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You Know, For The Kids (And Everyone Else, Too)

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February was a real busy month for me so I only had the time to bookmark The Nonprofiteer’s epiphany about the value of public funding for the arts.

“Of course you’re indifferent to public funding for the arts, you dodo; you live in Chicago, where major performers and exhibitions will show up anyway. Public funding for the arts isn’t for Chicago–it’s for Bloomington.

And she remembered growing up in Baltimore, which is not a small town but which waited for months between visits of major dance companies; and she remembered the thrill of seeing those dance companies for the first time. And she realized (0r remembered) that that’s the real point of public funding for the arts: to make available to everyone the thrill of exposure to first-rate art. Everyone: that means people who live in Bloomington, and International Falls, and Arroyo Hondo, even though the free market would not support a stop in any of those places by the latest tour from the Joffrey or the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Met.

I thought she made quite a few good arguments on behalf of funding the arts. They seem of particular value given that she finds them compelling as a person who is not particularly supportive of public funding for the arts. It isn’t often that a non-politician who has not drank deeply of the Kool-Aid takes the time to provide considered commentary on behalf of public support of the arts so it behooves us to take note. As might be expected, I am not entirely in accord with her suggestion that support should only be in presentation rather than creation of new works. Though I certainly do see her point:

“…you have to accept another, equally painful truth, which is that no one can actually determine what’s “art” til at least 25 years after it’s been created. Probably the Nonprofiteer doesn’t need to remind you that people threw things at the stage the first time they saw and heard The Rite of Spring, now part of the musical canon. But what she probably does need to point out is that this doesn’t mean the public should accept and/or fund every objectionable thing it sees in hopes that it will ultimately turn out to be art. Rather, it means that support for creation is a mug’s game, a gamble at which most players lose, and that the public should instead put its money into presentation.”

I hadn’t initially assumed she was saying that public funding of the arts was needed to bring culture to the hinterlands. All the same, I was glad for Scott Walters’ comment to her about the importance of enabling local groups to develop works that emphasize and reinforce the value that can be found in their communities. For me that is the strongest argument for funding the creation of new work. I am not as vocal as Walters is on his blog about how the concept that artistic success originates from NY/LA/Chicago is robbing the rest of the country of talent. But I am certainly in agreement with him that there is no reason those places should be held as a standard of quality and be viewed as the only destinations for achieving artistic success.

Public monies and tax breaks are offered to attract and retain industry, perhaps the same should be done with the arts. The argument can be made that state and municipal support of the arts is doing just that. What the public support is not doing though is generally providing incentive to “buy locally.” In some cases, there has to be an equal investment in encouraging people to create locally as well. I have mentioned in a number of posts lately that while it would be much more economical for me to present local artists, there aren’t enough of quality to sustain the effort very long. There are a fair number of talented people in the community, but most (though certainly not all) are expressing themselves via Broadway plays and musicals or covers/derivatives of other people’s work.

Still, if the criteria for receiving public monies and tax breaks was 100% of the concept and execution by local artists, I could take advantage of the support at least once a year and guarantee my audiences the quality they have come to expect. That sort of confidence constitutes a good starting point in my mind.

One last bit of the NonProfiteer I would quote is her view that we need to get public support for the arts as acceptable a concept as public support for education.

Yes, yes, the Nonprofiteer knows: education isn’t well-funded either; but relatively few people argue that public funding for education is just a plot to spread disgusting lies, or to keep teachers from having to work. Let’s get the discussion about public funding for the arts to the level of conceptual agreement we have for public education, and then we can engage in any further battles that might need to be fought.

In other words, brethren in the arts community: stop talking about public funding for the arts as if the point were for the public to support YOU. No one cares about you. What we care about as a society is US, and how exposure to what you do will improve us.

I think there is a distinction between what she means by “how exposure to what you do will improve us” and the message the arts have been communicating along those lines. While improving test scores, reasoning skills and developing geniuses in the womb are probably part of what she is suggesting we talk about, it can’t be the entirety for the simple reason that it excludes anyone who is not a child. People care about their kids, yes, but everyone will only be persuaded when they perceive they are included in the benefits. I think it is pretty clear that the reasons we give can’t be about what we want people to experience but what they want to experience.

We want people to experience transcendent moments and there is a good chance the first time they sit down to hear a symphony play, they won’t have a transcendent experience. The measure of their satisfaction with the experience that night may simply be that no one caught on to their utter cluelessness. Transcendent experiences should certainly always be a goal and are absolutely attainable on ones first interaction. I just spoke to a woman today who had a group of students who did just that, though they probably couldn’t have identified it as such.

There is a difficulty in asking people what they want out of an experience with which they have had limited interaction. About 18 months ago I linked to a video of Malcolm Gladwell talking about how when people were asked what kind of spaghetti sauce they liked, described the sauces they were eating. However, when presented with samples of different options, expressed strong preferences for sauces that no company actually made. When asked, people may say they like car chases and gun battles not realizing what they really may value is dramatic tension and once they get past the arcane language, a lot of Shakespeare really suits them.

If trying to draw responses of value from your audiences sounds like an intimidating process, well sure it is. There are big companies sinking millions of dollars into marketing and research trying to figure it all out too with limited success. The advantage you have is that you only have to figure it out for the community you serve.

Under Pressure To Find Value In Live Performance

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Thanks to YouTube I have been thinking a lot about the experience of live performance. A couple months ago, for reasons I can’t remember, I watched this cover of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” done by David Bowie and Gail Ann Dorsey.

I thought their rendition was great and a couple weeks later, I wanted to hear it again and ended up with this version.

It was soon clear that it wasn’t the same performance. I liked the first version much better. One of my first thoughts was how interesting it was that the same song, same performers, same tour could have a vastly different quality. It seemed to me a good argument for seeing live performance. Often people say they don’t want to see a play or hear a piece of music again because they have already seen it. People in the arts generally counter that different groups render different interpretations. If that doesn’t work, we break out the old opportunity for disaster option noting that you never know what will happen at a live performance. Even better in this case with almost all things being equal, one performance is so much more exciting than the other which proves another degree of value for live performances. I started checking to see if Bowie was coming to town soon.

Well, come to find out it is not quite all things equal. The second video is from 1997 and the first from 2003. (In my defense, not all of the copies are well dated.) I imagine part of the reason I like the 2003 video is that the sound is much better. I also believe Dorsey got more kickass in that time.

Which brings me to the second revelation about the experience of live performance–the importance of reference points. My sense of where the videos fall on the quality continuum is based on my experience with the original version by Queen and Bowie vs. 2003 Bowie and Dorsey vs. 1997 Bowie and Dorsey. What I have no ability to judge is the relative value of a piece of classical music played by the NY Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, much less the same piece by a single ensemble now and six years ago.

From my perspective, no symphony would allow themselves to take the liberties in interpreting Beethoven Bowie and Dorsey took with Queen’s original music. But I could well be wrong. I have no experience upon which to base that assertion other than my belief that symphonies are too tradition bound to do so. This lack reinforces the importance of regular and repeated exposure to the arts. It also reveals why the belief that people will become enamored of the arts if only they will step through the door is erroneous. People can only judge something is good if they have a basis upon which to make the judgment.

The general implication of making a statement about exposure to the arts is that it has to be in schools. Students are a captive audience and unformed vessels ready to receive. The parents are lost to us. They are too old and too busy at work to pay attention to our lessons. Yes, that is mostly true. But when they take breaks from work they go to things like First Friday’s downtown where they will stop and satisfy their curiosity about Southeast Asian dance if the opportunity presents itself in a easily accessible place.

Cheap dates are important in this economy so First Friday type events may present an opportunity for increased exposure. Expose people often now and maybe they will be prepared to pay for the experience by the time the economy turns around and increases their disposable income.

April is Take A Friend To the Orchestra Month (TAFTO) and provides a good opportunity to position events and opportunities that encourage friends to experience an event together.

(You don’t actually have to be an orchestra to take advantage of April in this manner. Just don’t tell Drew McManus I gave you permission.)

Math, Science, Reading, Writing, Thinking– It’s In There

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My assistant theatre manager and I went to speak at an elementary school career day today. This is the first time we have been invited although the school has apparently been doing career days for nearly 20 years. They often have the same groups year after year so wanted to change the line up a little this year.

Now if you are thinking a theatre manager talking about his job for 30 minutes is about 27 minutes too long for your average fifth grader, I am way ahead of you. Some of the students had been to the theatre for an outreach performance last week so that gave us an opening to talk very briefly about what went in to getting the performers to the theatre. I squeezed in a stay in school pitch by noting the necessity for good reading, writing and artistic skills in putting a brochure together but then we moved on to the exciting part of theatre–performance and technology.

The sounds and faces actors make when they are doing vocal warm ups is pure gold for getting elementary age kids to participate. I also did a bit about how performers communicate non verbally with body, props and facial features. It was a big hit with the kids and provided the assistant theatre manager photos with which to blackmail me. My consolation was that I got asked for my autograph.

Then I broke out the lighting equipment my technical director gave me for the demo. This really lent itself to our message about the value of education. I used the equipment to illustrate the importance of lighting people from all sides. Then I talked about the importance of math in figuring out how many instruments you could attach to a circuit. We had one bright light that used the limit of 1,000 watts but didn’t cover me from all angles vs. four instruments of 250 watts each that covered my whole body but wasn’t as bright. Which did they like better?

I pulled out some gels and talked very basically about additive vs subtractive color just to introduce the concept of color we perceive directly vs. what is reflected. Gotta know your science. At the student’s suggestion, we experimented using multiple gels to see what the result of mixing them together was. The big finale was putting the portable dimmer we had into demonstration mode to create a chase sequence of our gels.

I take the time to recount some of what we did because of a conversation we had with the Vice Principal at lunch. He volunteered, without anyone mentioning it, that he really wanted more art in the school but No Child Left Behind requirements were inhibiting him. He started citing studies that showed that the arts improve scores in the areas NCLB was requiring improvement.

Boy, it is great when you can eat your lunch and have people make the case you would normally deliver to them for you.

