Long times readers know that when I was living in Ohio I had a close relationship with a local group called the Creative Cult. We did a number of projects together and I participated in the events they sponsored. The local art museum wisely decided to bring one of the cult’s inner circle, Nick, on staff and he has been making some great contributions to the organization.
This week the museum has made a series of Facebook posts under the title “Things Written At The Front Desk,” with some pictures from Nick’s journal/sketchbook and other projects he has worked on while at the desk. Today was the second post in the series and really caught my attention because it featured Nick’s illustrations of a guide to a gallery exhibit. At first I was excited because I thought perhaps the museum had reopened for socially distanced exhibitions, but the guide was made for a pre-Covid exhibit.
Regardless of when it was made, the concept of walking into a museum and picking up a guide to an exhibition which was hand illustrated by one of the people greeting you struck me as something that would make the whole experience feel more welcoming and accessible. The pamphlet Nick illustrated reflects his quirky aesthetic, presenting the visitor with Marty, a cartoon figure who will accompany on your journey complete with a map of Marty’s suggested route through the exhibition.
Then things take a strange turn and some of the illustrations reference to Marty’s diary and a beast being hunted down by a classic mob armed with pitchforks and torches. Clearly the whole guide isn’t depicted so we are missing parts of the story, but that makes you want to learn more, right?
Not only that, wouldn’t you be interested in seeing a museum exhibition framed by an information pamphlet that implied your tour guide may have a monstrous alter-ego….or perhaps it was all just a strange dream?
This week CityLab mentioned that the US Senate was working on funding a program to reclaim areas of communities displaced/demolished/bifurcated by highway projects as those roads are decommissioned.
As Streetsblog reported on Jan. 11, the Economic Justice Act, a spending package worth over $435 billion, includes a $10 billion pilot program that would provide funds for communities to examine transit infrastructure that has divided them along racial and economic lines and potentially alter or remove them. It would also help pay for plans to redevelop reclaimed land. The program contains specific language requiring projects funded through it prioritize equity and avoid displacement. It also provides grants meant to facilitate community engagement and participation as well as construction.
I immediately recognized that there was a sizeable opportunity for arts organizations to be involved, if not lead, the facilitation of community engagement around these efforts. I had written about 500 Plates, a project that literally brought people from every neighborhood in Akron, OH to a long table down the center of the highway in question to discuss what should happen after the highway was permanently closed to traffic.
I live in a community where the width of the interstate is expanding, increasing the displacement that occurred in the 1960s & 70s and we are looking into ways to employ creative expression to address the ongoing conversation about blight. So there are opportunities to spark conversation and action on both ends of the spectrum. However, it sounds like there may be actual funding available to conduct conversations about reclamation and repurposing.
Back in December, Joseph Horowitz had a lengthy piece in The American Scholar about the impact of the pandemic on the arts in America. I may revisit the article in future posts, but there was one section that caught my attention because it seemed a testament to both the influence of a shared cultural ideal and the power of leaders who advance an agenda.
Horowitz writes that while there was resistance to government run media a la the BBC, there seemed to be enough will and interest post-Works Progress Administration to support programming featuring public intellectuals and artists.
A little-known footnote to this 1930s saga of the artist and the state was an unsuccessful campaign to implement an “American BBC,” … An alliance of university and radio leaders argued that a public radio system would ghettoize education. “Controlled radio” was also denounced as a “threat to democracy.” Crucially, David Sarnoff and William Paley, leading NBC and CBS respectively, were visionaries for whom an educational mission incorporating culture was a genuine priority, whatever its commercial liabilities…
Later, when TV entered the picture, CBS initiated Leonard Bernstein’s Omnibus specials and Young People’s Concerts, and Sarnoff created an NBC Opera offering innovative productions of opera in English. But Paley retired as president in 1959, Sarnoff in 1970; their successors gradually abandoned the high mission at hand. PBS and NPR, ironically, have offered nothing remotely as ambitious as the arts programming CBS and NBC once championed. If American arts audiences today compare unfavorably with audiences elsewhere, the minimal role of the state—the cumulative absence of an “American BBC”—is far from irrelevant.
I frequently hear people extolling Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts and wonder why no one tries to replicate them since they were so well-received, but Horowitz’s piece recounts how the lack of investment, both in terms of general policy and economics, allowed both opportunity and popular will and interest in these experiences to wane.
Even though the Western canon of arts and literature were lionized to the exclusion of others during this era, a different infrastructure would exist today to amplify a shift telling a broader range of stories had focus and investment been sustained.
Horowitz’s conclusion near the close of the article is that the upheaval cause by the pandemic has provided another set of opportunities to effect enduring change if we are ready to take it.
However, if you are just now getting to a place where you can start to think about reopening now that vaccine distribution has started, the NEA guide can be a good place to start your plans.
The bulk of the guide is a list of best practices supported by case study interviews conducted with arts organizations of various disciplines around the country. I am not going to quote extensively from the guide because I feel like I have written some of these topics to death by now. I did want to highlight the fact that the first lesson listed is to strengthen ties with your immediate community. While I have written that to death, I don’t feel anything is lost by repeating it until it people can’t remember a time it wasn’t a core tenet of their practice.
Another lesson learned I wanted to emphasize is:
The unexpected will continue to happen. Be transparent when it does.Adapting quickly to new circumstances and information, and communicating those lessons promptly and effectively to artists/staff, board members, donors, and the public will attract greater confidence in your endeavor.
One thing in the NEA guide you won’t find in any other guide is a survey of National Service Organizations (i.e. American Alliance of Museums, Association of Performing Arts Professionals, Association of Writers & Writing Programs, Dance/USA, Film Festival Alliance, League of American Orchestras, National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, OPERA America, etc) about how their members were coping with the pandemic and what they were seeing.
You’ll find this in Appendix A. It can be worth reading to know you are not alone in the troubles you are facing.
For example:
NSOs also reported these key difficulties for members in reengaging with audiences or visitors:
◽Navigating local or state government reopening protocols (e.g., limitations on gatherings)
◽Securing union permissions
◽Audiences/visitors not following safety guidelines
◽Creating one-way flow in buildings not designed to accommodate routing
◽Cost of retrofitting and preparing safe venues for audiences
◽Accessibility issues that can result from reserved/advance ticketing policies
I was talking with an agent for some Broadway show tours this week in order to get a sense of what things might look like for productions in Fall 2021/Spring 2022. I was intrigued to learn that they were considering sending out two shows in repertory.
