences – despite more than a decade of language, policy and schemes aiming to support diversity.

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People often have far more input into the way libraries are used as public spaces than they do with arts and cultural spaces – for all their outreach. At its best, the library is an intergenerational resource that adapts and moulds around the communities it finds itself in.

[…]

Outside the professional arts sector, libraries have engendered a trust that has eluded many traditional arts venues – and this must not be lost. The arts can definitely support the development of libraries, and amplify the case for reinvestment. But libraries must not succumb to the fate of the many art and culture-led spaces that have inadvertently become dominated by the middle classes.

As far as I know, there isn’t a similar effort in the U.S. to make libraries into trendy arts hubs. In fact, as Drew McManus pointed out today, the The Institute of Museum and Library Services is up for dissolution right along with the NEA, NEH and PBS.

However,  pretty much all the observations Vawda makes about libraries in England are true for libraries in the U.S. Even if Black, Asian and ethnic minorities don’t use libraries in greater proportion than those who identify as White in the US, I feel pretty secure in saying libraries are visited by a much more ethnically and socio-economically diverse group than most arts entities.

Reading this article it struck me that there is  potential to “get it right,” as it were. As Vawda mentions, arts organizations have a long history of outreach efforts that have had middling results.

The opportunity exists then in  putting a lot of effort into studying very closely the environment libraries provide, both in general and as specifically appropriate to their neighborhoods/communities and implementing radical changes to transform existing arts organizations.

Or, perhaps more pragmatically, arts organizations can bring their resources to libraries and be guided by them about how those resources are deployed.

I say this is the more pragmatic option because in all likelihood, in choosing it, an arts organization is acknowledging the great difficulty established arts organization would have implementing the sort of internal radical change required to cultivate the level of trust engendered by libraries. Even this would be a difficult decision for many since there is no guarantee that a close partnership with the library will ever increase the level of direct participation with the arts organization.

If the organization has the internal will to implement former option of providing an experience with the same sense of openness and user agency provided by a library, partnering with the library would already be part of the plan or the organization would already be hitting satisfying benchmarks and see no pressing need to partner.

Though with as imaginative as people are and as different the dynamics of every community, it is distinctly within the realm of possibility that some few arts organization wouldn’t have to radically change their business model and philosophy.

Pretty much either option requires a recognition that if the people you are dedicated to serving won’t come to you, you need to move toward them and meet them where they are.

Reading Rebranding As “You Aren’t Wanted”

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Last month you may have read a number of news stories about the Methodist church in Minnesota with declining attendance that decided to kick out all their old members so they could attract younger members. Except that wasn’t exactly what the church was doing. They just wanted to close the one church for about 18 months in order to do some renovations and rebrand it and were asking members to attend a sister church in the meantime.

The goal definitely was to attract a younger congregation and the new pastor would be about 30 years younger than the current pastor. It sounds like the renovations had the goal of creating spaces in which younger people felt comfortable worshiping.

Shifting all this to the context of arts organizations, there is an eternal conversation about attracting new, younger audiences. However, research shows, arts organizations are actually pretty good at attracting new audiences, but not too good at retaining them so they return with some consistency.

This story about closing and rebranding made me wonder if there is any value in doing so if it makes your organization look more welcoming to a broader range of the community. We know that one of the biggest barriers to participation for people who aren’t already doing so is not seeing themselves and their stories being depicted.

If you were going to pursue closing and rebranding in a similar manner, it would have to encompass more than just freshening up the physical plant with a renovation.  The type of programs the organization offered would need to be revised. Likely the way in which they were delivered might need to be changed. Staff would either need to be retrained and/or new staff hired to deliver on the promises the organization was making.

Is there a good chance that all of this might scare your existing audience away in the same way it is turning off the current congregation of the church? Yep, good chance of that.

In the past I cited a couple of Nina Simon’s talks about providing relevance to the people whom you hope to serve. While she talks about creating metaphorical new doors for people to enter, if you are doing a renovation, you might create physical ones. She notes that it may be difficult for long time supporters to understand that not everything that is being done now is for them, even if nothing has been subtracted to provide experiences for others.

As I wrote:

A new initiative may displace one of regular events. Instead of 10 things designed for you, you only get nine. For a lot of people even 1/10 of a change can result in them feeling the organization is no longer relevant to them. This may especially be true in the case of subscription holders. That one bad grape in ten ruins the value of the whole package.

In this situation it can be a little tricky to say, that’s okay you don’t need to come to that show, we have other discount configurations that may suit your needs. Not only might your delivery of that message be flawed and sound offensive, but even with perfect delivery, the patron may only hear “that’s okay you don’t need to come.”