Catching up on my blog subscriptions, I came across this entry by Adam Huttler over at Fractured Atlas

I’m always skeptical of arts advocacy arguments that emphasize the importance of arts as a hobby in support of other (presumably more serious or important) endeavors. You know, like when people claim arts education is important because it helps kids do better at math. That’s great and all, but what’s wrong with the fact that it helps kids do better at art? Why isn’t that enough? Even setting aside the intrinsic value of the arts, the direct benefits to society from arts and culture activities are well documented (economic development, urban renewal, etc.) We shouldn’t have to justify our existence on the idea that, by supporting and practicing the arts, some totally unrelated but positive thing might happen by accident.

I agree wholly with him but would just like to add that people getting better at math, science and reading when they experience the arts doesn’t happen by accident either. The arts don’t existing in a vacuum and magically bestow their benefits. People become better at math, science, reading, writing, critical and creative thinking etc through the arts because the arts require you to use math, science, reading, writing, creative and critical thinking. We know that people have a more positive relationship with the arts if they have had active interactions vs. experiences where they simply watched. I feel pretty confident in claiming, without any statistical backing whatsoever, that students also gain greater benefits in the aforementioned subject areas if they have actively participated in the arts.

It Might Not Be Entirely Dead Yet

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The president of my consortium went to a Western Arts Federation meeting and returned with some materials for the membership to read. One of the more provocative pieces was written by Numa C. Saisselin, Executive Director at the Count Basie Theatre entitled “Arts Presenting Is Dead.” (Full disclosure, I once interviewed with Numa for a job at the Count Basie.) Unfortunately, the document isn’t online. I would have to make some inquiries to get permission to store it on my blog.

Numa’s basic premise about presenting being dead is that the practice of offering “serious work” like “theatre, dance, classical music, and maybe the occasional folk singer” and being successful focused on doing only that is no longer viable. What has eroded this situation are elements of which we are all generally aware: The low barriers to entry of the presenting field means there are more people doing it in the general vicinity; competition comes not only from other performing arts organizations, but sporting events, television, computers; costs are going up but earned income, drop in corporate support and other economic factors make it difficult for presenters to break even; organizations aren’t doing new things to attract new audiences; “every market is different, but by and large we all compete for the same programs” and “every market is different, but by and large we all employ the same generic marketing strategies.”

Saisselin does a good job tracing the direction things have been headed and giving concrete examples of how his organization has faced each of these essential areas. The way he has found success is to become more nimble in his programming focusing less on establishing a concrete season for people to subscribe to and more on taking advantage of opportunities that present themselves in the short term and then communicating these new developments with his mailing lists. While they take the long view on some things, he likens his approach to that of a concert promoter rather than the traditional definition of a presenter.

He notes this approach may not work, and should not work, for everyone given that every market is different. He also acknowledges that his organization has to ask granting entities to have faith in them since they don’t have a concrete idea about what they may do with the money at the time of application.

One of the benefits of his approach is that it allows him to take advantage of opportunities where an agent is offering an artist at a lower price in order to keep them busy between performances. Saisselin feels that presenters need to move even beyond this and educate themselves more about artistic fees rather than blindly accepting what is asked. There are databases of artists performances all over the country that can allow you to compare yourself to similar communities to get an idea of what attendance was like and what ticket price was charged.

Now I know none of this sounds terribly provocative. I included most of this narration so you could get a general idea where Saisselin was coming from. What I am told has quite a few people up in arms and calling him irresponsible for suggesting is that presenters be able to cancel a performer 30 days out.

If the artist can cancel a date on 30 days notice to take a more important gig on a TV show, a feature film, or in a Broadway production; or a more lucrative gig in Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Reno or Tahoe; or in some cases for any reason, then the presenter should have the option of canceling on 30 days notice if ticket sales do not warrant proceeding. If the artist has the option of canceling to enhance their overall career or make more money, then the presenter should have the option of canceling if it’s going to lose money, or at least if it’s going to lose a lot of money.

From the artist’s and management’s perspective, not allowing presenters a cancellation option protects the artist from bad presenters. In other words, if the presenter does not do their job, the artist should not suffer, and that makes sense. But if the presenter does do its job, and tickets still do not sell, artists, agents and managers should accept at least a measure of responsibility. If we’re really all in this together, we should share the pain as well as the rewards.

He notes there is already an unofficial process one can follow to achieve this that generally ends up with the presenter paying 50% of the artist fee as a cancellation penalty. He suggests making it a formal part of contracts. While the presenter will still realize a loss, it won’t be a debilitating one

The presenter would be required to jump through some hoops to make such a request. When booking an artist, the presenter would have to submit a marketing plan, and satisfy management that the plan is reasonable, and has worked in the past. When making a cancellation request, the presenter would have to document that they had followed through on the marketing plan, without achieving the desired results…

…Artists would not be forced to play for half empty (or less) houses to collect their check, but in the event of a cancellation would still be fairly compensated for reserving the performance date. Agents and managers would be saved from having their artist develop a reputation as a box office loser, and would have the opportunity to revisit and revise their own strategies, perhaps getting their artist into smaller rooms, and building or rebuilding their artist’s career in another way. Presenters would be saved from throwing good money after bad when they already know a show is not selling.

He goes on to make some good points about improving standards for arts managers and boards of directors which I hope to address in later entries. For now I just wanted to float this idea. I am not quite sure how I feel about it. Assuming the practice moved in this direction either through active efforts of presenters or by default as tough economic times make the unspoken procedures into the standard, is it a direction we want to head?

It is easy to get angry at ever increasing fees and being left in the lurch by artists and talk about leveling the field in the abstract. There can be some unwanted repercussions though. I have been to the booking conferences and there the dynamic is one where the presenters have all the power. Artists and agents complain that presenters won’t acknowledge them or meet their eyes as they pass. I suppose if more people moved to act as promoters as Saisselin has, then fewer arrangements will be made at conferences and more will be made as a result of emails and YouTube videos. Not to imply artist cancellations for a better gig is revenge for the conference snub, but maybe it will be good if that uncomfortable vibe was removed from the equation.

My concern is that the money factor becomes a larger issue and emerging artists get further marginalized if 30 day cancellations become standard. Is an agent or manager really going to invest time in cultivating someone who is yielding them a percentage of 50% fee or are they going to go with the known quantity that dependably fills seats?

Certainly, the internet allows people to promote themselves fairly well so they don’t have to rely on an agent. For those like me who already get a constant stream of artist availability emails, more virtually unknowns adding themselves to the mix only makes things more difficult. As evil as agents may be made out to be, the good ones develop relationships with you that enable them to provide appropriate advice to presenters. Saisselin mentions his appreciation for an agent that invested years in a relationship with him before he actually booked an artist.

One road to success I can see is if the economy gets so bad that presenters turn their attention to seeking out low cost regional and local performers. Sasselin mentions how the record single went out of vogue only to come back again thanks to the iPod. Perhaps the impresario will make a return of sorts as people with theatre facilities turn their attention to cultivating the careers of regional artists as agents drop them.

Sasselin’s proposal is certainly something to consider in some form or another in order to relieve the pressure on presenters. I don’t think it can be applied in as straightforward a manner as he suggests.

**One thing that did occur to me as I was writing is that it would be great for the small touring artist if someone would create a piece of online software that integrated communications, scheduling and maps. That way a person could email, IM, etc about a gig, have the mapping feature tell them if it is actually reasonable to drive/fly that distance in the time allotted between gigs and then place it in a schedule they can access while on the road. Heck, if it could suggest flights, car rental places and hotels, that would be great too. (Except I imagine the top suggestions would be positioned there by paid advertising and may not be the most affordable for our struggling artist.)**

When You Grab That Cute Ball Of Fur, You Also Get The Teeth

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Sometimes I wonder if my first entries for this blog were among some of the best because I seem to find myself drawn back to their topics more often than later entries. A recent piece [ed. original link is broken, updated with 2014 retrospective post] I read via Artsjournal.com by Melodie Bahan, the Director of Communications at the Guthrie Theatre makes me think back to the piece by Chris Lavin I wrote about early on. Bahan, like Lavin argues for better writing by arts journalists. Like Lavin, regarding the depth of coverage sports sports receive, Bahan notes that articles on movies provide a fair bit of background information to a reader while it is hard to discern between preview and review pieces for theatre.

Features about theater are often glossy, shallow puff pieces that are indistinguishable from reviews. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had someone say to me, after reading a feature story about a show that hadn’t opened yet, “Wow, great review in the paper today.” And the very sporadic stories that do get reported are disproportionately about money – or the lack thereof – and therefore focus on only the large theaters. Plus, because these stories are so sporadic and lacking in context, complex issues are boiled down to one line conclusions.
[…]
When the Playwrights’ Center or the Guthrie or Mixed Blood gets a grant, the papers run a paragraph culled from a press release announcing the grantor, grantee, amount and purpose. And then…? Our critics don’t have time to follow the money to see how it actually creates art because they have to write reviews of the six shows that opened this week, an interview with an American Idol reject who’s appearing in a touring production of Grease, another profile of that really gorgeous actress they’ve profiled twice this year, and a Valentine’s Day poem.

In this performing arts community, there are personalities and huge egos and unsung talent and incredible artistry and gossip and bad blood and conflict. Readers are being denied those stories because our writers are spending their time writing reviews that won’t be nearly as interesting, vital, or even as accurate.

Bahan points to the work of papers like Time Out Chicago as something of an ideal. (Though she admits she might not welcome their attention were it turned on her organization.) She cites as constructive contributions to the arts articles examining the causes behind the preponderance of Caucasians in Chicago theatre and the positive and negative impact of large commercial shows on the local theatre scene.

His stories are fully reported and sourced – nowhere in his stories did I read, “Some say…” or “The theater community is buzzing about…” – both phrases used by journalists who have no sources to confirm their own opinions. Real arts journalism is informative and detailed and interesting, and it makes theater relevant.

Artsjournal also carried a rebuttal interview with Claude Peck, senior arts editor for the Guthrie’s home town paper, the Star-Tribune. Peck acknowledges that theatre reviews are generally designed to advise people whether they should spend money on a performance or not. His most pointed criticism for Bahan was that it is difficult to do any substantive journalism because arts organizations, the Guthrie especially, deny them access.