What that means is the same cast and crew rehearse so they are capable of mounting two different shows. This was once a common practice in theatre, and is still not terribly uncommon, especially among Shakespeare festivals.
I have seen some smaller touring productions offer this option, but never heard of it on the scale of a Broadway touring show. Given that you can do so much with projections these days, they can cut down on built set pieces to allow the tour to go out with the same number of trucks a Broadway tour of a single show would.
I am not sure if this is the right solution, but this is the first group I have spoken with that seems to acknowledged that times have changed and touring productions need to adopt new approaches.
This offers an opportunity to be more responsive when it comes to routing a show. Usually the tour of Show A will have one schedule and tour of Show B will have another schedule. It doesn’t help either me or the production company if Show A is touring near me but I want to see Show B. The repertory approach means they can send one tour out and perform one show 150 miles away and then another show in my venue. Since they are only sending one tour out with one set of cast and crew, there is a potential to save money vs. sending the two shows out separately.
If they were particularly well-organized and a venue had the space to shift and store things, they could feasibly do one show one night and the other show the next night and have the labor costs involved in doing so be economical for the venue.
How this might impact the quality of the show and the production values people expect, I don’t know. It is absolutely possible to execute a high quality experience with the investment of enough attention.
I suspect the first year or so of post-Covid touring will be an environment that will see even tours of single productions stumbling to find their footing and how well they handle that will be the biggest factor in the success and quality of their product.
Research has shown that offering free admission doesn’t lead to an increase in participation by new audiences. In most cases those that are attending are the people who normally attend, they are just showing up again a little sooner than they might have.
This past October/November I actually paid attention when I visited a museum that was offering free admission on a day that the featured artist was speaking. Sure enough, except for friends of the artists that came from out of town, there were only a handful of people who appeared to have never visited before. Most everyone else were greeted by staff as familiar faces or entered and made a beeline down the correct hallway to the exhibit.
Recently Seth Godin made a post titled “Why isn’t there a line at the library?” which addressed an aspect of what keeps people from showing up. He notes that if any other company was giving their core product away for free, people would cram through their doors.
A century ago, information was truly scarce and books were far more expensive than they are now. A decade ago, obtaining the instructions on how to do something was difficult indeed.
“It’s too expensive,” or “I can’t get access to it,” used to be really good excuses. But they obscured the truth: “It’s too much work.”
And that’s the answer to the question. It’s too much work to change our minds. It’s too much work to dance with the fear of failure. It’s too much work to imagine walking through the world differently.
Let’s be clear, this is true for all of us. There is always something we decide is too much work to engage with and yet will pour five times as much effort into something else. People will periodically ask me if I want to return to acting on stage, but the prospect of investing the proper time and energy to do a good job turns me off the idea. Yet there other things I have been working on regularly for decades. (This blog, for one, to think of it.)
There has also been an ongoing conversation in the arts community about the fact that an environment has been created around what we do that makes it a lot of work to comfortably participate.
Certainly, there are things that our potential audiences/participants already eagerly engage in that require more effort. But in many cases there is also a more widespread sense that you will be joining a bunch of fun, like minded people in this pursuit. Often that is not the vibe we give off.
This forced pause in operations the coronavirus has created provides an opportunity to shift the context and narrative for the future. It can start with social media posts and then transform into practice. Any return to activity is likely to begin on a small scale as people venture out which provides a low stakes environment in which to experiment with change and make your mistakes. Starting out small may not be great for the bottom line, but it offers a chance to reboot narratives and expectations regarding what we are all about.
Advisory Board for the Arts just sent out a summary of four takeaways about what motivates arts donors based on interviews conducted this past November and December.. While this post is going to be quote heavy, it isn’t going to include all their observations so I encourage you to take 2-3 minutes to read the whole thing.
The first takeaway was basically “first impressions set the tone for the whole relationship.” Once someone makes a donation, future donations will generally fall in the same area. The amount donated is fairly dependent on their perception of what a person like themselves has a duty to donate.
“…which is a combination of what they can afford to give and what they believe is their duty to give, based on factors like marital status, whether they have children, and how much they get out of the arts. When prompted to discuss whether he would consider increasing his giving to arts organizations, for example, one interviewee said that increasing “would probably be appropriate for a couple or a family. Just being single, $1,000 is already a high tier.”
The second takeaway probably holds no big surprises. Donors like to support different organizations, but they have a core group of entities (~2-5) with whom they concentrate their support and perhaps up to 20 others which they vary their support.
The third takeaway is very promising for organizations during and after Covid. While people may donate at a certain level to gain perks, taking away those perks won’t cause them to reduce their giving, by and large.
A handful of donors we spoke to pointed to benefits like free parking and access to donor lounges as reasons for their giving — but across the board, donors indicated that they would not change their giving habits if those perks were significantly reduced or removed entirely (as has been the case for many during the COVID-19 pandemic)… Many donors expressed a desire to help their communities, including by attracting business and building a vibrant local economy, through a demonstrated commitment to the arts. They stated their views clearly: the arts are not a luxury. They belong — they are needed — as part of the social fabric of every community…
The last takeaway is also probably not a surprise. Relationships and connections matter–both with the organization and other participants.
…the opportunity to meet and to know other people is what brings them back each year. Interviews revealed they have an acute awareness of what would be lost without those relationships.
Importantly, donors emphasized the difference between arts organizations’ (often costly) initiatives to foster community-building and the community itself. One interviewee summed this up succinctly when she told us that “perks like donor parties and receptions create community, and that is one of the satisfactions people get from donating. It is something people get besides the altruism of giving to the arts. But there are a lot of ways to create community without parties.”
We spoke to some donors who had met lifelong friends through the opera or symphony; we spoke to other donors who jumped at every opportunity to speak with artistic directors and performers and curators. They weren’t planning on discontinuing those relationships anytime soon. To do so would be to leave the community that had brought them those friends in the first place.
Yesterday Drew McManus released another episode of his Shop Talk podcast where he speaks to Kenji Bunch and Jenny Bilfield about artistic elitism. I was listening to it while painting one of my bedrooms and there was an uncanny period where Kenji Bunch was echoing my exact thoughts on a four second delay. It came at the 28 minute mark (cued up below) where Bunch talks about how he had programmed his season with 100% Black American composers with a 50/50 gender split. He says he got a lot of praise for it, but he was a little embarrassed because it was ridiculously easy to do and something he felt he should have done long ago. He suggests there are institutionalized pressures against making those type of decisions based on chicken-egg gatekeeping. (e.g. employers are looking for experience, but you can’t get experience without a job.)