Even if the new initiatives are additions and don’t displace any of the current offerings, patrons, donors, board members can still feel the organization is no longer the one they value, despite having lost nothing.

Reading the different stories about the church in Minnesota, I got the sense that the current congregants were hearing “that’s okay, you don’t need to come,” in the planned renewal of their church. While that may turn you off of considering making changes for fear of losing what you already have, consider that what you are already doing may be telling a lot more people who have never walked in your door or come once or twice, “that’s okay, you don’t need to come.”

Escapism Over Escape

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Historically, theater fires have been among some of the worst in terms of loss of life and property damage. Improvements in firefighting equipment and building design and construction have fortunately made most of those tragic tales infrequent, relative to the situation in the late 19th and early 20th century. An article on New York City theatre fires in Lapham’s Quarterly during this time period illustrates what significantly increased the hazard and opportunity for loss of life were gross misrepresentations of the safety of theaters coupled with a lack of effort to improve the conditions.

To combat the growing reputation of theaters as death traps, New York City impresarios began to advertise their venues by stressing just how safe they were—without changing the actual structures. In 1901 the top of the Broadway Theater’s playbills, above the production information, read “Safest theater in the world—34 exits.” That same year, the Knickerbocker’s playbills stated that it was “Absolutely Fireproof.” By 1904 the Majestic was billing itself as “New York’s finest—the world’s safest theater—positively fireproof—42 exits,” and by 1906 the Colonial was claiming it was “absolutely fireproof—this theater has the lowest insurance rate issued to any theater in the world.”

…According to Gerhard’s report, as of 1899 New York’s Fifth Avenue Theater could hold 1,400 people but be emptied in 2.5 minutes, while the Abbey Theater could hold 1,450 people and be emptied in 1.5 minutes. The enormous Madison Square Garden, which could hold 17,000 people, apparently required only 4.5 minutes for complete evacuation.

These hypothetically efficient evacuations were impossible to execute, however. Theaters and movie theaters often were illegally packed to standing-room-only capacity, with additional bodies blocking potential routes of egress. Furthermore, Gerhard found that the doors were locked in many of the buildings, and many of the exits first wound through basements or alleyways. Some exits even led to wooden staircases. Families and young children were frequently given permission to be seated in the highest galleries, which made their top-priority exits more difficult.

What is interesting is reading about how much the theater owners and managers resisted safety procedures fearing the optics of making people aware of fire exits would make people consider other diversions. A good number of the bad choices were preserved in the name of maintaining the escapist environment of the theater.

Among the reforms that had been suggested were having firemen walk out on stage at the start of the evening holding placards directing people’s attention to the nearest exits. It was pretty much exactly what flight attendants do on a plane today. When it was brought up in a meeting of theater managers, there was a great deal of push back out of fear of panicking audience members or souring the experience by suggesting the theater was unsafe. According to the article, actors would see a fire but would continue performing in order to maintain the facade they had constructed. In at least one case, opening a door caused a cross draft sending the fire the actors were observing flaring into the seating area.

It is something to think about as live performances try to compete with digital forms of entertainment. What lengths are people willing to go in order to provide the immersive experience they believe is required. What corners will be cut? I have already seen hints of this where occasionally contracts request/require no pre-show announcements or stipulate they occur so early only half the audience sees them. I don’t imagine any of this would expose current audiences to the dangers looming silently over 19th & early 20th century audiences, but the lessons of those times bear consideration.

Museum, The Video Game

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Via a social post ArtsMidwest made, there is a museum management game coming out next year called Mondo Museum. Thinking back to all the posts Nina Simon had made on Museum 2.0 over the years, my first thoughts were that there was no way a game could really encompass all the ways in which a museum needs to work to become relevant to their community.

Then my misgivings started to move toward 10 on the dial when I read the following:

Success is quantified in two ways: money, which comes from ticket sales and gift shop revenue; and prestige, which is measured by visitor numbers and their experiences. These metrics feed each other: a prestigious museum will have high foot traffic, while a big-budget will give you more opportunities to please audiences.

Granted, the game designer wants Mondo Museum to have the widest appeal possible so these are terms which general players could best understand, but revenue and visitors are hardly the best measures of a museum’s real value.

My concerns began to dial back when I read there would be some nuance required in the curation of displays and that the designers were cognizant of some important conversations associated with museum collections.

Curating shows that draw meaningful connections between disparate collections—like a model of the solar system next to ancient Egyptian astronomical tools, the designer suggests—will earn you points.

[…]

Yet, by and large, the game is not about replicating the modern museum. Instead, it posits an alternative form of institution, one free from colonial histories, strict genre restraints, and underpaid labor.