He paused, somewhat dramatically: “Very difficult, for example, in the case of the Guthrie, which has had a long reputation of giving the barest minimum of cooperation for our newsgathering efforts.”

By this point, I realized this had become a February Festivus — a full-scale airing of grievances. Bahan had exorcised some demons about writers, and Peck was now unloading on subjects: If they plead for tougher journalism, they best not be hypocrites when their own phone rings.

“We recently did a story on Guthrie director Joe Dowling’s salary,” Peck said. “Melodie made it clear to me in a conference before the story ran that she and the Guthrie would officially participate in no way whatsoever, be of any help with any numbers for that story.”

He added, “I told her I didn’t blame her, and we would try to newsgather in any way we can. And fortunately, we found board members willing to speak on the record.”

After the piece ran, he says she wrote him an email “comparing that story to a Molotov Cocktail tossed into an already fearful community. And yet we did see the news value in that story: Dowling was making more than any New York not-for-profit theater director or any regional director — even discounting a one-time $100,000 bonus, he was at the top of the heap nationally. As the economy was heading into the shitter, we felt that was some news we wanted to write about.”

This all recalls portions of Chris Lavin’s earlier piece:

When compared to the open access a sports franchise allows, most arts organizations look like a cross between the Kremlin and the Vatican. Casting is closed. Practices closed. Interviews with actors and actresses limited and guarded. An athlete who refuses to do interviews can get fined. An actor or actress or director or composer who can’t find time for the media is not uncommon….How often have journalists either ignored or been kept from financial problems that plague many arts organizations until a “crisis” makes publicity — late as it is — unavoidable.

The parallels with Lavin’s observations go a little further in this case. Bahan criticizes the local papers for not sniffing out the massive financial troubles at Theatre de la Jeune Lune. Peck notes that the guarded status the arts world maintains kept his paper from confirming any rumors of problems Theatre de la Jeune Lune had for quite some time.

I just thought the whole situation was a great reminder to us all that when we bemoan the lack of good arts coverage, we should be mindful that what we wish for is a double edged sword situation and not entirely the ideal we envision.

Programming Comfort Food

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

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

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

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

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

Is This The First Step To Better A Structure?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Audacity What Counts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cost Is More Than Pocket Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stuff You Can Use: Google Analytics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Segmenting Mass Appeal

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

In the last week I have:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Emperor’s New Ad

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

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

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

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

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

Tough Times Follow Up

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

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

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

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

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

Answering “What Can I Do To Help?”

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

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

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

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

Manufacturing Your Worst Enemy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theatre of the Future Gives Me Ulcers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Must Remember: Innovative, Not Creative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out Damn Robot!

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

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

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

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

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

Art Is Cake

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

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

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

Well, except for one person.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preparation for Conservation on Arts Education

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

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

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

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

We Got Answers, You Got the Questions?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yo Mama Says Mozart For The Win!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They Took My Beautiful Coke Machine!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting The Dead To Blog For You

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

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

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

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

Little Bird, Will You Sing For Me?

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

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

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

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

If The Pudding Is Really That Good, Why Don’t They Serve It?

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As corporate blogs go, I sort of like Southwest Airline’s. They do a pretty good job covering all sorts of topics from opening new facilities and showing pictures of their mechanics performing maintenance on the their aircraft to discussing the impact of hurricane’s on their operations. Of course, being Southwest they also indulge in goofy pursuits like sharing their grandmother’s banana pudding recipes.

I think the blog is pretty effective for them as a forum for communicating information about their company and answering customer questions about the choices they make.

One thing they did recently which I thought could be especially effective for arts organizations is have an entry and podcast on how to work for the company and what to expect once you apply. (podcast doesn’t have permalinks so you’ll have to find the 9/24/08 episode.) They talk about all the crazy stuff people did to get noticed but also note how long it took some of these people to get hired given that they receive hundreds of thousands of applications every year.

Arts organizations taking a page from their book could talk about what people might expect working for the organization and what the place would expect of an applicant. This could help strengthen and diversify the applicant pool. I am partially thinking back to comments Andrew Taylor made last January about how arts organizations shouldn’t discount people simply because they don’t possess skills that have an exact one to one correlation to the job description they wrote. It is great to hire true believers who have already invested their hearts in your industry but in the long run more dispassionate new blood might lead to a healthier situation.

If you don’t have the resources to maintain a running blog or podcast, it would probably still be beneficial to have a one or two recorded conversations with people talking about their experiences with the company posted in the Human Resources portion of your website. The emotion transmitted in a voice is certainly compelling than a lengthy text account of the same information.

Eyes Give You An F

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There have been a number of studies conducted regarding how web page visitors interact with the pages they visit and what the most effective layout might be. One of the most prominent studies was conducted by Jakob Nielsen who used eye tracking studies to discover that people viewed pages in a roughly “F” shaped pattern. People read left to right at the top of a page but as they continue, they start scanning along the left column only.

The details of the study linked to above are pretty interesting. Another website, Virtual Hosting.com coalesced the major suggestions Nielsen made along with those from other studies to create a list of simple ways people can improve the effectiveness of their websites. (Tips for blogs on conveniently on the next page.)

The most surprising of their 23 tips is the first one- Text attracts attention before graphics.

I will leave it to my curious readers to continue on and find out why…

How Will Your Organization Live On?

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In the past, whenever I would get anxious about whether a marketing plan would work, I would always think about New Coke. If ever you think that someone who is smarter, has a bigger research and marketing budget, more personnel and resources could do a better job, all you have to do is look at new Coke to realize having these benefits at your disposal are no guarantee of success.

Now as we watch Bears Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, AIG Insurance, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Washington Mutual encounter troubles we are basically provided with more contemporary examples of how this is true.

Of course, even if your marketing budget is 1/100,000,000,000th of Coke’s, the stakes and disappointment if your plan fails are not equally exponentially less than they experienced. In fact, since there are fewer people to distribute blame around to, your experience may be greater.

It can also take far fewer and far less severe mistakes and mismanagement to lay your organization low. The events of the last few months have brought an all to familiar reminder of organizational mortality. If there is one realization most non-profit arts organizations embraced long before the for-profit world, it is that there is no such thing as “too big to fail.” A great many arts organizations have experienced “donor bailouts” and come back strong while the cash infusion allowed others to linger awhile longer before finally closing.

The reminder for many arts organizations is that they don’t have any intrinsic right to exist. There were far more people invested in the continuation of the aforementioned corporations than have ever willed the continuation of an arts organization. As a result some of these companies have been bought out or merged. But as of the time of this entry, it doesn’t look as if anyone is going to step forward to save Lehman Brothers. There have been some merger partnerships between arts organizations in the past to save one or the other of them (first that comes to mind is Asolo Repertory Theatre and Sarasota Ballet circa 1997). But for many arts organizations, that option doesn’t present itself.

As many organizations of every type are wont to say, a organization is not the physical presence as it is the people and ideal that it represents. If anything is going to remain of an arts organization after its demise, it is that. If an arts organization is smart, they will devote a lot of energy to cultivating and sustaining their image and ideal throughout their existence.

Pam Am Airlines once spanned the world regularly serving every continent except Antarctica. The airline failed in 1991 and subsequent attempts to resurrect air service under that name likewise failed. However, the cachet of the name is still powerful and currently appears with the familiar logo on the side of railroad freight cars. The company even named their quarterly reports (of hopefully their success) Pan Am Clipper, the terminology the airline used for their planes. And people still hold hope that the airline will fly again. In a Forbes article last year, a Miami attorney was looking to license the name for an airline flying internationally.

Few arts organizations have that sort of name recognition on a national level. But it is possible to generate value for an arts organization on a local or regional level. Given that it is quite possible we are in a transitional stage for the way the arts are presented and experienced, many arts entities may go out of business over the course of a few years. The name may re-emerge as with Pan Am, with a different physical manifestation altogether but with intangibles like the core identity, quality and values transferring intact.

The Asolo Theatre moved operations from a theatre that originated in Asolo, Italy into a theatre that originated in Dunfermline, Scotland. Arena Stage moved across the Potomac River into Virginia and no one doubted they were the same organization. Identity is not tied to physical places. Now if either went out of business and reemerged as a video game developer or communications company, their new customer base would probably have few overlaps with their old one. But there would still be a association with quality entertainment experiences lingering in people’s minds which can have positive results for the new companies.

Fuzzy Definitions

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During his talk prior to the design charette for Performing Arts Center Eastside, Alan Brown cited the 1997 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown apparently has access to the raw data which is not listed in the NEA report. The answers Brown lists from the survey may cause you to question the results of the surveys you conduct.

Brown lists an admittedly small excerpt of the verbatim responses to the question: “What was the last “classical music” concert that you attended?” Among the answers listed are Tito Puentes, The Stompers, Showboat with Tom Bosley, Music Man, King and I and Oliver.

For the question, “What was the last “opera” that you attended,” Phantom of the Opera appears five times along with Les Miz, Brigadoon and “It was on Broadway” (remember, these are recorded verbatim).

Not having access to all the raw data, I have no idea what percentage of the answers these represent. As I suggested, it does make you wonder when people answer surveys that they enjoy and want to see more classical music or opera, if your concept of classical music/opera is the same as theirs. These results are from 10 years ago so I wonder how much less significant these categories are to people these days.

I also wonder if there isn’t a constructive way to make use of this situation. By and large people attending a performance have absolutely no idea if the hosting organization is for profit or non-profit (and a foggier notion of what that may mean). They aren’t there to support their favorite non-profit, they are there because they enjoy the product. They may feel a loyalty and trust in the organization but it might not have any relation to the tax status.

With this in mind, would it be a benefit to arts organizations to de-emphasize classical and opera and focus on the idea that they produce great performances? You wouldn’t want to abandon the label altogether or misrepresent what you were offering because you would alienate people who did know the difference between opera, classical music and musical theatre (or ballet, modern, jazz; Shakespeare, Miller, Godot, etc) The Philadelphia Orchestra isn’t going to get away with advertising a concert as their latest remix of that rockin’ composer of the 20th century, Rachmaninoff. Unless, of course, they do treat his music to a remixing, the nuances of their interpretation vs. another orchestra’s will hardly constitute a remix.