At the time, though four seconds earlier, I was reflecting very closely along the same lines about the last six months. At my day job we have been offering a curated storytelling series and outdoor cabaret series that features local stories and voices. Many of them are stories and voices of Black residents. We have been getting praise for amplifying these stories and voices from members of the Black community, including some of our board members.
Like Kenji I have been a little embarrassed because it hasn’t involved much effort to arrange for interesting and charismatic people to step into our spaces. My staff and I know there is more to be done and feel people need to hold our feet to the fire to do it and not let us off too easily. There may be a time when that comes. Right now people may be in a little bit of shock to see their faces and stories on stage when it isn’t Black History Month and then realize it wasn’t a token effort when it happens again 4-6 weeks later with more of the same listed on the schedule.
I think I have mentioned before on this blog that in some respects the situation with Covid has facilitated some of this. Absent the expectation to provide the same type of programming we have in the past, there is more permission, and even a recognition of the necessity, to focus on local talent and stories.
We had actually been moving in this general direction prior to Covid knowing that the planned construction of a building next to us in 2024 might limit our use of our loading dock and thus larger scale performances. We planned to shift the programming gradually to get audiences used to seeing smaller scaled shows. In some respects that transition might be easier and more acceptable to audiences than it would have without Covid. (And who knows how long construction may be delayed now or if it will happen at all if there is a greater shift to working from home.)
I bring all this up to propose that the near future may be the best opportunity to implement measures to make your organization and programming more inclusive. Not only is the institutional inertia that would normally resist such decisions likely to be weaker, the execution of the effort will likely be easier than you anticipated and warmly welcomed.
What you shouldn’t walk away with is a plan to only effect change up to a certain point as a sop to critics with an expectation of grateful praise. As I said, my team and I pretty much anticipate people will eventually say that was great, why did you stop there, if we don’t continue to think about how we can do better for everyone.
Friend o’ the blog, Rainer Glaap shared a video link to a session lead by Elliott Bruce Hedman, Head Design Researcher at, mPath an organization that researches how consumers engage emotionally with products. mPath uses skin conductivity sensors to measure the emotions people are experiencing during certain situations. The talk was hosted by Github for a technology oriented audience so Hedman characterized the examples he was going to use in his presentation as “bizarre case studies.”
So of course the first one was the New World Symphony (NWS).
The “bizarre” appellation aside the case studies were interesting (the others dealt with selling large shop vacuums and teaching math and reading to kids.) I have queued up the video below to start at the ~3:45 mark where he shows the results for the New World Symphony. (If you want to know about how skin conductivity sensors work, start from the beginning of the video.)
Hedman says he was hired by NWS to reverse the trend of classical music concerts losing about 30% of their audiences annually. In one example he gave, he placed the sensors on veteran concert goers and novices. The emotional engagement of the veteran was very active through out Stravinsky’s “Firebird.” The novice’s engagement at the same concert was virtually flat through the entire piece and only peaks significantly at the applause.
Hedman makes the point that this doesn’t mean it is impossible for new audiences to become emotionally engaged, it just indicates people react to different things. He shows shows the graph of another first timer’s concert experience, this time for the whole concert. This is particularly fun to look at because it shows where the attendee was bored by the person talking from the stage. However, when the music ends and the host starts talking, the engagement jumps before tapering off because something has changed about the experience.
This person was seeing Romeo & Juliet (I am guessing Tchaikovsky for reasons which will become apparent.) They had a much more varied experience than the person seeing The Firebird, especially during the quietest part and the main theme, the latter of which is familiar from basically every romantic moment in movies and commercials.
Hedman said he advised NWS to only program works that were about a minute long to prevent people’s attention from waning and music that was familiar rather than esoteric works that only experts would appreciate.
Yes, the concept of a short classical work, much less one people recognize does raise a chuckle. It wasn’t clear to me whether he meant this for concerts specifically for people who are new to classical music or as a regular feature. (It is probably the latter since he suggests more Red Hot Chili Peppers and less Beethoven.) If anyone knows how New World Symphony implemented his suggestions, which I imagine were more involved than depicted in the video, I would be interested to learn more.
At first it struck me as problematic to play things with which people are familiar if you are also trying to diversify your programming to include compositions by women and persons of color. But it also occurred to me that what he suggests brings up the possibility of facilitating those choices by getting up during a concert and saying “Before we move on, next month we are performing The Rose of Senora. Here is a three minute excerpt that illustrates why this new work excites us. It will be that much better when Holly Mulcahy is here as a soloist.” The idea that everyone in the room is learning something new at the same time might help diminish the sense for new attendees that you need to be an initiate to enjoy the experience.
There were a number of insights Hedman shared at the end of the video which are worth noting if you are trying to improve the emotional experience of audiences, stakeholders, participants, etc:
-You won’t design the right experience the first time out. Hedman says his first attempts in most of his projects were wrong and he is still refining his program to help kids feel excited about reading.
-Businesses are obsessed with happiness, but confidence, attention and understanding, and play is what sells a product. This is something to note – research has shown that people are often satisfied in an experience with a company even if they didn’t get their desired outcome. If they have lodged a complaint but didn’t get a refund/replacement, having felt heard and acknowledged still contributes to a constructive relationship with them. (This is me drawing a connection, not him.)
-Measuring emotion adds the much needed human element to your data. Hedman says the most important thing he wants people to take away is trying to collect emotional data from their customers. He said depending on website stats is insufficient and the emotional data adds depth to your understanding. While he obviously has a service he is selling to people, it is worth remembering that emotion is strongly intertwined in what we do and thus integral to our interactions with audiences and participants.
A number of arts organizations like the one I run as my day job, have started focusing on programming that is locally and regionally sourced since drawing on artists from a greater distance is not practical. Back in April I saw an article on CityLab that seemed like cool idea that could be scaled up, adapted and lead by local arts organizations, even if it was over Zoom. I held off writing about it because best results probably depended on access to local libraries and historical archives and not many of them were open to the public at the time. While this still remains the case in some communities, I thought I would toss the idea out there as something to tool up for as vaccine distribution increases.
The article author Ariel Aberg-Riger, set out to discover the history of her neighborhood in Buffalo, NY and created a little pictorial guide to her journey. She delved into the archives of newspapers, libraries, Library of Congress and local historical groups as well as chatting online with neighborhood groups on Facebook.
Her account is rather engaging and amusing. She talks about how she thought it ridiculous that people were taking out classified ads with pictures of their kids—until she realized that practice was an early precursor of Instagram. She found out that in 1924 a burglar had been caught by a previous owner of her house when the burglar reached under his pillow and woke the owner.