In the world of Mondo, art is never purchased, and artifacts are never obtained through imperialism or theft; all historical objects live in institutions near to where they were created

In an interview in another article, the game creator commented:

…if anyone is brought in will likely be to review specific collections for cultural sensitivity issues we might have been oblivious to. For example, someone recently brought up the debates museums have around the subject of human remains when making exhibits about ancient burial practices and so on, which I hadn’t considered before. That kind of insight is really helpful (in our case, this helped me decide to only have mummified animals because a) they’re actually pretty cute while human mummies are pretty gross and b) a human mummy is kind of unnecessary since the real interesting artefact/art is the coffin and sarcophagus).

No video game is going to perfectly replicate all the considerations of running a museum. (I mean what museum can operate entirely on earned revenues, with a well-paid unionized staff,  avoiding grant writing, fund raising galas and thorny ethical questions about accepting large donations?)

As the creator discovered, there aren’t actually any museum management games out there. The fact that the game encourages people to draw thematic connections between seemingly disparate topics in curating displays and requires you to source objects through exchanges with legitimate sources means it introduces people to some good processes and practices.

One Of The Most Significant Music Venues In Washington DC Is Outside A Cellphone Store

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Today CityLab had a post titled “How Go-Go Music Became Kryptonite for Gentrification in D.C.” This was actually a follow up to an article that had come out in the Spring that I bookmarked with a notation “A T-Mobile store is the cultural axis for Go-Go music?”

I had bookmarked the story with the intention of returning to it in order to draw attention to the way centers of cultural signficance often emerge organically rather than by plan. I don’t think anyone uses a cellphone store as a model when drawing up plans for a cultural facility.

Briefly, the story here is that a guy who owned a nightclub which featured go-go bands opened a cellphone store when the venue closed and started playing his go-go music collection over the speakers outside his store. The neighborhood has gradually gentrified since the mid-1990s and residents of the new condo across the street complained about the music being too loud.

You may not know that residents of Washington DC claim go-go as their own, feeling the music style is synonymous with the city. Hearings were held on October 30 in support of a bill to make it the official music of the city.

They rallied around the store in a big way:

Thousands of people flooded Shaw’s streets and thousands more signed a petition (80,329 to be exact) demanding that Campbell be allowed to keep playing go-go at his corner, all done under the banner #Don’tMuteDC, which was to say “don’t mute—or erase—black people in D.C.” … which was to say, “don’t let gentrification have the final say.” And it didn’t. Several forces converged—including the CEO of T-Mobile, which owns the Metro PCS cell phones and service Campbell sold at his store—to declare that “the music will go on,” which led to the condo tenant dropping the complaint and acquiescing to the will of the streets.

Often speakers/writers about non-profit organizations challenge people to think about their place in the community and ask the question, who would miss you if you were gone, as a way to gauge the degree of relevance your organization has in the community.

Something of a corollary to this question is whether there is an entity in the community so that is so closely tied into the identity of the community that people would become angry if it disappeared. It may not be your organization, but really asking the question and paying attention might be revelatory. On the surface, it may seem obvious. In some communities, everything may seem aligned toward high school or college football. But there may also be some powerful, but overlooked element your organization could do a better job embracing and/or magnifying. Or at the very least recognizing and acknowledging the importance of.

It’s Time To Paint The Town Red

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Hey all! If you live in a small or medium sized town and have always thought the asphalt and concrete slabs of your streets wouldn’t be so bad if they just had a coat of paint, Bloomberg Philanthropies is making it possible to take your art to the streets.

Their Asphalt Art initiative is open to applications from communities with populations of 30,000-500,000 people. Deadline is December 12, 2019

The initiative will fund “visual interventions on roadways (intersections and crosswalks), pedestrian spaces (plazas and sidewalks), and vertical infrastructure (utility boxes, traffic barriers and underpasses).”

There is a CityLab piece on the project with gorgeous examples of what other cities around the world have done. Bloomberg Philanthropies also offers a free guide and promises to include project planning information like model contracts, permits and insurance. If you don’t intend to apply for a grant, but are contemplating a project along these lines, these resources could be valuable.

A type of project along these lines that has been very popular lately is painting crosswalks with the goal of making pedestrians safer in the theory drivers will tend to slow down when driving across/near an image that doesn’t conform to familiar road markings. If that is an appealing notion, you should be aware that the Federal Highway Administration frowns on crosswalk art and actively requests cities remove them.

The Kentucky removal particularly peeved Lydon, who said that piece of street art saved lives.

“That was at an intersection with almost 10 crashes a year,” he said. “After it went in, it went down to zero. But the state DOT there too them to get rid of it because of the letter from [the federal authorities].”

And locals living near new street art in Rochester, New York told local radio station WXXI that the rainbow designs there calmed traffic on streets that were less than pedestrian friendly.