Acknowledging that people don’t care how performances are categorized as long as they have an enjoyable experience changes the way you market performances. If the definition of classical music is rather nebulous, the fact that the violinist received a Pomme Rouge when they were 17 is nearly bereft of meaning. (As it should be, my mother was giving me pommes rouge before I was 5 years old.) Marketing has to focus on why someone will enjoy the performance and not overly concern itself with convincing someone they like the organization’s definition of classical music or whether the recipient likes classical music at all.

This probably sounds strange because the performance is of the organization’s definition of classical music. But what I am getting at is that the focus shouldn’t be on telling everyone what a great and important guy Beethoven was. Certainly, mentioning Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 is a waste of column inches in a newspaper for all the influence it is likely to have. Telling people they will enjoy it because the opening motif is one of the most recognizable phrases in the world and has been appropriated and integrated in numerous compositions since can be convincing. The idea that it is Death knocking at Beethoven’s door is certainly compelling.

I know that this is pretty much discredited but that is the story Pat Conroy tells students in The Water Is Wide. I first read the book 20 years ago and that fact has stuck in my mind since. If the piece can inspire excitement in poorly educated students who were entirely unaware of classical music, what impact will it have on people who are marginally or generally aware of it? Even more importantly, the kids didn’t know classical music to know if they liked it or not. I’d bet they would have categorized Beethoven alongside any other piece of well played music they came across.

Of course, the water flows both ways in regard to this sentiment. When asked if they liked opera, someone might say they liked Phantom but didn’t really care for The Magic Flute. A good experience with what they think is opera, classical music, Shakespeare (but really Oscar Wilde), won’t guarantee liking the “real” thing. Nor may it inspire experimentation even if they equate Phantom with opera due to simple lack of name recognition.

So what I am saying is, just put the information out there telling people why they will enjoy a performance and let them decide if they will or not. In some respects, if people are defining what might traditionally fall in a Pops concert (Marvin Hamlisch, Burt Bacharach) as classical music, it could help, however marginally, to gently dissolve the barriers of definition and include familiar pieces like Beethoven’s 5th. The 1812 Overture certainly hops back and forth across this fence. Bugs Bunny helped turn classical music into pop music. Perhaps there is something to be gained by tossing the Blue Danube Waltz into the pops. I still associate that piece with the cartoon of swans swimming behind their mother (starting around 4:15 in this video) And who can forget “Kill da Wabbit” and “Spehwur and Magic Helmut” from “What’s Opera Doc?”

Audience Theory

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As wonderful an opportunity it was to influence staff workplaces, those of us in the PACE advisory group still understood that the success of the building would be in how comfortable audiences were interacting with the space. When I was preparing to travel to Bellevue, I was mindful of Andrew Taylor’s observations wandering around the streets of Denver at the National Performing Arts Conference that

“block after block of glass or stone walls at the street level, many of them without a door (at least an open one) for hundreds of feet at a time. As a result, there are very few people populating the street, stopping to talk with each other, people watching, lingering, and realizing they’re in an urban streetscape of diversity and energy.”

I approached the facility design with the intention of insuring the building appeared engaging to foot traffic since there are quite a few residential complexes being constructed nearby.

The importance of physical design was actually reinforced for me as we walked to the meeting with the architects. About four-five blocks from the future PACE site, we passed a small area next to the sidewalk with hedges and benches. There was a sign noting that the area was open for public use. I would have never known that because of the way the hedges and a short set of ascending stairs lent it a sense of being private property. Because of this they had to essentially grant people permission to enter.

But to back up a little…. I had mentioned earlier that Alan Brown made a presentation on the value of live performance. Obviously, it is in relation to the audience’s experience that his thoughts are most applicable. It wasn’t until after his presentation that I realized how significant a moment in the design process it had been. The architects and project manager had never really had these ideas addressed in connection with their work before and so were pretty attentive and taking notes. The same was true for a couple board members who were present.

Of the concepts he covered, a number of them caught my attention. The first was his suggestion that interactive experience the Nintendo Wii offers predicts one day being able to virtually perform with Pilobolus. Since he is the first person I have met who has advanced this idea since I began promoting it in 2004, he instantly endeared himself to me.

He also addressed the situation where people were waiting longer and longer to buy their tickets. He spoke of a focus group where he basically discovered young people were afraid to buy a ticket until the last minute because committing to one option closed the door on all the other possibilities. I wondered if this was an element of Generation Y’s problem with decision making.

He said he asked them to describe what they would envision as a perfect jazz club. They said it would be a coffee house during the day but a bar at night with a separate room where those who wanted to be full immersed in the music could go. However, there would also be an anteroom where people could talk with friends and still listen to the music and still another anteroom where people could interact with friends more and listen less.

It seems like a tall order to design a building to provide this experience. However the impression I took away from what Brown had to say was that people at every age really desire an experience at an intermediate stage between listening to a recording and fully attending a formal concert. He described this as a place to drop in and hang out and get more information. One suggestion he made which he certainly did not represent as encompassing all possibilities was having kiosks in the lobby where one could try all sorts of new music. (I imagined something like the listening stations in record stores.) Having a DJ mixing in an area surrounded by comfortable lobby furniture.

Alan Brown’s presentation had a tangible effect on the discussions that followed. The building design already allowed for many of the activities he mentioned so conversations revolved around the possibilities. This is fortunate because if Brown is right, there might be an increased necessity of having such a space as venue for value added benefits. Acknowledging that there are some people who are voracious for an educative experience, Alan Brown proposed that while arts organizations gave education away for free as part of their mission, he suspected people would pay a premium for a private, executive briefing on events.

I have read and heard suggestions that were related to the core idea behind this. There are some complexities to this that I haven’t fully considered so I don’t quite know what I think about this. I suspect for some communities and organizations, he is right on the money with this idea.

As you might imagine from the thought the PACE administration put into the staff work areas, there had been some investment into the design of the public areas as well. As I already mentioned, the layout lends itself to sponsoring some of the programs and features Alan Brown suggested. Some other notable concepts they had were arranging the ticket office so one’s experience was more akin to interacting with a concierge than a reinforced security checkpoint. They have also looked into situating the restrooms so that the lines at intermission don’t become the half time show.

Our advice seemed to be viewed as insightful and even viable within the overall plan and budget. I am demurring on many of the details because so much is undecided at this stage in the game and I don’t want to create any unwarranted expectations about the ultimate result. Participating in the process was very exciting and engaging. While our status as outsiders lent some weight to our observations, Alan Brown’s occasional, but well timed comments lent some reinforcement.

Believe it or not after all this writing, I still have some additional observations to make! My next entry will have some really basic suggestions for those who might want to replicate this exercise.

(Details of this entry have been altered since the original posting to comply with confidentially agreements)

Why Haven’t We Ever Done This?

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I spent the weekend in the Seattle area participating as a lead partner in the very first stages of a pilot program where emerging arts leaders provide input on the construction of Performing Arts Center-Eastside (PACE) in Bellevue, WA. I had noted my participation in an earlier entry if you would like a little more information.

I intend to spend the next few entries reflecting on the experience. However, since everyone hopes this program can be replicated for future construction, I am going to summarize the major activities in today’s entry. Anyone considering using the process during their own construction or major renovation project will have an easy reference to the basic outline.

I want to acknowledge and give a lot of credit for the creation of the program to PACE Associate Director, Dana Kernich. She brought the whole concept to Executive Director, John Haynes and then did a lot of the organizational work to make it happen. When I was advocating more professional development opportunities for the alumni of APAP’s Emerging Leadership Institute, this program barely hovered at the edge of my mind as something that might be possible.

Obviously, I also need to acknowledge John Haynes for embracing the idea and committing resources to it. It was not a cheap undertaking. PACE flew 10 of us out, housed us and fed us (and it wasn’t at Sizzler though we would have been happy for it). Haynes told me he still saw it as extremely economical. He could have spent the same amount on a week long consultant visit but he was getting 10 consultants committing themselves to providing feedback for about 3 more years.

Haynes also observed that while consultants and architects are absolutely invaluable to the construction of facilities, once the job is done they move on to the next job and aren’t involved in the experience of inhabiting and working in the space the way arts professionals like ourselves are. In this respect was expense worthwhile. (Lest anyone think they will be ignored, there have been and will continue to be discussions with artists who have experienced performing in many spaces.)

The Process

We started out with a tour of the region so that we could get a sense of the physical environment in which the PAC would operate. Traffic isn’t getting any better in the region especially with the likes of Microsoft and Google expanding their physical presence. When we returned from our tour, John Haynes gave us a briefing on the history, audience demographics, vision and financial issues for the organization.

After that we participated in a panel discussion on the Regional Arts Ecology attended by the Executive Directors of the Bellevue Philharmonic, Kirkland Performing Arts Center, Seattle Theatre Group and 4Culture. This was a very interesting session to me on a number of levels. First, I appreciated the thorough job PACE was doing in educating us. But also, while 4Culture is a funding organization and Bellevue Philharmonic will find a place to perform in PACE, the other two could easily find themselves competing with PACE for audiences and artists. They might all end up competing for funding. Their observations and answers were great in terms of providing outside parties’ view of the environment in which PACE would operate.

That evening we had dinner with the facility architects, Pfeiffer Partners. This was more of an informal meeting than any type of presentation.

The next morning began our “work day” where we started to provide feedback in the context of what we had learned. It had already been clear to me how important PACE viewed our participation given all the people they arranged for us to meet including having the architects come up from Los Angeles. But what really impressed upon me just how innovative and important this pilot program might be was the fact Alan Brown of Wolf Brown was there. Apparently John Haynes had mentioned the project to him and he asked if he could be present and observe.