She also learned that her street originally had a different name that didn’t appear on maps because the road wasn’t paved. More interestingly the person for whom the road was originally named opposed having it paved, but the city insisted on it so they could deliver coal to the public school. The compromise left part of the road unpaved for four years and as a result, the brick paving is two different colors right in front of Aberg-Riger’s house.
There is quite a bit more she discovered about how those who originally owned the land under her house were connected to the history of Buffalo at large, but I felt like just the little bit I shared here could provide the basis for creating short stories, plays, visual art works, storytelling sessions, narrative dances, etc, etc.
There are a number of directions an arts organization could go from involving people in researching elements of their community by holding contests for the best stories that are uncovered to getting them to participate in creating works based on information that is uncovered.
Stories from a more distant past might be useful in addressing uncomfortable topics of the present, including making people aware that history is seldom as clear cut as reported and problems faced today aren’t necessarily unprecedented and insurmountable and therefore capable of resolution.
ArtsHacker-in-chief Drew McManus praised me for thinking of such a timely topic to write on and I responded that it was largely inspired by a true story.
At my day job we have been able to mount some smaller scale events like movie screenings, storytelling sessions and outdoor concerts using our fire escape as a stage. Even with all the measures we have taken to ensure social distancing, people have a hard time conceiving of themselves seeing indoor events. We had the manager and mascot of our local baseball team introduce a screening of A League of Their Own this summer. When they told a co-worker where they were going, she was interested in attending until she found out the screening was indoors. At the same time, she was willing to go to a restaurant where she would be sitting a lot closer to other people and have worse air circulation.
As a result, my staff and I have been putting time and effort into taking pictures of people attending performances spaced apart at an appropriate distance. We have pictures of parents helping their kids pump hand sanitizer and everyone wearing masks. These pictures pepper our web page and appear at seemingly random intervals on our social media pages. All calculated to present an accurate, reassuring image of an experience at our venue.
It wasn’t long ago that we noticed social media posts by another arts organization promoting an upcoming concert. The image they used depicted a packed indoor concert which I am 90% certain was a stock photo rather than from one of their shows. Later they emblazoned “Sold Out!” across the same image which reinforced the idea that there were shows going on locally where people were crushed together.
The truth is, the show they were doing was at an outdoor amphitheater which employs solid social distancing guidelines. While it was sold out because of social distancing guidelines, attendance didn’t reach the fire code capacity of the space. The post-event pictures reflected this with masked people seated in a grassy area a respectable distance from one another.
While pictures of people spread out across the frame isn’t as sexy as a mass of people with open mouthed expressions of delight, it is a lot more reassuring for audiences during these cautious times. Right now a lot of people are seeking that measure of confidence over a mass communal experience.
Just think about how many times in the last 9 months you have reflexively felt uncomfortable with how blase people in a video or picture were being about masks and social distancing only to realize the performance or gathering depicted was from 18 months ago.
A year ago how I promoted my event didn’t really impact the way people perceived your event. Now the question is much less about which of many activities you want to choose and more about IF you feel comfortable making a choice to participate in a public activity at all. As a result, how other organizations present an experience has a much greater influence on the lens through which people perceive your event.
There has been an ongoing conversation among the arts community that there needs to be less effort invested in selling people on an arts experience and more listening to people to find out what they are looking for.
The alternative is the elevator question, not the elevator pitch. To begin a conversation–not about you, but about the person you’re hoping to connect with. If you know who they are and what they want, it’s a lot more likely you can figure out if they’re a good fit for who you are and what you want. And you can take the opportunity to help them find what they need, especially if it’s not from you.
[…]
Instead of looking at everyone as someone who could fund you or buy from you or hire you, it might help to imagine that almost no one can do those things, but there are plenty of people you might be able to help in some other way, even if it’s only to respect them enough to not make a pitch.
The truth is, unless you are in the presence of a very narrow demographic, chances are that few people you meet can fund or buy from you. Since we know that the narrow demographic most inclined to buy from us is not sufficient to support our work long term, you do need to talk to a lot of people whose general inclination toward the arts and your organization is less known. Therefore the elevator question is going to be better alternative.
Of course, the elevator part is a misnomer for this concept because there is likely no way the conversation will effectively be completed on an elevator trip between floors. It may be months or years.
Just because you aren’t practicing to deliver a frantically paced pitch between floors doesn’t mean you should neglect to provide a focused introduction of yourself and the work you and your organization does. There is so much more you can talk about if you aren’t trying to milk a sale out of precious seconds, but people will appreciate an organized, interesting self-introduction as much as they appreciate not feeling hustled to buy into something.
Much of the information about why people attend was very similar to other recent survey results I have written about in the last 3-6 months. To be honest, given that all the data was collected pre-Covid and so much of that may no longer be valid in the future, I didn’t want to devote a lot of time reviewing that information.
What caught my eye were some findings about how people view their own creative expression.
Like this bit about the intended audience for created art and how it was shared. I was surprised so few performing artists share their work on the internet compared to other artists.
Between 35 and 40 percent of art creators and performers said their art was intended only for personal consumption. (The percentage was highest for creative writers at nearly 40 percent.) Greater variance was observed among those who reported their intended audience as only people they personally knew: 52 percent of art creators identified this audience type, with only 32 percent of creative writers doing so. The highest percentage of respondents creating or performing for the general public were creative writers (29 percent), followed by arts performers (18 percent), and visual art creators (13 percent).
Nearly half of those who personally created art used the internet to share their work. In contrast, about 41 percent of those who engaged in creative writing used the internet to share their writing, and fewer than 14 percent of those who personally performed art shared their work in this manner.
The findings on price and income are interesting and complex. Income quartile was not predictive of whether people would say price factored in their decision to attend an event. In other words, income level didn’t necessarily align with whether they said price was a factor. However, of those identifying low cost as a motivation, it was almost the only reason they attended.
The percentage of each income group reporting that low cost motivated their attendance ranged from 30 to 39 percent, with those in the lowest-income quartile citing it the most often as a factor, and those in highest-income quartile citing it the least often. However, unlike in 2012, income quartile was not a significant predictor of whether an individual would identify low cost as a reason for attendance. Of those who identified low cost as a reason for attendance, between 68 and 71 percent of each income quartile group indicated the factor as the most important or only reason for their attendance.
Socialization was a big factor in generational terms. The younger the generation, the more frequently the respondent would say not having someone to accompany them was a barrier to participation. While Covid may change a lot about people’s willingness to venture out for in-person experiences, I suspect this is one finding of the survey that will hold true for those that are willing to attend in-person in the future.