[…]

But the Highway Administration doesn’t see it that way, ruling in its report that “crosswalk art is actually contrary to the goal of increased safety and most likely could be a contributing factor to a false sense of security for both motorists and pedestrians.”

There are still a lot of other type of projects one could undertake. There are a number of pictures of pedestrian plazas and parking lots in the articles, but I think vertical structures like utility boxes, traffic barriers and underpasses are particularly ripe for development. I passed this information on to some people I know who were eyeing a train underpass I frequently walk under. I think more people would feel safer walking through there if there was more light and color.

A Hack At The Opera

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No, no, no, this isn’t a story about someone with little talent and unoriginal ideas, quite the contrary.

Recently my Arts Hacker colleague, Ceci Dadisman, had linked to an article about an Opera Hack-a-thon that happened at the end of July.

If you are wondering how a “diverse group of opera industry composers, librettists, producers, directors and designers as well as experts in the fields of virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning, software design, creative coding and 3D printing” can solve problems facing opera, among the ideas they came up with where: (my emphasis)

There was also a discussion of using virtual reality to map the interiors of the theaters that opera companies use as well as the use of 3D printing technology to create low-cost costume, prop and scenic elements.

[…]

One idea involves creating an online database that producers and scenery designers could use to virtually create a three-dimensional scenic design inside a digitally mapped theater to determine how that scenery would fit in the space and what construction materials would work best for the venue, Bennett said.

Last season, San Diego Opera was forced to postpone a production of “Hansel and Gretel” because the company discovered after announcing the production that its rented scenery was too large to fit on the stage of the Balboa Theatre. Technology like this virtual database might eliminate problems like this in the future.

The article said the winning ideas from the Hack-a-thon wouldn’t be announced until August. I was curious to learn what emerged so I sought that article out as well. What caught my eye was that it sounded as if some solutions emerged outside the structured conversation of the event.

[Angel Mannion, project manager for Opera Hack, said]  “I think that we in the arts often live in our own heads, where we forget to ask for help, and that usually leads to re-creating the wheel in both artistic and administrative ways. We found that there were several problems that came up in side chatter where technology could provide an easy solution.”

One of the ideas coming out of the July event will receive funding to develop virtual reality equipment focused on delivering the sonic experience of an operatic performance:

The listener would be able to walk up to a virtual performer in the visual environment to listen more closely to their voice. Vibro-tactile haptic sensors strapped to the viewer’s body would also enable the viewer to “feel” the music.

Another project melded the digital mapping of a space for scenic design I mentioned earlier with project team collaboration software:

The database would incorporate the use of 360-degree “protogrammetry” to map the stages of opera theaters around the country, so that opera producers could work with scenic, lighting and other designers to see how a set might fit on their stage and appear from the vantage point of audience members. Eventually, the database would offer virtual reality “meetings” where multiple users could “beam into” the same virtual space together for planning meetings.

This proposal will be tested first by Houston Grand Opera, which is one of the lead architects of OPERAMAP, but will be made available to opera companies and designers nationwide.

The third project to receive funding, Open Show Bible, aims to cut production costs by making it easier to coordinate all the technical and performance cues for a show.

Using existing score-following software, the process would be tied into a live-animated open-show display that would be immediately accessible to multiple collaborators.

Creators say the new system would dramatically cut production costs by reducing the time it takes to “dry-tech” a rehearsal and it would improve communication between departments. In the long-term, the show bibles could be shared among multiple opera companies to present lower-priced, turnkey production with pre-programmed digital cues.

These latter two ideas especially would probably be welcome in other performing arts disciplines since dance and theater face many of the same design and production coordination challenges as opera.

Maps Upon Maps, Soon Useful Data Appears

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As part of developing the cultural masterplan for our community, people are being encouraged to contribute information to a cultural resource map. The goal is to not only map the active assets in the community, but the potential ones as well.

I have written about this aspect of crowdmapping before. You don’t only notate theatres, art galleries, murals, dance schools, historical markers, etc but shuttered movie houses, former community centers and places where things potentially might occur.

A beautiful fountain in the center of town? Good place for an impromptu concert. Empty lot overgrown with weeds? Our next community garden or maybe a pop-up sculpture park. Blank walls of an abandoned building? We see murals in our future.

In my post two years ago, I used an example which talked about using paper and colored stickers, but as you might imagine there are apps available for this sort of thing as well.

The executive director of the local arts alliance is taking classes in GIS mapping. The goal is to integrate the cultural asset maps with an overlay of every bit of data the county collects and maps. Not only will we (and local government officials) be able to see which neighborhoods lack cultural assets, we will be able to see where public transportation does and doesn’t run thereby limiting access to assets around the county. Likewise, they can cross reference things like frequency of events with trashcan placement in order to better deploy waste disposal.