The day started out with Mr. Brown discussing Cultural Participation. This was derived from the research he had done for the Major University Presenters on Assessing the Intrinsic Impact of Live Performance. I had gotten the audio from a session he and the other researchers had conducted at the APAP convention but I was still jotting down lots of notes. Perhaps more importantly, some of PACE’s board members were present and doing the same. Again, I will expound on this in later entries.

Then the architects conducted a design charrette discussing their philosophy for the facility as well as noting the way they had dealt with challenges and benefits of the physical location. One of the most helpful things in the discussion was the models they brought. One allowed us to remove each floor piece by piece and another was large enough to stick our heads into to get a sense of things.

At this point, everyone except the 10 lead partners left the room and we engaged in a brainstorming session on the design. Haynes asked us to limit ourselves to three areas since there were so many directions we could go- Assess how the building functioned as a workplace, how it facilitated the patron experience and how the “machine” of the building worked (i.e. can a dumpster be rolled outside and not have to go through the lobby)

When the allotted time expired we presented our thoughts to the architects, members of the building committee, Dana and John. As you might imagine a great deal of discussion followed. However, our observations appeared to be valuable to all involved since one of the architects asked why no one had ever done this sort of thing before. (Thus the title of this entry.)

After things wrapped up we went out for dinner with Alan Brown and all flew out the next morning. As I noted in my earlier entry on the project, this weekend was just the first stride in a three year journey. It merely provided the context for conversations and exchanges of information channeled through a blog entries and emails over the next three years. My intent is to reflect upon the experience this week and across the next few years. Even with the strictures of the confidentiality agreement, there are enough general observations about the process I can make to be valuable to others.

Media Using The Masses

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It appears as if the mainstream media has gone from glaring at bloggers to embracing some user generated content, perhaps at the expense of their employees. I am beginning to suspect some outlets have realized they could tap in to people’s desire for 15 minutes of fame as long as things ran through an editor for quality control. About a year ago, I started seeing the press releases I sent to the arts editor appearing verbatim in the neighbor specific inserts of the newspaper. I would still get a calendar or photo listing in the paper proper and maybe even a feature story if I was lucky. I have had my releases appear verbatim in smaller weekly papers, but this was the first time it was happening in a major daily.

A little later a mechanism appeared on the newspaper website encouraging people to submit stories of their own. Then a heck of a lot of people were laid off at the paper. I don’t know if there was a casual relationship or not, but I began to wonder if my attempts at promoting my events was contributing to pink slips being issued.

Last night I saw a promo on television announcing a new program the station news department was starting involving citizen contributions. There was nothing on the website despite their encouragement to check it out for more information. I think it had something to do with weather. I wouldn’t be surprised if some point in the next five years they started soliciting people to submit video reports.

Last month Salon.com started Open Salon where they will actually pay people for creating content.

What does this mean for you?

Well first, people may expect more opportunities to interact and contribute in your events.

Second, you may never know when the newspaper critic is coming because it could be anyone in the audience and a totally different person from last time. On the other hand, if you have a popular show you may hear from 10 people who intend to review your show for the newspaper and want free tickets (and still have an unknown 11th person’s critique printed).

I also imagine that some artists will anticipate expectations and you may find the type of shows they create/offer for performance at your venue beginning to evolve. I have spoken about how people may not be content with the passive experience sitting quietly in a dark room watching a show any longer. As much as I expect audiences to demand more, I also expect artists to start to provide more. As always, some will do it better than others.

In the short term though the implications of media outlets using exactly what you send them are that you better be making a compelling case for attendance. No longer are you trying to convince a writer your event is worthy of a feature story or review and depending on them to conduct interviews and recast your event in an interesting manner. Now what you write has to do both these things. You may not have the alternative of writing two releases, one for the editor and one for publication as is. I have had an editor take a single press release, assign a reporter to follow up to generate a story and forward it to be printed verbatim by the newspaper. It happened at least three times last year.

If you don’t know how to start writing compelling entries, you may want to check out my entry here. Because Artsjournal.com has changed the way they address their archives, those links to Greg Sandow’s blog don’t work any more. However, if you go to the May 25 -June 15, 2005 entries on his blog, you can probably find them without too much effort.

What Value The Compact Disc?

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Occasionally it is healthy to revisit daily rituals and practices to evaluate if they are still pertinent. For example, every time I go on a trip I clean all my CDs out of car and leave the little door on the CD holder open to show that there are no CDs in my car. It recently struck me that in the time since I bought the car several years ago, the value of CD as a format has dropped so precipitously that no one really wants to break into my car to grab them. In fact, they probably didn’t want to when I bought the car either but the iPod has gone from competing to almost default format in that time.

Realizations like this make me re-examine stuff in my professional life including policies we have set for ticket purchases/exchanges, seating, volunteers, rentals and whatever else comes up. Because we have always done it can’t be the default excuse for continuing to do something. In many cases, because we did it last year might not be valid either as behaviors and values change so quickly.

On the other hand, just as there are still people desperate enough for the few bucks they might get for my CDs at the local record exchange, the cost of someone abusing the lack of a policy might still outweigh the benefit of eliminating it.

No Lack of Power Had They Lacked Power

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I hadn’t intended to watch the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics but then I saw the footage of the rehearsals Korean television “leaked.” I was so intrigued, I got up at 2:00 am hoping to watch the ceremony streamed live. Unfortunately, NBC chose not to do so. I would have been happy to watch it with commercials inserted. Nor could I find any other source, including China’s CCTV that didn’t forbid me due to my geography. Instead I had to wait 18 hours.

I am glad I rushed home from work to watch it Friday night. I was flabbergasted at the scope and pageantry. What surprised and impressed me the most was the precision execution of things like the drums in the opening segment and the taiji players who formed perfect concentric circles without any spike marks on the floor. What left me agape was the movement of the printing blocks. I thought they were computerized hydraulics or some such until I noticed there were legs under there as the cubes rose. This was a good 2-3 minutes before they revealed that fact. There are some great still photos here.

I imagine that the London Olympic Committee was gulping at the thought of having to follow that. I have to admit the torch lighting was pretty anti-climatic in comparison with the rest of the opening ceremony. I was expecting a dragon or a phoenix to emerge to ignite it. (I have since read that the IOC requires an athlete to do the honors.)

What I liked most about the Opening Ceremony as an arts professional was that the focus was so much on the abilities of the performers. If the projections on the side of the building, the LED screen scroll on the floor and the computer enhancement of the fireworks had failed, it would have still been a superlative performance. If all the power went out so that they flying couldn’t happen, the fou drums were darkened and the globe couldn’t rise from the floor, it would have still been impressive.

I have worked in technical theatre where they are fond of pointing out that without them, the actors would be flailing around and speaking into the darkness. The truth is, if China decided to start at 8:00 am instead of 8:00 pm and planned on using natural light people would still have been wowed by the performance. (The sun was rising at 4:30 am when I was there so they would have had a fair bit to work with if the stadium walls were open in the right place.)

To my mind, China did the arts world a great service by emphasizing the power of live performance and exhibited what can be accomplished in that format. (Though granted thanks to a whole lot of money.) The reality was that even with all the rehearsals and training that made such precision possible, people still got injured. That too is a hazard of live performance and as much as we may like to sell the idea of the possibility of danger at our shows, it isn’t something we actually wish upon our performers. It is easy to blame China’s low safety standards. I might have done so except that I heard something similar nearly happened this weekend because someone neglected to secure unused equipment.

My blog is about the arts and though it might get me more readers, I stay away from politics and other matters. The controversies surrounding these Olympics loom too large not to at least acknowledge they exist. The optimist in me hopes for China it is just a matter of making up lost ground. Two days before the 1932 Summer Games in L.A. the U.S. Army conducted a bayonet charge on their own WW I veterans backed by tanks and didn’t have a very good record on the treatment of minorities. That same year, China was dealing with Mao in one part of the country and Japanese occupation in another. The US emerged from the Depression and gradually moved forward on social fronts. For China there were impediments to progress from within and without.

For the sake of all the wonderful people I met in China, my hope was that the opening ceremony was a grand declaration that the country had finished regrouping and was embarking on a campaign to be regarded once again as a giant of culture, learning and invention.

The Ninty Five Processes

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Since my second blog entry ever was about parallels between arts management and religion, I was intrigued by a post Scott Walters made earlier this month suggesting that theatres be built along the same lines that Lutherans build theirs.

The process he outlines is thus:

1. Costs for the first few years are evenly split between the new congregation, the regional organization (synod), and the national organization (ELCA).

2. Money is provided primarily to cover salaries.

3. After the first couple years, the new congregation takes on a greater share of the financial burden until it is financially independent.

4. At that point, the congregation begins to make annual contributions back to the regional and national church, which continues as long as the church continues in existence.

5. The congregation is responsible for raising enough money to build a church, if it so desires, but a service organization provides a source of low-interest loans to help with that process.

He compares this with the process for theatres which is basically that you have to exist for three years before anyone will even take a look at your funding request.

The process the Lutherans use is not terribly unique. There are many immigrant groups who have done the same thing pooling their money to fund businesses which were expected to return money to the pot to fund the efforts of others. Upon such things banks were established. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the Lutheran’s practice traces its roots back to immigration.

Given that I have had interactions with people wishing to build a theatre that had no concept of what it actually takes to maintain and run one in the manner they plan, I would embrace the idea that nascent theatres would receive informed advice and guidance.

I have it on pretty good authority that there are performing arts organizations of a certain strata which already trade information and collaborate on planning. The problem is that they rarely attend conferences so few of us get to talk to them. Which is too bad because their expertise could provide a starting point for creating and funding this type of project. I am actually involved with a project which could possible provide a partial template for what Walters is suggesting.

I had a couple concerns about Walters’ suggestions. The first is that it would encourage conservative rather than innovative approaches that would move how the performing arts interact with their communities forward. This process is good for Lutherans because they are dealing with people who already subscribe to an orthodoxy and understand what the expected outcome is. This is not necessarily the case with theatre. You have a choice between different formats and genres to focus on or ignore. It would be disappointing to have groups nudged toward some form of what their advisers know or think would be appropriate. It is still their word that releases the money.