In the closing plenary of the Arts Midwest/Western Arts Alliance conference, Arts Midwest CEO Torrie Allen spoke to Theaster Gates about a number of topics. What caught my attention was Gates’ fabrication of the Yamaguchi Institute. You may have heard this story already.Gates claimed that his ceramics mentor was a Japanese immigrant, Shoji Yamaguchi, that moved to Mississippi in search of a fabled “black clay” with which to make his pottery. Yamguchi marries a black civil rights activist and begins teaching black people how to make pottery in the Japanese tradition..
The whole thing was a fiction created by Gates but bolstered by Gates hiring an actor to play Yamaguchi’s son during a showing of Yamaguchi/Gates work. Gates admitted the truth of things some years ago, but in his discussion with Allen a couple weeks ago, added some nuance.
Gates in fact had traveled to Japan and studied how the Japanese made their ceramics. He says people in Japan felt he was a hard worker, but was pretty bad at making pottery. Finally one of the masters notes Gates is trying so hard to make a Japanese tea bowl and failing, perhaps he should try making a Mississippi tea bowl. Gates said that made him recognize that “maybe there is something worth mining in my own history.”
Yamaguchi was Gates attempt to create a context that connects his cultural roots with that of the Japanese craft. He says that he created a Yamaguchi as “a way of…creating an imaginary and psychic value for the history of where my people are from.” Gates said in the process of making up Yamguchi and the discipline he embodied, he decided to adhere to the Yamaguchi way and his pottery improved. “I actually became a better potter because Yamaguchi showed me the way.”
Gates says this type of myth making helps to create hope when it feels like so many forces are moving against you. He also said inventing Yamaguchi filled a vacuum of leadership in his life.
Gates also talks about how the Yamaguchi Institute hosted dinners where people from the community could have conversations and exchange ideas to create relationships across economic and racial lines. It sounds like there was a good chance it was a predecessor of the On The Table movement that originated in Chicago and spread across the nation to other communities.
This is a really fascinating story because essentially Gates created a fiction through which to focus his own self-discipline and provide himself with hope and guidance.
Recently I have been talking about how Covid times have brought a greater tolerance on the part of boards/audiences for experimentation with programming choices. I guess I have been talking about it with colleagues and co-workers because when I went to find my post I made so I could link to it, I couldn’t find it.
In any case, Drew McManus posted another episode of his Shop Talk podcast today where he talks with Jeff Vom Saal, Executive Director of Spokane Symphony & Martin Woldson Theater at The Fox and Zak Vassar, President & CEO of the Toledo Alliance for the Performing Arts.
At around the 16 min mark, Drew talks about the difference between creativity and innovation and notes there really hasn’t been a lot of the latter in the orchestra world and in fact many great administrators have been punished by boards and donors for pushing boundaries and taking risks. He says now arts organizations are paying the price for failing to become nimble enough to respond to the current challenges.
Vassar responds by talking about a trustee that recently pulled him aside and said:
“You’re trying to do something that in a good economy I would have voted down everyday of the week. But now is the time to experiment and to be nimble and to learn what we didn’t know and learn how to do it better. Because by the time the economy and the world comes back online, you’re gonna be at least one hare’s run faster on the track than the slowest tortoise…”
Let’s just ponder that for a second. I am not saying organizational staff don’t buy into this sort of thinking as well, but just imagine having a board member tell you that they would have fought you tooth and nail in better economic times, but now that you are really wondering about how you are going to meet payroll, have no audience willing to show up, slimmer fundraising prospect and almost no staff to pursue donations and grants, this is the best time to invest non-existent time, energy and resources into innovating?
I understand that when you feel you have nothing left to lose and find your perceived competitors on a level playing field (or teetering at the edge of the field) it seems like seeking new pathways is the best course of action.
Why were the decisions we are making now problematic when the economy was better and there was more ability to mitigate the impact of failure?
Perhaps the first thing in need of change the organizational dynamics that won’t tolerate change until complete failure is imminent.
We have seen the results of this type of thinking for decades – people rally around an organization at the moment its existence is imperiled. Those cases are isolated and individual. Now everyone is imperiled and we realize there is a need for a broad, communal rally–probably necessitating listening more to the other people at the rally.
Or more aptly in the terms of this metaphor, inviting a lot more people to the rally than in the past and listening to them.
If you have a board member that is either explicitly or implicitly communicating they would have opposed you before, but now they are willing to support you, you need to have a very honest talk that makes it clear there can be no return to those old modes of thinking when the economic picture improves. While the economy may improve, the operating environment and expectations people have will not return to what they were before.
The title of today’s post references the fact yesterday’s post was about cultural funding in Germany. I hadn’t planned it this way, but I wanted to draw attention to the lengths various venues in Austria went to this summer in order to perform in front of live audiences.
Among the rules: Audience members were asked to wear masks and social distance at one meter. Seating capacities were reduced, and every second seat in every concert hall was locked so people couldn’t get around the restrictions. There were no intermissions at performances, or refreshments available.
Simply buying a ticket meant agreeing to engage in contact tracing, if it came to that: Tickets were personalized with names, and audience members had to show an ID when they entered any venue. ..
In the end, the festival attracted more than 76,000 visitors — a little more than a quarter of last year’s — from 39 countries during August. According to the festival’s final report on the event, “not a single positive case has been reported to the authorities.” And of the 3,600 coronavirus tests carried out on the 1,400 people involved in festival preparation, just one came back positive in early July.
What was more interesting to me was the process the Vienna State Opera used to determine the testing schedule for their employees. Encouraged by the success of the Salzburg Festival, they planned to reopen last month and implemented a system of color-coded lanyards to indicate which employees were most at risk for exposure to the Covid virus.
Singers and people working directly with the singers are part of the red group and are tested every week (since they can’t always wear masks or keep distance onstage). Administrators are part of the orange group and are tested every four weeks. The yellow and white groups — people who don’t have close contact with artists, such as delivery people — are only tested if there’s a known exposure. And everyone wears colored lanyards to denote their risk, while groups are instructed to stay apart.
Read the whole article because there are interviews with individual artists about how they are impacted. The tl;dnr version is – artists are risking their health for even less pay than before
I just want to take a moment to brag on some museum friends and also reinforce the idea that one shouldn’t discount the experiences found in small towns as of lower quality.
Long time readers know that before I moved to Georgia, I lived in Portsmouth, OH, a fairly rural town in Appalachia which has often had the misfortune of being the go-to poster child for the opioid epidemic despite having started rebounding from its worst point before other communities even recognized they were in crisis.
