Audience Relations

Gumbo With Your Show

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I have only written about performances we have presented that transcended my expectations artistically (or things that we self-produced). The performance we presented this past weekend was just as excellent as I expected so it doesn’t necessarily fall into that category. However, the ancillary activities we conducted garnered us a lot of audience goodwill.

We were having a Louisiana group, Red Stick Ramblers, perform for us and noticed they did cooking demonstrations. Since their performance would be the first event of the season, it seemed like a good opening event to have the group cook for a small number of people. Theatres often offer the opportunity to have dinner with performers, but having the performers cook the dinner is a little more novel. They would be performing the same night so we didn’t want them to keel over in exhaustion. The chef/fiddler confirmed that cooking for nearly 200 people and doing a show nearly wiped him out once so I was pleased we limited the tickets to 50 people. We still have nice weather so we held it outside and billed it as a picnic. In addition to cooking, the band jammed a little off to the side while the meal was being prepared.

The people who attended were quite verbal with their appreciation for hosting the dinner and concert. They kept telling my boss how wonderful I was and what a great job I was doing at the theatre. (I should add, we weren’t serving any alcohol.) People got to listen and chat with the musicians. Others crowded around the pot and helped stir. If you have ever made a brown roux, for gumbo you know there is a lot of stirring to be done. A good number who attended the picnic knew each other from attending various music festivals in Louisiana so I was pleased there was some word of mouth in operation. I know the event added a couple people to our mailing list.

Of course, we had to expend quite a bit of effort to make a picnic happen in addition to a concert. There was a lot of food to be purchased and prepped prior to their arrival. Potatoes don’t peel themselves, nor do shrimp de-vein and lose their tails on command. Tables and chairs to be set up and broken down. Dishes had to be washed. By the end of the night, you begin to see the wisdom of having things catered.

But as people poured out of the theatre at intermission and the end of the show, still heaping praise on the experience, I realized we had earned a lot of good will with a number of people that evening. Caterers may have done all the clean up, but sometimes that can’t compare to a good home cooked meal. (Letting them in to the seating area earlier than everyone else probably didn’t hurt either.) By the time I got to the pot, everyone had fished all the big pieces of shrimp and other seafood out, but the liquid itself was pretty great tasting.

I am not particularly pushing these guys, though they are pretty easy going and fun. I think there are a few Louisiana/Southern US groups that do this sort of thing. A guy calling himself the Sauce Boss makes gumbo on stage while he performs and then gives a little to the audience. This can be a fun activity for a performing arts center. One of our partner venues in the state is having their cooking demo on a separate day from the concert so they can serve a larger group than we did. I think their dinner event was more fund raising focused.

Yes, We Get Snow Here

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In about five weeks we will be producing a show about the Hawaiian snow goddess, Poli‘ahu. Yes, Hawaii has snow every winter on Haleakala and Mauna Kea. It is upon Mauna Kea that Poli‘ahu and her sisters are said to reside. There are actually a lot of very interesting tales about the goddess and her sister, including a sled race against a disguised Pele, the volcano goddess.

We are working with the same company who created a Hawaiian opera based on the myth of the Naupaka flower back in 2006. One of the things that excited me about doing the 2006 show was that the artistic director was taking an approach to storytelling that was ambitious of itself, but fairly new in relation to Hawaiian culture. I thought the show might provide a good model and inspiration for other groups since Hawaii is undergoing something of a cultural renaissance. Since then we have presented a show produced by a partner organization about Kahekili who essentially played Uther to Kamehameha’s Arthur in the unification of the islands.

I had been pleased to learn that the artistic staff creating Kahekili had looked at the Naupaka performance when they were planning to remount their work created a decade earlier. In our early discussions about the Poli‘ahu, the artistic director talked about the lessons and ideas he took from the staging of Kahekili. The idea that there was an artistic conversation of sorts driving the evolution and development of works happening before my eyes really excites me.