I would assume that once the group of artists had been operating for awhile, a team who specialized in the direction they wanted to pursue would shepherd their progress so everyone wouldn’t automatically be told they were going to be a 250 seat theatre or a three venue facility. Yet the best option might not be a fixed seat venue be it built, rented or borrowed from another but a partnership with a ballet and gymnastic school resulting in an organization focused as much on physical fitness for the community as performance.

My other concern is that the mechanism be able to financially and more importantly emotionally and mentally weather a lot of early failures before they get the technique refined to the point where there are enough successful organizations replenishing the funds. I believe it takes colleges 40-50 years before their alumni become sufficiently successful that they can make significant donations to the school. Granted, the theatres cultivated by this procedure would be required to give back whereas alumni aren’t. Still, it might take 15-20 years before the method is self supporting. Arts organizations and businesses alike fear the inability to show results whether it be to granting organizations or stockholders. This fear could contribute to advocating that new arts groups take a familiar, conservative approach in their activities. And short of someone like Warren Buffet, there aren’t too many funding sources that would be prepared to wait 15-20 years for positive results.

Still if the funders, organizers and participants went into the process resolved to be vigilant about their prejudices and fears and accepting the fact that it could be a long time before any return is ever seen, it could certainly work. Frankly, even if the fears and prejudices did come into play, the process would still be a vast improvement over the current system if it established the practice of arts professionals centralizing and sharing knowledge to avoid replication or re-development of procedures refined or discarded by others.

And how great would it be if causing a schism with the Catholic Church eventually resulted in the unification of the arts? (Finally, we take revenge for being placed below beggars by co-opting religion practice for our own purposes!!!)

Cultivating An Appeal Certainly Is Not Clear

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There is a new buzzword out there called “Murketing”, a portmanteau of murky and marketing implying a sort of under the radar effort at increasing market share, cachet, whatever. If you read my entry about the staycation, you know that I am not a fan of what I feel are often attempts to put lipstick on a pig. My problem with the murketing term isn’t that the practice is a bad idea but rather that the creation of the term implies there is some hot new trend to adopt or be left behind. I have noted before, not every new approach/technology is appropriate for everyone, but they do bear exploration.

Let me expand a little on this. The way I think the idea should be approached is to say that in the face of changing behavior of consumers which includes rising skepticism about advertising campaigns that take a direct approach, it might be prudent for companies to examine the way they approach their marketing and perhaps even re-evaluate the market to which they are appealing. Instead the coining of terms like murketing makes it sound like you have to discard the practice of marketing altogether and replace with the method of the future. The reality is as I described it — take the time to re-examine.

I am not sure if he actually created the term or not, but a gentleman named Robert Walker recently wrote a book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are which examines the idea. Forbes did a review which appears to sum up Walker’s theories about as good as any article I have read on the subject or the book.

As much as I dislike the term, I have to say I like sections of Walker’s blog, namely Subculture, Inc and The Murketing Arts. While his book deals with the efforts of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Red Bull as well as some smaller operations, these sections are devoted to Q&As with people involved in small scale efforts to advance their products. Given that arts organizations often fall into the small scale category, these sections of the blog along with Walker’s “Consumed” column in the New York Times Magazine and of course, the book might provide some inspiration. (Yes, I have to acknowledge that the site’s sort of anti-guru vibe might actually be calculated, per murketing, to cater to my skepticism.)

I am reluctant to mention some of the ideas that popped into my head while reading about some of those interviewed because they essentially tap into the forces other people have discovered rather than finding some local characteristic. Sure there were women who tapped into the skateboarder market despite not selling any skateboarding gear. It doesn’t mean that is an appropriate target group for your organization. (Except the stars will align for some symphony in Idaho and suddenly California arts groups will be banging their heads trying to figure out why a state replete with skateboarders can’t win with them.)

My Butt in the Seats of Your Neighborhood Stage

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This weekend I was a guest on the Your Neighborhood Stage podcast. (July 14 episode, number 3.21). The folks over there let me talk for a real long time on a lot of issues. In the course of the conversation, I promoted the iPod idea I had blogged on before. I had listened to some of their earlier podcasts to get a sense of what I was in for and one of the on going issues they have discussed is inverting the idea that “all good things must percolate down from Broadway.” They were trying to find a way that things could be developed at a local level and percolate up in much the same way niche interests suddenly explode into popular consciousness via YouTube.

It occurred to me that while local theatres couldn’t really hope to get anything on Broadway via the current development path, they could be the place where the innovations that reinvigorate the performing arts are cultivated. As I note in my interview, the stakes are pretty high on Broadway but somewhat less so on the local level. (Not to understate the impact of even small financial losses on local theatres.) But with the rise of Pro-Ams (Professional Amateurs) who have both passion and increased access to technology, there exists the potential for great things to result from unorthodox approaches and experimentation.

There were some other issues we discussed like censorship in a production of Ragtime near Chicago, copyright infringement in an Akron production of Urinetown (the earlier case from the 90s I refer to is L! V! C! in Boca Raton- covered in NY Times, 8th paragraph down) and whether bloggers who review can be sued for defamation.

If ever you wanted to hear my voice, albeit a little distorted (my fault, mostly) or simply just want to sip at the fount of my wisdom in audio form, give it a listen.

Oh, I just also note. When co-host Staci Cobb was praising me and said “Go You!” I thought she said “Go UF” and was tweaking me as a Florida State University grad by cheering on the University of Florida. It is only as I listened to the podcast that I realized I misheard her. I am sure both hosts were a little perplexed when I joked about her razzing me.

Parents No Longer Just At the Stage Door

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Recently I have been talking about the needs of the next generation of leaders in comparison with those of earlier generations. On the whole I think that those who feel the next generation lacks the commitment to the cause exhibited by theirs can respect the desire for a better work-life balance.

There is a characteristic of the next generation that might be a thornier problem for arts organizations–their parents. The term helicopter parents was originally applied to parents who “hovered” over their children when they went to college. The parents would bug professors about their children’s grades, dorm staff about room mates and in some extreme situations, would actually complete assignments for them.

As the students graduated, the parents began showing up at the work place, at interviews and going so far as to fill out applications and negotiate salaries for their children.

Now I don’t quite know if this is necessarily going to be anything new for performing arts organizations who have always had stage parents hovering around. However, a decision needs to be made on the organization’s policy on parental involvement. As the Forbes article I linked to above notes, some companies are embracing parents. Others feel it is not appropriate for parents to be involving themselves in decisions being made at work and have generated formal responses to the issue.

Fortunately, my mother restricts her complaints about how many hours I am putting in at work to me.

While I have known about helicopter parents for quite awhile now, I haven’t run across any cases anywhere I worked. (Well, one intern’s parents followed him cross country to check out his work site but didn’t contact us past that point except to make a donation.) What impelled me to cover the subject was a video the Next Generation Consulting blog linked to in the entry on mentoring I cited last week. The video is about an hour or so long on the subject of mentoring at accounting firms.

As the speaker, Rita Keller, discussed the issue of parental involvement, she noted that employers needed to be prepared to have the new employees making a lot of personal calls or texting throughout the day. Now if the parents are prodding their kids to get to bed and wake up on time, this can be beneficial to a company. The area she mentions that I believe would be the biggest concern for employers is lack of initiative and decision making skills. Because these young people have consulted with their parents and friends on so many issues in their lives multiple times a day, they tend to crave/require specific guidance or advice and lack the ability to act independently.

The results of helicopter parenting and the general technological environment the next generation of workers have grown up in is the subject of a really good article from HR Magazine that addresses the issue and how to structure the work environment to best channel younger workers’ energies. There are some benefits these folks bring like familiarity with technology and a facility of working with groups and multi-tasking. But there are also some disadvantages too like indiscretion, unrealistic expectations and impatience.

Stopgap Mentoring

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Over at her blog on the Next Generation Consulting website, Rebecca Ryan asks, Is Mentoring a Coverup for Poor Management? According to an article she links to at the end of her entry, most companies are actually coaching rather than mentoring. Coaching essentially consists of helping someone fulfill their function for the company whereas mentoring is more of a customize relationship aimed at growing the person.

In Ryan’s view, most mentoring programs are essentially buddy programs. Whereas:

“True Mentoring occurs when an elder’s intention is to entrust another with the welfare of her or his estate (or something similarly signigicant.) In business, this means that one generation of leaders takes the next generation under its wing and over time, teaches them everything they know….So you see, Mentoring is intended to occur alongside a transfer of responsibility. Most Mentoring programs have no such intention.”

The problem she feels lies in the fact that companies try to use mentoring to fill in gaps but don’t commit to designing and implementing the program resulting in low retention and burn out.

The next generation of leaders are looking for mentoring and presumably want it to be high quality. Just as interns don’t want to just be a photocopier, new employees don’t want a coaching only experience. So if you have a mentoring program, the question to ask is, Is it any good?

Will You Love Me If I’m Cheap?

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While I have been encouraging arts organizations to create opportunities for local citizens who have decided fuel costs are too high to travel this summer, it has only been because I don’t have a direct line of appeal to the local citizens. One of the things I am wondering is if people will look for entertainment closer to home if they have decided not to travel or if they will simply look for entertainment at home on the 72 inch television they wisely purchased when times were better.

I have been wondering if I should promote the fact that knowing costs were on the rise, we are keeping our ticket prices the same as last year. This is absolutely true. I figured we could probably weather another season at the same prices if it made our shows more accessible to our community. But I wonder if people would care that we were trying to strengthen our relationship with them. Given that people no longer subscribe and wait until a few days before an event to buy tickets, will our attempt to stay affordable even register?

I am pretty sure I know the answer. I have read a number of studies on customer service and retention which I have cited in talks that show price does not develop relationships. This is mostly in terms of customer loyalty in situations where you and a competitor offer a comparable product. If someone defects to your competitor and says it is price, chances are the reasons run much deeper and price is the easiest excuse to use. With that in mind, it seems price should be a minor player in a campaign to win loyalty.

Another complicating factor– with the rise in fuel prices my partners and I are beginning to get requests to re-negotiate performance fees. So now I wonder if I can keep the prices the same or not and whether we will be able to afford to present as many artists come next year. I sense the developments over the next year or so will instigate a sea change in the way we do business in the future (as well as if.)