When I was living there, the local museum presented the work of Elijah Pierce, a man who started wood carving and barbering at a fairly young age. He did a number of biblical scenes whose imagery he used to support his work as a traveling preacher. Pierce had been born in Mississippi, but settled in Columbus, OH. When the work came to the local museum, they had a couple people talk about Pierce’s work, including a gentleman who would often walk over from the nearby Columbus College of Art and Design where he taught to chat with Pierce in his barber shop, surrounded by many of the carvings.
But when Nancy Ireson, the chief curator of Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, first saw them in 2018 she was amazed she had not encountered the work before. Ireson asked her fellow curator Zoé Whitley, the director of London’s Chisenhale Gallery, what she knew about Pierce. “Neither of us had come across his carvings in the siloed contexts of so-called ‘fine art’ exhibitions of 19th and 20th century artists,” Whitley says.
If you type Elijah Pierce’s name into a web search engine now, you will see this show is a big deal with many news stories written about it. (Granted, in the cultural news vacuum created by Covid, this may be less of a feat than it seems. Though the civil rights themes of the work would have likely still gotten traction.)
When I think about the fact I could wander in to look at Pierce’s work for free multiple times at my leisure, which I definitely did, and was able to learn about the work with people who really knew it well–and now people are swooning over the significance of Pierce and his work, it goes to my original point about not discounting the potential quality of an experience.
Gaining access to Pierce’s work was not an anomaly for this museum. There were a number of artists whose work showed there and got picked up by galleries. Some of them I bought before they gained greater notoriety, some I didn’t. Sometimes I regretted that later. I know for a fact that I walked out the door past two gallery owners who were coming down to look at the painting I had purchased and was carrying. Though certainly it wasn’t the only or most prestigious work they were coming to see that trip.
In this particular case, the community benefits from the fact museum directors were people who had curated good relationships over the course of their careers and were able to arrange for some interesting art to show. Likewise, gallery owners trust their judgment and check out work they display–or work with the museum to display the work of artists they represent.
I am sure the number of pieces of Pierce’s work that I saw are just a small portion of what you might see in Philadelphia so I wasn’t getting the blockbuster experience The Barnes Foundation might be offering. However, to drive into Portsmouth, it would be easy to assume you wouldn’t get to experience that small portion. What you definitely wouldn’t get in Philadelphia is an invitation to wander across the street to the museum directors’ home/gallery to nosh on some food and chat–something everyone who showed up for the opening got whether you were an old friend or new.
I knew Ruth Bader Ginsburg loved opera. There are stories about her and Justice Scalia’s friendship and shared love of opera. A few weeks ago, I had written about the artistic director of the Tulsa Opera’s comments in a documentary film about being married by Justice Ginsburg who had admired the director’s work as a composer.
I have to say I appreciated that Chief Justice Robert’s eulogy today used her love of the performing arts as a significant theme, referencing opera multiple times, her rock star reputation and speaking of the court as her stage. I wish more eulogies were that way. It makes the deceased seem like they lived a more well rounded life versus simply talking about their professional accomplishments.
So I was annoyed that some news sources edited the performing arts content out of videos of Robert’s speech.
There were a couple article this weekend about Ginsburg’s passion for the arts, but the one I like best was written by the Washington Post’s Peter Marks.
Not only was she a passionate spectator, she made cameo appearances in some productions and appears to have married a whole lot of creatives along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.
It was interesting to note that the very first commenter on the Washington Post article says he asked for a refund as soon as he saw Ginsburg was performing that night because he paid good money to see professionals, not amateurs perform.
As I was driving into work today, I heard an NPR story about the 92nd St Y, an event/education space in NYC, and how they have gone virtual during Covid-19. According to NPR, in a typical year 92 Street Y has about 300,000 people participate in their events. In the last 6 months they have had over 3.4 million people engage with their virtual programming.
My first inclination was to think that if they had successfully monetized their offerings, it was likely due to the fact they are located in NYC and are such a marquee name that Hugh Jackman takes classes there.
It turns out that even with those numbers, they haven’t been financially successful.
BLAIR: And they’re selling tickets. Some programming is free, but they’ve also generated over $3 million in revenue. Still, CEO Seth Pinsky says, despite the income and the massive audience increase, they’ve had to furlough staff and cut salaries.
PINSKY: The hardest part of all of this is that, in spite of all the successes that we’re having, the economics still don’t work. And we’ve been operating on fumes.
BLAIR: Pinsky says he hopes, going forward, the 92nd Street Y can crack the code on how to make this new virtual, now global model a sustainable one. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
It should be noted that while $3 million seems great revenue for a lot of us, it is all relative. According to 92nd Street Y’s financial reports, (much love to them for making it so easy to find), they had $45 million in earned revenue in fiscal year 2019.
For as much as people are saying virtual content is the future, you don’t want to necessarily go all in on this right now. Though obviously, investing energy in in-person content ain’t generating $3 million right now.
Broadway producer Ken Davenport is of the mind that the more paid virtual content that is offered, the quicker that mode of engaging with content will be normalized. He uses the example of younger people paying to watch people stream themselves playing video games.
I am not sure that is the most apt comparison when it comes to streaming live content. I think using your computer to watch someone play a game you, yourself can play on a computer involves a different mode of thinking. There is no live substitute that exists for that experience. Even if you attended a video game tournament in person, and people pack arenas to do just that, you would still end up watching the action play out on a huge screen.
That said, Davenport seems to think there is a separate audience out there that may not necessarily overlap with existing audiences. I am put in mind of the fact that among the top impediments to attending a live event are not having anyone who will accompany them; transportation/distance difficulties; not having the time. There may, in fact, be a local demographic that will engage with a performance that is livestreamed for them.
Davenport writes:
Well first, if you’re a TheaterGoer and you see a TheaterMaker doing something with a price tag attached (and it’ll be much less than a live ticket – because they have to be), considering paying. You’ll be helping a TheaterMaker. And TheaterMakers? Help your peers. Attend their shows. Support and you’ll be supported.
But if you want more specifics, then here are my three giant takeaways for TheaterMakers that you MUST do to get on the ground floor of the paid streaming revolution that is coming.
Build a following. You need your own tribe, your own fans, your own community to have a successful career in streaming your art. (That tribe can be any size, but you need to know where they are and be able to communicate with them daily – and yes, social media is great, but nothing beats email.
Stream something. Anything. Start experimenting. Plays. Concerts. One person shows. Try to make it a unique experience for the streaming market so it feels created for it.