There is already an app for reporting problems like potholes, broken streetlights, erosion to the county so there are likely to be all sorts of interesting correlations that emerge over time as more data gets added.

There is potential for all sorts of different analysis, including planning and zoning of hotels, housing, supermarkets, parking meters and the like. I think most people are excited by the idea that they will be able to cross reference data they haven’t even anticipated needing yet.

Here is the form we in Macon, GA are using to collect data. The mapping is still in its earliest stages so very few assets have been added yet. (I plead guilty to not doing my part.) There is a plan to cross reference this map with organizations , buildings, historical markers, etc already listed in different databases in order to populate the map with the lower hanging fruit.

Even if you don’t have access to map overlays, the simple paper and sticker process can be an important step toward a constructive conversation. As I noted in my post from a couple years ago, the process

… can go a long way toward solving the problem of involving people who are most impacted by decisions but may not show up to formal meetings. People who don’t feel like they are represented or have their voices heard can gain a measure of confidence that their contributions matter when they are made responsible for imagining/suggesting what a neighborhood might become.

This can especially be true for online submission tools. If you enter the hidden gem attraction at the end of your cul-de-sac and see it appear on the map a couple days later, you can gain the sense that you can contribute in a way that makes a visible difference. There is also an ability to bring recognition to often overlooked information preserved in a neighborhood, but not widely known in the community.  The grave marker of a civil rights advocate at the edge of what is now a cornfield, for example.

Though obviously, this only works if the serving as gatekeepers of the maps are prompt in approving the additions and responsive to the needs of the participants. I’m sure I am not the only one that had to jump through hoops to get Google Maps to correctly reflect closed streets and a change to one way traffic flow.

Waiting For A Nice Chat

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I came across an article about English towns that are installing  “chat benches” with signs saying, “The ‘Happy to Chat’ Bench: Sit Here If You Don’t Mind Someone Stopping To Say Hello.”

If this sounds vaguely familiar, you may recall that four years ago, I posted about a bus company in Brazil that reserved seats on buses and provided conversation prompts for people who wanted to meet someone new.

I actually used that as an inspiration for a program at my last venue to match up individuals wanting to see show who didn’t have anyone with whom to attend. ArtsMidwest picked up on it and apparently are still talking about as part of their Creating Connections program because people keep telling me they heard about the idea at one of their seminars.

Birch Coffee in NYC had a policy of not turning on the Wifi until 5 pm and providing conversation prompts at their tables. (A look at their website and social media presence couldn’t confirm if they still hold to this).  Their goal was to create a greater sense of community than was possible with people constantly looking at their screens.

The intent of the bench project in England is combat loneliness among senior citizens, though they encourage everyone to have a seat.

Burnham-On-Sea police community support officer Tracey Grobbeler told Burnham-On-Sea.com, “Simply stopping to say ‘hello’ to someone at the Chat Bench could make a huge difference to the vulnerable people in our communities and help to make life a little better for them.”

The initiative was launched to coincide with United Nations World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. According to a recent poll, more than a third of seniors reported feeling a lack of companionship at least some of the time, while 27 percent said they feel isolated some of the time or more often. While the project was conceived with the elderly population in mind, the Burnham-On-Sea police department encourages residents of all ages to use the chat benches.

Something I wonder about all these projects is whether the initial intention is fully realized. Clearly you can’t just set up a bench somewhere and expect conversations to happen organically. A framework was set up for each of these efforts. At the same time, as the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. People may not behave in a way that conforms to your ideals.

Just as with my search of Birch Coffee’s web and social media presence sites (as well as some media reports) didn’t have any mention of the no-Wifi policy, I haven’t really been able to discover whether the Brazilian bus company had success getting people to strike up conversations or if the seats were monopolized by the same people who refuse to cede their seats to the elderly on public transport worldwide.

I would be interested to know if anyone has come across projects with similar intentions and had a sense of their success. My hope is that if things diverged from the original intent, the results were even better than the creators envisioned. It would be great to know how any sort of successful outcome emerged or if important insight was derived from disappointing results.

In an attempt to become regarded as more of a community asset, I am sure a lot of arts organizations would be pleased to learn about moderate successes. Everything doesn’t have to be about racking up huge numbers for grant reports.

If there was a case where an arts organization said, “well we invested a little bit of time and money for six months up front and now there is a consistent presence of 10-15 people hanging out, chatting all day in our lobby or sidewalk where no one had been before,” there is a low level, but consistent good-will benefit accruing for the organization.

Isn’t Everyone Creating A Museum In Their Basement?