Going off on a little tangent from the topic of booking, one of the artists I was excited to be presenting decided they wanted to change the time frame that they toured. This will put them outside our planned season. We hadn’t gone to contract but thought we did have an understanding with their agent. This wasn’t related at all to fuel costs but rather the timing of other projects the artists were involved in. My partner presenters decided not to replace the group. I have a smaller schedule than they so I have been seeking a replacement and hoping I can do so before it is time for the brochure to go to press.

A substitute was suggested by some staff people and their friends. YouTube videos were reviewed and the artist judged to be of good quality. The sole booking contact channel turns out to essentially be the artist’s email address. An email is sent inquiring about availability and bounces back because the artist hasn’t been reading their email and is over quota. We may go back to them to inquire, but probably only if others don’t pan out.

Word to the wise all ye starving artists. Keep your lines of communication open and your email boxes clear! Rising fuel costs and declining attendance ain’t gonna be increasing opportunities to perform, there is no need to provide impediments to the process.

Constructing Leaders

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Some disclosure right from the beginning. While most of my involvement with the project I am about to describe will be voluntary, I am receiving some travel and lodging in return for my participation.

I have recently been chosen to participate as a lead partner in an very intriguing project. There is a new arts facility being planned for Bellevue, WA and I have been asked to provide input into it’s planning and construction. I assume I was chosen for my past work experience but especially because I provided input into the theatre portion of a community center the Salvation Army is building with a bequest from Ray and Joan Kroc.

But providing input into building projects is no big deal, right? What makes this so intriguing is the process the organization is using to gather and integrate the input. All ten of the lead partners (later phases will involve additional people) were chosen from among those who have participated in the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Emerging Leadership Institute. The thought behind involving ELI alumni is to tap into the collective knowledge and experience of people in mid and senior level positions who are involved in both overall policy making as well as day to day operations.

What is deemed of additional importance is providing professional development opportunities for people in these positions. The lack of these opportunities has been a concern since I first attended ELI. In explaining this need, the pilot project document quotes an address Ben Cameron of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation made to International Association of Assembly Managers about the next generation of leaders’ view of careers in the arts which appears to be pretty much what he said to the Southern Arts Federation.

In addition to providing excellent career advancement opportunities, they hope to create a template with which future projects may be built. While I will be traveling to learn more about the site and talk with those involved, a lot of the work I will perform will apparently be online discussions and reactions to materials posted by staff. Perhaps the fact that I actively use a blog was also a factor in being chosen since that will be one of the tools that will be used.

I have signed a non-disclosure agreement agreeing to keep many of the details confidential. From my experience on the Kroc Center project I understand that there is some information that can also prevent the organization from receiving the most competitive bids for services too. I am generally pretty conservative about revealing what I really know about situations so I don’t perceive any difficulties in my participation.

What I do hope to be able to do is report on some of the general topics that are discussed that are worthy of consideration by arts organizations everywhere– “How does the design make passersby feel welcomed?” “How does the design facilitate emergency evacuation.” Though I will steer clear of publicizing some questions that while valuable to ponder and a valid part of the design process, might cause people to lose confidence in the organization without reason–“Aren’t you concerned that that placement there might have a potent for a toxic spill?”

Needless to say I am pleased to be involved with the project. But also gratified to learn that people are seriously thinking about ways to create opportunities for leaders to attain career and personal growth.

Suffering Your Own Penalties

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Via Arts and Letters Daily, there is an intriguing article in Reason Magazine about how penalties for undesirable behavior can actually result in more poor behavior if people perceived paying the penalty as license to continue.

Citing a study in Science, Ronald Bailey gives the example of six Israel day cares who instituted a fee to penalize people who pick their children up late. Instead of solving the problem, this made it worse.

According to Bowles: “The fine seems to have undermined the parents’ sense of ethical obligation to avoid inconveniencing the teachers and led them to think of lateness as just another commodity they could purchase.”

The same thing happened in an experiment in Columbia. Researchers were conducting a game where people were involved with divvying up forest resources. The results of many scenarios reflected concern for the resources and other users until a situation that simulated government control fined those who overused their alloted share. People felt paying the fine justified pursuing their short term interests rather than the interests of the whole.

I tried to think of ways the arts might be providing disincentives for their audiences to act in the interests of the organization, audience or community through what they perceive to be penalties. I haven’t really thought of anything but maybe something will occur to you readers.

First thing that came to mind were the ticket fees we charge for buying tickets online or over the phone but might not charge if people come to the window. Or that we charge a lower price for subscriptions and buying single tickets before a certain date.

But neither of these things seem to create an incentive for people to buy early. I don’t think it creates a disincentive either. I think people are just busy and have changed their buying practices.

Next I wondered if holding people in the lobby for late seating hoping they, (and those they annoy when they are seated), are discomforted enough that they arrive promptly next time might have some unintended consequences. It is easy to foresee that both late comers and those seated are likely to be annoyed by the timing of the late seating interval even if it has reduced 14 potential interruptions to one. No surprise there.

It is likewise easy to anticipate reactions to policies like; No food in theatre, no exchanges or refunds, no video taping and no cell phones. Perhaps no cell phone policies and signal jammers may have caused a rise in texting, (I seem to remember jammers don’t impact texting frequencies, just voice) but even that is not unforeseen. As annoying as the glowing screens can be, it isn’t as bad as having someone pull out their cell phone and say, “Yeah, I am in the theatre. No, no, I can talk,” in the middle of a performance.

So does anyone know of a policy that was meant to control undesirable behavior that has essentially reinforced it? Drop me an email or comment below.

Forget Snakes on A Plane, How About Arts on a Train?

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Thanks to the lovely people over at GrantStation, the deadlines for two interesting arts related funding opportunities came to my attention.

The first is community based grant program administered by Union Pacific. Essentially if you live west of the Mississippi River and have train tracks running through your town you are probably in a Union-Pacific community and are eligible.

The second is some what more interesting. Johnson Johnson/Society for the Arts in Healthcare are looking for programs that “promotes the evaluation and replication of promising models in order to strengthen and expand the arts in healthcare field.” The most difficult eligibility criterion appears to be membership in the Society for the Arts in Healthcare. Otherwise they are primarily interested in programs that have been in existence 3 years or longer and that can be replicated on a national level.

When I saw this, I immediately thought of a program in Brooklyn I had written about three years ago. At the time the hospital, Woodhull Medical Center, was offering inexpensive health care for artists in exchange for their performance or interactions in the wards and units. They may have expanded the program since then. In any case, I sent the grant information to Laura Colby who is mentioned in the NY Foundation for the Arts article referenced in my entry. What she helped start would definitely be a boon to artists if it were rolled out nationwide.

Hopefully some of my readers out there have some similarly good ideas or at least know of some being enacted right now.

Low Internet Recognition for NPAC

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Hat tip to Artful Manager Andrew Taylor for noting Doug Fox’s piece on how poorly Internet media outlets and blogs were involved in the National Performing Arts Convention.

Generally, I don’t replicate links to which prominent bloggers like Taylor have drawn attention, but I was just astounded by how few references and links a highly promoted conference like NPAC got. I don’t know about other people but I was getting emails from different sources at least twice a week for the 6-8 weeks leading up to the conference urging me to go. I had already planned to go to China so the conference was out for me. While there looked to be some interesting sessions planned, nothing struck me to blog about it so I made no references to the event.

Fox makes some suggestions for the next time around but it occurs to me that some of his points about opening access and encouraging promotion can apply on a smaller scale to our own arts organizations and communities. (Assuming people want to write about your company.)

The Planes Are Alive With The Sound of Music!

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I don’t want my blog to get into a running travelogue about my trip to China so this will probably be the last entry where that subject is the main focus. I just wanted to comment on what is usually the most onerous part of my travels but turned out to be rather delightful this time around–air travel. I have to say that Japan Airlines has ruined me for all U.S. domestic flights. The food, service and entertainment even in economy class was great. I am not going to wax philosophical wondering why U.S. carriers can’t replicate it. I will just assume they have costs that Japan Airlines doesn’t and leave it at that.

The thing I will pose the “why don’t we have that” question about is the entertainment. I watched a great Kabuki piece while on the plane, the Noda version of Togitatsu no Utare performed in 2005. I had no idea kabuki could be that funny and irreverent. I was getting some glances from my neighbors because I was laughing so loudly. There was a lot of self-referential stuff, what looked to be the kabuki version of the West Side Story opening number and a Rube Goldberg contraption. To be sure, according to this article, kabuki may not have been quite so funny until recently. (Though it also sounds like it originally might have been.)

Purists probably considered the show I saw to be a dumbing down of the art form. Maybe it is. But it was a fun introduction to kabuki for an international visitor like myself who is only generally familiar with the art form. This type of pride in a national art form is what I wish there was more of on airplanes. Some might argue that given Hollywood is the center of the film world, all the films shown are, in fact, a statement of national pride.

As an arts person I am not, of course, going to be satisfied with that line of reasoning. While I am not the biggest fan of musicals, they would probably end up being the most natural choice in terms of how accessible they would be to domestic and international audiences. Given all the performers and writers contracts that have/are entering negotiation, it would be the perfect time to broach the subject of renumeration for the airborne broadcasts. If a rule bound, insular art form like Kabuki can begin to exhibit sweeping changes in their performance style, arranging to have Spring Awakening shown on a plane should be easy in comparison.

Heck, given that most people in the United States haven’t been to the theatre it would be as much an entrée to the form for the domestic audience as the Kabuki was to me as a visitor to Japan.

On Man’s Spam Is Another’s Annual Appeal

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There is an interesting study about the effectiveness of email campaigns that came out recently. M + R Strategic Services and Nonprofit Technology Network published the results of their survey on the use of email by non-profits as a fundraising and advocacy tool. None of the non-profits participating in the study were performing arts related. That doesn’t seem pertinent to the results because the study is more about general behavior in regard to email than responses to specific organizations. They don’t have a lot of tips for maximizing the effectiveness of your email campaigns, but they do tell you what sort of response to expect and some guidance about frequency and timing of campaigns.