Repeat. Keep doing different things until you find what works for YOU. And after a while you will find something that supports your live stage work. Wouldn’t that be nice?
At my venue we are going to experiment along these lines with a speaker series in October. We will have a live event that is streamed. We are putting the stream on sale a little later than the live event tickets under the philosophy that live streaming is an overflow space to some degree.
After the speaker finishes, there will be a curated Q&A. A half hour after the Q&A we will host online discussions of the topic in Zoom breakout rooms as a way to simulate an after event discussion. The half hour is to allow in-person attendees a little time to get home and log in. The goal is to try to bring the two methods of interaction together in one place. I will let you know how things turn out.
This weekend at my venue, we hosted our first live event since March -an outdoor cabaret performance on our fire escape. (Not so much an invention, I suppose since the first thing people did when the pandemic started was sing from their apartment windows and fire escapes.)
As you can see from the pictures below, we have a pretty substantial fire escape with multiple levels that can be used for performance. Since this was our first time out and we didn’t want to expose more of our equipment to the summer heat and possible rain than necessary, we limited our activities to one level.
The audience sat in our parking lot. As you can see, we prepped the parking lot by chalking out seating pods. The seating was general admission and we undersold what we imagined our capacity to be in order to provide both our audience and ourselves with the flexibility to see how things developed.
We determined the size and number of pods to create by analyzing the ticket purchasing patterns. We drew out two person, four person, six person and in one case 10 person, pods based on how people purchased their tickets. The pods were spaced to allow six feet between groups of unrelated people. Then we allowed enough room on the perimeter for people who felt the need for greater distancing to set up as they wanted.
Our aim was to observe how many people chose the pods versus the open areas in order to get a sense of what our actual capacity for the space might be while ensuring good sightlines. We capped the event at 175 people, but now figure we can get up to about 250 and still ensure appropriate spacing and flexibility in seating location.
Our local mask ordinance requires that if you are anywhere outside your home within six feet of a person with whom you do not live, you must wear a mask. The example given is if you are waiting at a crosswalk alone, you don’t have to wear a mask, but if someone arrives to wait with you, you need to be wearing one.
Since people were coming with picnic set-ups or could grab food from partner restaurants and didn’t have to wear a mask while eating, our policy was you could only sit with people in your household and could remove your mask while seated in your pod with them. Since moving to and from that space requires becoming closer to others, you needed to wear a mask as you moved about everywhere else. By and large everyone heeded the rule and those that didn’t we firmly prodded to comply.
One bit of fortunate timing was about three weeks ago the local government expanded permission to have open containers on downtown streets from First Friday only to every night between 4 pm-10 pm to allow bar patrons to use sidewalk tables restaurants and the downtown association had deployed. This allowed us to serve alcohol out of our own bar which helped improve the financial situation of the event.
Overall, it was regarded as a success and we are planning to run at least one more before it gets too cool this Fall. Stay tuned.
A post on ye olde Twitter feed led me to a piece on The Globe & Mail site structured as a conversation between J. Kelly Nestruck (theatre critic) and Kate Taylor (visual art critic). In it, they reveal some of the benefits and detriments of watching a livestream performance.
Reading it, I felt like there were some unrealized gems that may become regular features once they are fully developed as well as some points of friction that people will either get used to, fully resist, or accommodate in a way that leads to the development of a new practice.
Early on Nestruck observes that the Stratford Festival’s supposed archival materials look highly polished and he expresses “one of my concerns as a theatre critic is that I fear many of the Shakespeare productions at Stratford are now being created with filming in mind.”
A few sentences later, he says lauds the viewing party he attended as a great experience that probably echoes the environment of Shakespeare at The Globe Theatre:
My best experiences came tuning in to “live viewing parties” to restore the feeling of watching along with others. These are online appointment viewings where you can chat with other viewers in the comments.
The one for Stratford’s Macbeth, for instance, was fun because I could read what folks watching in Winnipeg, Montreal and Cleveland had to say in real time. A recent immigrant from Syria living in Toronto even chimed in to say it was the first time he’d seen the play.
Many actors who had been in the show watched as well, and shared backstage anecdotes. A chatting audience and meta-theatrical asides may sound ghastly to some Shakespeare purists, but I actually thought this was probably more like what the boisterous original outdoor audience was like in Shakespeare’s time.
Taylor says she can see the attraction of having that chatting environment as a frame for viewing the production, though she likens it to the distraction of texting while driving, but she doesn’t think it is a good substitute for live attendance.
Nestruck mentions sometimes the live communal experience is artificially manipulated. He describes how one of the last shows he saw before the Covid shutdown in March actually used canned cheering to get the audience going–though the sound design intentionally tapped into the live audience reactions as well.
“I later learned this chanting and cheering was actually part of the show’s sneaky sound design – though the recorded disembodied shouts then did lead to real cheering. (The sound designer Gareth Owen told me he sometimes also places microphones around a theatre so that an audience’s audible responses can be amplified at certain moments.)
All of which is to say that technology can help foster a feeling of belonging, at the theatre as much as at home.
As this conversation continued, Taylor admits that based on the examples Nestruck has cited, it is becoming difficult for her to definitively say a live experience is the best experience.
So, you’re really challenging me to explain why live performances, with the audience’s and the actors’ minds and bodies occupying the same space and time, are special and important.
It’s odd, but the pandemic has made me recognize the weight of theatrical rituals that I used to dismiss: booking the date, dressing up, applauding all performances. One artist told me that your ticket is a contract with the performer, both literally and figuratively. I will show up; you will show up. There will be a transaction. Somehow, I don’t think that happens when you watch something on a screen. I don’t feel I have entered into a transaction with Brad Pitt or even Greta Gerwig.
In the end, both say there is an ineffable value in the live performance/museum experience that can’t be replaced.
What grabbed my attention was Drew defining a museum experience as information gathering in the same sense as entering a library.
Museums fall within the larger field of GLAM—art galleries, libraries, and museums—where you’re not supposed to go there knowing everything. That’s the myth of museums. You don’t have to know every single book when you go into a library. You go to a library to gather information, and we should be looking at museums in the same way. We go into museums or enter museum websites to garner information, and hopefully we leave knowing more than what we came in with. But somewhere along the line, it became like, “I don’t get it,” or, “If I don’t know this, this, or this, then I shouldn’t go.” That’s one of the greater barriers to access
Drew is pretty passionate about museums. In the conversation between her and the interviewer, there is a fair bit of discussion about all the expectations of what an experience is supposed to be that weigh down the experience. They say that not only can’t a museum account for all contexts influencing how people are interacting with art, sometimes the person who normally spends hours in a gallery is coming in to get out of the rain for a half hour or because they feel like getting out during their lunch hour.