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There was an article in Forbes last month about the glut of empty museums in China. While many museums in the United States have larger collections than they can possibly display, storing the majority in basement vaults, museums in China have the opposite problem in that there is more museum space than objects to display.

Part of the problem, according to Forbes is rooted in the way commercial property development is handled,

According to Johnson, what has fueled China’s museum building boom has been a strategy where a local government will grant a developer a prime parcel of commercial construction land on the contingency that they also build and operate a museum (or an opera house, library, etc). In this way, a city can obtain their iconic public buildings while having someone else pick up the tab.

…After receiving accolades for building a world-class landmark, the developers often find themselves in more unfamiliar territory: actually running a museum.

“That isn’t to say that they can’t hire someone to be the curator to develop content, but at the end they don’t really care,” Johnson proclaimed. “They’re building it because they want to build the tower on the site adjacent to it to make their money.”

It light of this, it was somewhat ironic that on my recent trip to China, I found myself touring an extensive display depicting the Ancient Tea-Horse Road and elements of the Naxi ethnic minority in the basement of a family owned hotel in Lijiang. The owner and her father had created a 120 meter long diorama showing each stage of the journey in the tea-horse trade. (Though they currently only have room to display 80 meters.)

The floor of the basement are reverse frosted plexiglass with pictographs of the Dongba script once used by the Naxi along with the corresponding Chinese hanzi and English translation. The owner described how she, her husband and a friend created each panel.

The owner and her father spent a great deal of time and money both personally and hiring scholars and artists to assist in creating the diorama and floor displays. Clearly a labor of love and a testament to their pride in regional history and Naxi culture. But it is only accessible to guests of the hotel who are personally accompanied by the owner.

My sister and I just happened to choose the hotel from those that were available and then noticed the reviews mentioned that there was an amazing display in the basement.

I didn’t really press the owner to learn why her family continues to invest so much effort in a project so few people will ever see. Judging from the superior service and hospitality ethic she exhibited during our stay, it may just be rooted in the idea that pursuit of excellence brings it own rewards independent of external recognition.

 

A Harvest of Performers

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My summer vacation this year took me back to China. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet with China arts administrators on this trip, though I did try to secure some introductions and arrangements.

One arts related thing that struck me this time was the Impressions: Lijiang performance I attended. The show is directed by Zhang Yimou (Raise The Red Lantern, Hero, 2008 Olympics Opening and Closing Ceremonies) and was the second of seven shows he and his collaborators created for scenic places around China.  The show in Lijiang is performed in full daylight in a 2000 seat open amphitheater on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain near Lijiang.

There are about 500 performers and 100 horses in the show. As you will see from some of the pictures below, some of the performance happens in the aisles and the horses gallop around the entire rim of the amphitheater.

The interesting thing about this production is that all the performers have been cast from the local farmers, representing about 10 different ethnic minorities that live in the region, (including the Muoso, one of the few matrilineal societies in the world). So the cast is telling the story of their people who have lived there for generations. Historically, the people of Lijiang and Yunnan province in which the city is located have participated in the Ancient Horse-Tea Road trading route, thus the significant presence of horses in the show.

As far as I have been able to tell from what I can find in promotional content about the other six “Impressions” productions, it appears this show may be the only one that is performed by “amateurs.” I put the term in quotes because that is how many information sources about the show refer to them.

However, because everyone kept mentioning they were farmers, I asked if the show needed to be scaled back or cancelled during harvest and planting time to allow the performers to return home to help their families.  I was told performing was their full time job now and was assured they were making better money than if they were still living on the farm. As best I can tell the amateur term is likely a translation of the idea the performers haven’t received formal training rather than a reference to lack of skill or salary.

I wondered if the casting of farmers was intentional in order to help stimulate the economy by increasing the income of residents or was a practical matter due to the difficulty of finding 500+ trained performers in southwestern China, (though they likely didn’t need to be trained to handle and ride horses), or a combination of both. Given the way things operate in China, all the shows in the Impressions series were likely instigated by, and receive significant support from, the government. As much as I would love to use this as an example of government support for minority cultures, it wasn’t all that long ago that official policy was to suppress the cultural practices of these same ethnic minorities.

As you may have surmised from my pictures, it was raining the day we saw the show so the spectacular majesty of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in the background is not apparent. Check out the video below which was taken during better weather.

There Are No Small Theaters, Just Theaters Who Think They Are Small

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I wrote last week about how small nuances that alter our perception of a situation can make a big difference.  Back in 2009 I wrote another post along the same lines featuring a TED talk by Rory Sutherland.

At the time I felt the following bit Sutherland imparted was worth consideration for arts organizations. I wrote,

….at the end of his talk where he cites a quote “Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new.” Though in the case of the arts and current attendance trends, the familiar may be an entirely new experience.