There were a couple odds and ends that caught my eye.

-They claim email is superior to social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube for mobilizing supporters but don’t offer any evidence to back it up.

-Existing email technology makes it difficult to accurately measure the rate at which people are opening email. Some email software triggers a pixel embedded in the message to record it as a read, but there is no guarantee that a human has read it. On the other hand, some programs don’t allow images to be automatically loaded so the pixel is never triggered even though the message is read.

“…we have found that up to 25 percent of the actions or clicks in response to a particular email come from people who have never officially ‘opened’ the email!”

-Open and click through (following a link in the message) rates are lowest in December and the unsubscribe rate is highest. But given the volume of appeals being sent out is highest in December, “…the number of people who unsubscribed per individual email was actually about the same or slightly lower than in other months.” Even though people are being hit hard by appeals in December, it pays to time it for the end of year as Oct-Dec was the most productive time for the study participants.

-The response rate to fundraising appeals has dropped a little, but since the amount given remains the same and the size of email lists continues to grow, the total amount raised has increased.

-More of those who choose to donate are doing so online. I would guess this is a matter of people feeling more comfortable with conducting financial transactions online.

You can download the study for free but do need to provide your email address. Even though you can opt out of receiving their newsletter, I didn’t see any promise not to sell your name to their clients.

Dancin With Myself

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Well here is one from the “Hope This Doesn’t Catch On” file. I got an email from the Orlando Fringe Festival last week promoting a Silent Rave. Essentially you show up with your iPod and dance while listening to the music you brought while other people do the same. You are literally dancing to your own drummer–at least if the music to which you are listening has drums.

They claim it is hot in Europe but the most information I can find is a Silent Rave this past April in NYC’s Union Square.

Here is some video from the event.

Interestingly enough, here is a video taken around the same time which the person decided to set to his own music. I understand that re-editing video is common practice but in this context it sort of comes off as being dissatisfied with the lack of audible music.

How prescient Billy Idol was when he made his “Dancing With Myself” video. I know the attraction of the gathering was more about the flashmob element than the actual promotion of isolating yourself in a crowd. Since NYC has really been cracking down on actual raves, driving up and deploying a sound system on the fly would have probably gotten the event shut down a lot faster because it more closely met the legal definition of a prohibited rave.

These things aside, it is a little disturbing that people are choosing to replicate an event where one insulates oneself from others. It seems something of an oxymoron that this communal event is possible because these isolating devices are ubiquitous. The fringe festival is probably sponsoring this to seem edgy and hip. Indeed, there is a lot of novelty inherent to the idea. This can be especially true if some strange synchronicity emerges between what you are listening to and how you see people around you are dancing.

But it is really in their best interests to promote the idea that you can enjoy yourself alone. Or even worse, that while at a public event you have license to act as the spirit moves you. The latter might be acceptable at a fringe festival more than a concert hall, but if people decide they will enjoy staying home more, all organizations potentially suffer.

People have a right to do what they will with their free time and aren’t responsible for keeping arts organizations in business. There is also nothing necessarily wrong with introversion. The concept may make you laugh, but I wonder if what we are seeing isn’t a sort of synthetic introversion. It just seems to me that in the past, real introverts have filled their time alone thinking and doing things. I won’t claim they have been any more productive than anyone else in advancing civilization. I am just concerned with the direction of things when people who are not nature introverts start to take on the behavior and fill the silence with iPods and text messaging.

The world needs its extroverts to conduct the interactions and exchanges of the world. While they may be real extroverted across these devices, it is as if they have hobbled themselves by removing the option of unmediated interactions. Instead of empowering the introverts by removing some of the opportunities to be socially inept, it looks like technologies are depowering extroverts.

Granted, I am not a social scientist with the training to observe and interpret these things. But I have admitted introverted tendencies. While my shopping experiences would be so much better if people would stay home, the fact that I am concerned that they are may be cause to worry. I see people doing what I did as a geeky teenager. Except I was doing it with books so I was at least getting smarter and growing my vocabulary. I don’t know if the same can be said of the situation today.

Sometimes I Feel Like A Fatherless Color

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I don’t know how it found its way to my backstage, but I came across a booklet from Apollo Design that really show the company has a sense of their customer’s needs and seek to add value to their products. They have what they term Playbooks which provide a scene by scene break down with gel and pattern suggestions of some of the most popular plays high schools and community theatres perform.

They admit that the options they offer are among the safest choices a lighting designer can make. They also can’t offer guidance about placement of instruments and intensity of light since they can’t know the needs of every theatre. But for the high school teacher who has volunteered to direct the fall play and knows nothing about choosing gel colors, the booklets can remove quite a bit of anxiety. Even if you aren’t directing any of the plays they cover, you can get a sense of how the design theory you might read in a text book has been put into practice in specific instances.

You can download pdf versions of specific Playbook sections here. As an example of the general guidance they offer, for The Glass Menagerie, the notes state:

“Smoky, red glow” – mentioned in the Amanda and Tom argument scene. The colors should not be malevolent or suggest violence. It should be a subtle indication of frustration and tension”

Another example is in scene 3 the booklet provides guidance for different colors on the fire escape, living room, bedrooms and dance hall.

Although their skills far outstrip those of the people who would use these booklets, my technical crew thought the booklets were a great idea and have been thumbing through them for the last week.

We did get a little chuckle though from their political correct renaming of Bastard Amber, one of the most often used gel colors around. It was created by mistake when a guy was trying to create a batch of regular amber. Bastard Amber ended up being generally a better color choice and more widely used than regular Amber. The two leading gel manufacturers, Rosco and Lee both have the color in their swatch books.

Apollo on the other hand calls the color Fatherless Amber. Given that they have a Dominant and Submissive Lavender, we can’t imagine they are complete prudes.

If you want to have a bit of fun, ask your tech director if you can see their gel swatch books. You can find some amusing names for colors in there. Given that Rosco and Lee have created proprietary colors that the other hasn’t been able to reproduce, you can have fun looking through both. Like some famous painters who have created their own paint shades, lighting designers have asked that unique colors be created for them and so you will find some colors named after notable theatrical folks. Be warned that there are also a lot of mundane boring colors in there as well though you will probably wonder at the contradiction of shades like No Color Blue.

Art, The Government Prescription Program

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There is a piece on the online journal, Spiked from Frank Furedi decrying the English government’s prescriptive use of music in their sponsorship of the Music Manifesto. My first thoughts were that this is what comes from positioning the arts as having all these benefits when asking for money. This is further evidence that the authors of Gifts of the Muse in saying the arts were ill served emphasizing these elements over the intrinsic value of the arts. I also thought that it should come as no surprise that governments would be employing music to advance an agenda. This has been happening for centuries from the Medicis to the current day where popular music is used to sell everything from cars to presidential candidates.

Perhaps I have been exposed too much to commercially motivated music, but I had a difficult time envisioning music as a vehicle for seeking and serving Truth. Perhaps it is the lack of this connection to Truth or my inability to see it that can be attributed to what he cites as “impersonal force of the market impinged on the development of art and culture.”

My initial cynicism about his complaints aside, there were a number of observations he made that I hadn’t really considered. For instance, he notes that by valuing who will be attracted by the experience over the art itself, “what really matters is the audience rather than the music that the audience listens to. The question of who sits in the audience, rather then what they hear, shapes official thinking on music today.”

I have seen this myself. Every final grant report I fill out regardless of whether it is privately or publicly funded asks me how many K-12 students were served. Many ask about the racial make up of the audience and if my program was designed to serve specific races or K-12 students. Some ask how the programs reinforce family values and self-sufficiency. I am occasionally tempted to ask how a particular government policy is actually reinforcing these things. The arts shouldn’t necessarily be looked to in order to patch what has been rent.

I do think that arts organizations should be paying attention to who is attending. I am happy not to have to break down my audience into all sorts of demographics for my grant reports. One should always be assessing who is attending and how they are receiving it. Though the identity and number of people attending shouldn’t form the sole measure of success.

One of the toughest parts of Furedi’s complaint to tackle is the idea of accessibility equating to dumbing down. He criticizes music classes.

“Instead of providing an opportunity for pupils to study and learn about music, ‘music-making opportunities’ are often about involving kids in playing around with digital media and pretending to be djs…But frequently the ‘music-making’ approach is praised because it allegedly removes the ‘barriers’ that prevent children from ‘making music’.”

and suggests that the real elitists are,

“the educational and cultural establishment who have so little faith in the ability of children to appreciate and learn about classical music. Their anti-elitism is a populist gesture designed to flatter ordinary folk and reassure them that not much is expected of them.”

The question that emerges in my mind is how to structure an introduction to theatre, music, dance and art to people whose experience with these disciplines has come from movies, television, MTV and Photoshop? Are the activities you intend as a bridge between these experiences and the creative/performing arts underestimating your audience or does it provide necessary context? A contributing factor to activities that do indeed dumb an experience down is the receipents may not view the relevance in the same manner you do. So the bridging activities become the whole program rather than just the initial steps of a larger plan.

For example, does all the art and literature about the transitory nature of life have the same poignancy for people who can create and destroy a visual representation with a touch of a button? How do you cultivate an appreciation for an artist’s technique in mixing colors or composing music when there is software that will correct those flaws? How do you instill a desire for preservation in someone whose criteria for doing so is based on the amount of room left on a memory card rather than what ever quality of composition is apparent on the tiny digital camera or cell phone screen?

I don’t doubt that you can cultivate appreciation and understanding of art in people amid all of these influences. But if they don’t feel it to the same degree or manner as you and your contemporaries do, you may never move beyond a certain point and allow them to develop a more sophisticated understanding. On the other hand, if you don’t take into account that people experience the world differently than when you were their age and proceed to present the discipline in the same manner it was presented to you, you risk alienating people with your insensitivity and general cluelessness.

What is the balance then between presenting an accessible context that is intellectually challenging? It is easy to say that is your goal and just as easy to be diverted from the plan by what seems to be a general atmosphere of anti-intellectualism.

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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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