This may not seem like big deal in most places where everyone seems to give homage/steal the best of what they see other people doing. There are strict lines of tradition and orthodoxy in hula so even if you explicitly say you aren’t doing hula, but only hula inspired work, your product must still be respectful. Likewise, anything dealing with royalty or divine entities must exhibit suitable reverence. The production of Poli‘ahu is also integrating Siberian and Yupik Eskimo chant and dance so even more attention must be paid to avoid offending someone.

Of course, we also face the challenge of trying to convince people who are familiar with the traditional performance to take a chance on the unorthodox. We have sold out these performances before so we are leaving the door open to add additional shows. But four years ago, the people who seemed to understand what we were trying to do were those least steeped in the traditional arts. In fact, one of the arts reporters who is familiar with the company’s work asked how this production would be any different from their previous work. I almost blessed the opportunity to speak to someone who was a little jaded about it all because I didn’t have to work overcome the inertia of unfamiliarity before even explaining the concept.

I can tell by the way the ticket sales are going that this show is going to be sold by word of mouth and trusted sources rather than print and broadcast media. There are shows six months down the road that are selling about as well on the strength of the brochure alone. They will probably be 1/3 sold before I even revisit my plan to promote them.

Fortunately, we have been working together this summer to line up the interest and involvement of many of these trusted entities and that effort should bear fruit very soon. Once some of that becomes public and visible, we will start reaching out to individuals in the hopes of getting the phrases “I saw…, I heard…” entering conversations, tweets and Facebook postings.

Ritual And The Arts

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So this weekend I am acting as a master of ceremonies for a wedding reception. The request was made based, I kid you not, my curtain speeches before performances. I guess that teaches me not to give discounted tickets to my friends. They also chose me for my sense of humor. I am supposed to make some humorous remarks about the bride because her sister doesn’t speak English fluently enough to tell everyone how the bride tortured her when they were younger and how devoted they are to one another.

Mostly I agreed because there wouldn’t be a DJ at the reception so I will be spared the two wedding reception songs I hate the most. Celebrate by Kool and the Gang and The Chicken Dance. Also, if I am up at the mic, I won’t have to participate in the catching of the garter!

As simple as this wedding is, there is still a fair bit of ceremony and protocol involved during the reception –more so than the actual wedding ceremony. It made me realize that people have a real need, despite protestations that they want to keep it simple, to have some propriety and procedure involved in order to validate the whole proceedings.

I got me wondering about all the complaints about the intimidating formality of attending arts events. Do people really want things to be as informal as they say they do? When you spend as much money as you do on a ticket, do people have a natural inclination to validate the experience with some sort of ritual to mark the occasion? The problem may not be that there is formality surrounding the arts event, it may simply be that the rules are unfamiliar.

You can easily spend more on tickets to a football game. If you have ever attended one of these events casually either not being a die hard fan or regular attendee, it is easy to feel intimidated by the fact that people have tail gate set ups that rival some restaurants with fiercely held opinions about barbeque.

Or just attend a comic book convention and try to follow the minutiae referenced by die hard fans.

I would mention attending a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time, but regrettably few theatres show the movie any more. I blame the VHS release of the movie for letting people watch it at home and therefore become disconnected from that particularly exhilarating audience participation ritual.

As a newcomer, any of these experiences can be intimidating to those who don’t know the rules. But aside from making fun of nerdy males for having poor social graces, no one says that the die hard fans need to make their area of interest more accessible as is done with the arts. If you want to join in, you have to learn the rules of football and how to hitch your grill to the back of your truck. If you want to hang out at the comics convention, you’ll need to know obscure facts like the first non-clone stormtroopers were recruited in the year 9 BBY. And you know you will need to bring props, learn when to use them and learn some of the common call backs for the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Being a show virgin at Rocky Horror can have more public consequences than going to the theatre or symphony for the first time. So why are people so put off by the thought of going to the theatre? Best I can think of is that it may seem more possible to master the arcane details of these other pursuits, even though it is much easier to study up in advance of attending a performing arts event and fake your way along by keeping quiet and watching everyone else.