He says it isn’t a bad definition of what advertising people’s job is: “To help people appreciate what is unfamiliar. But also to gain a greater appreciation and place a far higher value on those things that are already existing.”

Now that I have gone back and watched the video again, along with two other similar TED Talks he gave, I have a slightly different perspective. If you have been reading my blog recently, you may have seen my post about the importance of the physical environment surrounding an arts experience.

The challenge for a lot of arts organizations is that they may be operating out of older buildings that don’t have the newest technology and amenities. In his talks, Sutherland emphasizes that it is often more important to fix the perception rather than the problem.

He mentions that people were more satisfied with their experience in subways when digital displays of the next train’s arrival time were installed. It didn’t make the trains arrive any faster, but it removed the sense of uncertainty about how long one might have to wait.

In the UK, Sutherland says, the post office had a 98% rate of delivering first class mail by the next day and nearly destroyed themselves trying to improve that rate. The worst part is, when asked people guessed the next day delivery success rate averaged at about 50%-60%. Sutherland says it would have been cheaper and more effective to just tell people that the rate was 98%–especially if framed in reference to Germany.

“…tell people that more first-class mail arrives the next day in the UK than in Germany, because generally, in Britain, if you want to make us happy about something, just tell us we do it better than the Germans.”

In other example, he show the elevator buttons in the Lydmar hotel in Stockholm which allows you to choose your elevator music. He suggests that an expensive renovation of your hotel room won’t distinguish it enough from any other room in a high-end hotel in your eyes, but the novelty of those buttons will make a lasting impression for a fraction of the cost.

Amusing distractions won’t make up for the fact that your restroom facilities are too small to accommodate the your entire audience during intermission. However, if they are sufficient, the most effective response to complaints about the wait is likely to be less expensive than a renovation to enlarge the restrooms.  The primary concern for the audience member isn’t whether they will be able to use the restroom, it is whether they will be able to use the restroom and perhaps get a drink before intermission ends.

Door To Seat As Important As The Quality Of The Event

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All right. A little gripe time here. I have been nursing a sense of dissatisfaction for a couple weeks now but it sort of came to a head when I saw the title of Ceci Dadisman’s recent post, “Unpopular Opinion: It is our job to remove barriers to engagement.” She talks about removing perceptual barriers, but the source of my dissatisfaction is related to physical barriers.

I had submitted a grant this past Spring and recently had an opportunity to listen to the panelists discuss our application over the internet. There were a number of criticisms which I can concede as deficiencies with our application. There were other places where panelists misread what we wrote, but I can understand that given the number of applications they read. (Though I did panic momentarily as I scurried to find the document we submitted.)

What annoyed me was a criticism of our response to a question about a recent program that had an impact on the community. Being new to my position, I had spoke with staff, board members, volunteers and long attending audience members about what events had made an impact. This resulted in some good conversations about the distinction between impactful experiences and popular, well-attended experiences. I wrote our grant response about the performance program that many people had mentioned had an unexpected impact.

Then, because I had the room, I mentioned that something that can’t be discounted was the impact a renovation to the physical spaces of the facility had on the community. I discussed the fact that it is very easy for people to make the decision to stay at home and every element associated with going to a live event from restaurants, to babysitters, to parking must align conveniently for people to make the decision to go out.

I went on to talk about the pre-renovation experience where the line to the women’s restroom in our facility was so long that it extended out the front door and the men’s room often had to be closed to men in order to accommodate women. Still intermission would need to be extended. I spoke about the restroom renovation garnering the most effusive response from people. I explained that as amusing as it might be to think toilets are the most popular part of a renovation, this represented a very real impact on the community perception of the venue and shouldn’t be dismissed especially given most attendance decisions and arrangements are predominantly made by women.

My mention of the impact of the renovations met with some criticism by the panel. What annoyed me most about this was that the panel was comprised of artists or those associated with arts entities drawn from throughout the state.  I could understand if panelists drawn from the general public didn’t understand the importance of the physical environment in arts and cultural experiences.

I intentionally wrote about the importance of environment in order to introduce the idea to funders and policymakers.  What I hadn’t expected was a dismissal by arts and cultural practitioners.

As Ceci mentions in her article, as insiders, arts and cultural practitioners can be blind to some of the perceptual barriers we erect around and experience.  I guess there also needs to be more frequent mention of the influence tangible physical elements play on the experience, just to be aware of these factors even if you can’t exert control over them.

 

Does Gazing Out From The Belly Of A God Provide New Perspective?

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There was an interesting video on Shanghaiist in the last week about a hotel whose architect designed three giant deities for the facade to combat rumors that the building was constructed on a cemetery.