Also, knowledge of the arts can often be tied to a measure of your worth as a person. Are you educated and cultured enough? While the same can be true of some sports in many parts of the country, there are friends and family members around to teach you the rituals surrounding the sport in your daily life. This is often not the case with the arts.

So I guess we get back to the old nature and nurture situation. Desire for ritual may be a natural part of being human, but our comfort level in approaching and learning new rituals is a function of what areas of knowledge we receive nurturing in.

Buildings That Say We Want You To Stay

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A hat tip to the Stuff Christian Culture Likes blog for the link to the photostream of Jody Forehand, a regional director for Visioneering Studios which does a lot of church design. I don’t want to get into a discussion about the influence of mega-churchs or the morality of such conspicuous consumption in church buildings.

I just wanted to point out just how theatrical the settings are. Even excepting the toon town design of the children’s worship area of Central Christian Church, I am sure most of us would be envious of the design and technology of each of these gorgeous buildings. Then there is the staffing. There is a lot of work that goes into organizing and mobilizing the largely volunteer staffing for some of these buildings every week.

I know there is a sense of obligation which brings people to these churches and their satellite campuses that people don’t feel toward the arts. The notes on Elevation Church say it is the broadcast hub for three locations serving 7000 people at 10 services a weekend. But as I have often said on this blog, perhaps there is something to be learned from churches. This is a situation where people aren’t charged an admission fee, there is music, but much of the time is spent listening to a person reinterpret a classic text for today’s audience or talk about their experiences. While one of the speakers may have a lot of experience traveling around speaking on the same subject, much of what is said by the speakers has not been extensively workshopped or rehearsed over many weeks. And yet, there is enough investment in the church to construct multi-million dollar buildings.

Even if people aren’t there out of a sense of obligation, there are spiritual needs that are met at worship services, even if they are heavily theatricized, that a main stream play or musical can’t provide. For many it is preferable to hear a single person talk about the life of crime they lead than it is to watch a well rehearsed performance about a criminal that mended his ways. Honestly, I don’t think communities are well served by theatres that only do morally unambigious shows with happy endings. Though there is a price to be paid for that decision.

But one thing that is clear from looking at this buildings is that they were designed to serve the communities. Even though the main use of the facilities is in a large room with theater style seating for hundreds, there are large areas devoted to children and large lounge areas and lobbies to mingle and hang out in. Even though there are multiple services each day, the place isn’t designed to move one group out and bring another group in. They don’t care if people stick around, in fact they want people to stay because that provides an opportunity to get a person more invested in the organization.

That is something of an alien thought for most performing arts groups because their model is based on selling a seat to a different person each performance. If a person wants to buy a seat for the next show, that is great! But if they just want to stick around and take in the whole vibe and experience again, that can cut into the bottom line.

But maybe it is time to rethink this approach, especially with organizations that are focused on serving a specific community. Internet communities create value by having people stick around and interact–the longer the better. Granted, even with the largest internet companies, the question always arises as to how they end up making money providing these services for free. And it is relatively easier for an internet company to add more capacity by buying more server space vs. a performing arts organization trying to expand their physical space as more people decide to hang out and interact.

Finding a model that works for theatres will take some imagination and perhaps even some tact. I have been reading quite a few articles lately that talk about how coffee houses which had been offering free WiFi have started turning it off because people have been camping out at tables all day long while nursing a single cup of coffee. So it isn’t as if theatres would be out of touch idiots for recognizing the need to empty and refill seats in order to stay in business.

Really, when people are hanging around the churches, they probably aren’t returning to the seats in the worship center anyway. There are other areas for them interact with people and many of those people will ask if they are interested in increasing their involvement and commitment to the church. This might involve anything from volunteering in some capacity to joining an affinity group (young parents, young singles, female professionals, etc).

Implementing these sort of programs are within the abilities of many arts organizations. Much of it can be accomplished with the help of well directed volunteers. Though granted many are willing to invest more volunteer hours into their spiritual lives than into the local arts organization. Certainly many find spiritual fulfillment in the arts.