The three deities, Fu (福), Lu (禄), and Shou (寿), represent the three attributes of a good life, “prosperity,” “status,” and “longevity,” respectively. They were added to the design of the 40-meter-tall building by a local architect to compensate for rumors that the structure was being built on top of an old cemetery.

I will let you take a look at the video first. (Let me just say I present this mostly as a diversion and basis of idle musing rather than subject for serious analysis.)

 

One of the first thoughts I had was, if this was in the US, would this be considered some form of artwashing? For example, if someone had used positive imagery on a hotel constructed on a toxic waste site or some other dubious association as a way to assuage fears.

I am not trying to conflate toxic waste with human remains. Personally, I would have no problem staying in this hotel. I have worked in enough theaters that were purported to be haunted or built on sanctified land that this doesn’t bother me. The placement of the hotel and anticipated repercussions appears it has a much stronger social and cultural significance in China than it might in the US.

I just found myself musing about cultural differences. Would something along these lines this be viewed with skepticism in the US while in China it might be viewed as an appropriate gesture given the history of the plot of land.

I also wondered why a hotel might choose to go to the expense of the extra construction. Presumably people coming from out of town wouldn’t be aware of the rumors. Though if it is the sort of place that gains more business from people visiting local residents or conducting business with government or local companies rather than tourism, they might depend more strongly on word of mouth.

I was amused by the comment made by one of the residents that the building unexpectedly became a distinctive feature of the community. I was thinking to myself, how could three 120 foot high deities NOT become a distinctive feature of the community? If nothing else, you could navigate the streets in relation to where it was on the horizon.

Perhaps people did initially see the statues as a cynical use of spectacle to make money but ended up finding that it created a unique sense of place in the neighborhood.

Thinking about all this made me start to wonder how efforts at creative placemaking might appear from the outside through the lens of other cultures. Does it appear like we are trying to manufacture a sense of community where one doesn’t exist organically? (I get the image of some foreign visitor paraphrasing Regina George “stop trying to make community happen, it isn’t not going to happen.”)

I Probably Don’t Really Know What My Audience Values Even Though I Am In The Lobby Before, After, And At Intermission

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I bookmarked a guest post on Museum 2.0 a month ago. Now I feel guilty for not circling back to it sooner. Nina Simon invited Martin Brandt Djupdræt, a manager at Danish museum,  to write about how his organization has all the decision makers interact with visitors as part of their audience research effort.

Their approach is super simple, though a little time consuming. A member of management approaches a random visitor and asks if they can follow the visitor around to observe where they go in the museum and what they interact with. Three weeks later they give the visitor a call and ask:

• why they chose this museum,
• what they noticed especially during the visit,
• whether they interacted with anyone, and
• whether they had talked to anyone about the museum after the visit, and what about

Every decision maker in the organization seems to be required to participate, from management to curators. Djupdræt says the goal is to get managers up and away from their desks interacting with people with whom they wouldn’t normally come in contact.

As you might imagine, what the managers and curators were sure people valued about the museum wasn’t quite accurate. Even those with more direct contact with visitors were surprised by what they learned.

The curators were surprised by how important other parts of the museum besides the historical content were for the visitor. The F&B manager and the head of HR were surprised by how many objects and stories the visitors were absorbed in. This has also given us insights into the work of our colleagues and made us appreciate their work to a larger extent. Now we all have useful and inspiring stories about visitors’ choices and the impact the museum had on them.

Another observation was the importance of food and drink. In our trackings we could see how much time the visitors spent on the museum’s eating places and the great social importance these breaks had. Something we learned about food through the interviews was that the guests consider the food at the museum as part of the museum’s storytelling. This insight has encouraged us to focus on food and food history as a priority topic at the museum, and a colleague is going to work particularly with that subject.

[…]

Visitors have always been a focus for the management, but the research have personalized our audience and they are discussed differently now. As the head of finance described it: “I normally look at whether a task is well done, financially possible and efficient, but now I also consider more seriously how a visitor would feel and react to the changes we plan.”

I especially wanted to include that last section as a reminder that measuring success by efficiency and expense doesn’t necessarily equate to providing a fulfilling experience.

One thing Djupdræt didn’t cover that I was curious about was why they waited three weeks to follow up. I didn’t know if that was a social practice in Denmark where it was rude to immediately survey people about their experience or if it was calculated to see how much of the visitor experience still made an impression three week later.

The whole article is a reminder not to depend entirely on surveys as an evaluation tool. Yes, it is an important practice to have people in the back office interacting directly in a focused manner with the people the organization serves, but there is also the shift of perspective this practice brings. You would assume a food and beverage manager would have fairly extensive interactions with visitors and would be paying close attention to trends.  That person at the Djupdræt’s museum still found themselves surprised by some of the insights they gained.

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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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