This is obviously applicable to all disciplines and their respective audiences. Along those lines, Drew acknowledges sometimes timing is everything. She says despite there being hundreds of visual arts related blogs out there before her’s, when she started her Black Contemporary Art Tumblr page, it aligned with a need from people who were passionate and curious, but didn’t have the resources to learn and were alienated by the way art was presented in museums and galleries.
Based on this, Drew is an advocate for providing different paths which allow people to interact with your organization: website, blog, video content, etc., as an accompaniment for the physical experience you offer.
There is a recording of the full interview from which the article is excerpted if you want to absorb the whole conversation. (There is also a transcript, but it is auto-generated by software and attributes Drew’s words to 4-5 separate speakers which gets confusing.)
Drew McManus has recently rolled out a video podcast on the Adaptistration site with the goal of addressing topics facing the orchestra business. Today, he posted the second episode title, Art Has Always Been Political, with guests Jason Haaheim and Weston Sprott.
They get to discussing the familiar topic of how the non-profit model in the U.S. has tended to reinforce the values and demographic composition of those who had the money to support non-profits. Right around the 23:10 mark, Sprott approaches the fact many arts organizations reflect a very wealthy, Caucasian demographic from the point of view of mission vs. design.
He says that many arts non-profits fail to live up to their mission statements, mostly by virtue of the fact that those statements are idealized visions of reality. From the design perspective, they are operating exactly as intended:
“…if you shift the paradigm and think, is this organization serving the group of people that it was designed to serve, then that is yes…Now that doesn’t mean that the group of people that it was designed to serve is the correct group or an inclusive group, but it is what it was designed to serve. If you have an administration and a board and everyone that funds you fits in one, in general, to one demographic, then it’s not surprising that the people that perform and the people that attend the concerts…all fit into that demographic. It was designed to be that way.
I don’t think that a lot of opera companies or The Met, for example, were designed with the idea that we want to make sure that people from all cultures and backgrounds, including black people and brown people and other groups who are marginalized feel like they are truly comfortable in our space. So that is a different question..Does our mission say we reach those people? Yeah it does. Was our organization designed to reach those people and is it structured to reach those people? It’s not.
This reinforces what Nina Simon says in The Art of Relevance about needing to create more doors through which the people you wish to serve can enter. While some of those doors may indeed be physical if you are designating space for new people, in most cases they are conceptual. But require no less effort than a construction project in order to properly revise staffing, board composition, funding, programming so that the organization is designed to serve this broader range of people.
This past weekend the Macon Film Festival held one of their few live screenings of this year in my theater. (The rest of the festival content is being streamed.) They showed The Sound of Identity, a documentary about the first opera performance by a trans person in the U.S. The singer, Lucia Lucas, is an American living in Germany who was invited to perform Don Giovanni for Tulsa Opera in their 2018-2019 season. The angle they were taking is that Don Giovanni is a master of disguise and uses that in the process of his seductions.
The movie is basically what you want a film on this subject to be. Despite the PR text about Oklahoma being one of the reddest parts of the United States and the artistic director, Tobias Picker’s line in the trailer about potentially needing to resign, the socio-political elements of Tulsa never factor in. (They do have some fantastic shots of the city.) The movie could have happened anywhere, it just so happens Tulsa invited Lucas first. Similarly, the general approach of the movie was that this was a production of Don Giovanni where the lead just happened to be a trans person.
Because in fact, the movie is really about us –the arts profession. I am not alone in feeling this. I had a conversation with my marketing director and she remarked, unprompted, how much the movie was about arts administration. The biggest conflicts arise from things we deal with every day regardless of what the show is and who is performing. Their bad dress rehearsal moment is when the singer playing Leporello, a major part, gets sick and the assistant director does the blocking while the guy playing Commendatore sings the part, all of which makes it difficult for Lucas to synch up properly.
This is actually a good movie to show people who aren’t familiar with mounting a production because there is a lot of detail, but very little technical jargon. Though certainly I may be assuming a lot of shared basic knowledge from my long career in the arts.
Pretty much everything we discuss about running an arts organization is in this movie. The whole opera is dying and tickets only cover a portion of the $500,000 cost it takes to mount a production conversation occurs. (Their revenue goal was $120,000. We never hear the final tally, but sales were at ~$70,000 a few weeks out.)
Lucas and the artistic director have a conversation about how a trans person in the lead will attract a new audience and some of those they talk to say that is the reason they are attending. (With one guy it seemed pretty clear he didn’t anticipate coming back for other productions.)
There is a discussion about the need for board diversity. A representative for Tulsa Opera touts the board diversity, but the interviewer actually says he has to push back on that statement because the board of 30-50 (per the movie) has only two people of color. The representative backpedals a little saying there are a large number of homosexuals on the board.
There is a fair portion of the movie associated with promoting the production which illustrates just how much time is involved and how difficult it can be to do it well.
Between the organization and Lucas’ own drive, the singer is shown doing a lot of social gatherings. That comes up as a potential problem in a conversation with the director when Lucas says she isn’t feeling the guidance the director is giving with a particular song. The director says Lucas needs to conserve her energy and not do so many public appearances that she feels drained during rehearsals.
Lucas also prints up promotional postcards on her own dime and goes out to a park to hand them out. The artistic director accompanies her, but isn’t happy with what is happening. When they interview him alone, he says something akin to “I don’t want to characterize it as a fiasco, but it was sort of a fiasco.”
There was a moment in a restaurant that made me cringe a little where Lucas and the artistic director are eating and strike up a conversation with one of the restaurant staff. They tell her they are doing Don Giovanni and ask her if she knows the show. The staff member says she hasn’t heard of it and then Lucas says, “well here is the score.” Then they end the conversation telling her to tell anyone who asks that they are doing the opera. I didn’t feel like that exchange advanced the staff person’s knowledge or incentive to attend much at all.
Which is not to say that Lucas wasn’t able to have constructive conversations about the opera or her career because she was shown chatting at least a half dozen social gatherings. Near the end of the movie, she says she wants people to leave the opera hating Giovanni, but also loving him, but hating themselves for loving him because he represents misogyny and sexual predation in an extreme. Something like that would get people wanting to know more.
Ultimately, there is a scene where Lucas says she has been told that it is not her job to worry about how well the show is selling and has been asked to scale back her activities.
You are probably getting the sense that there is very little sensationalism about the lead in this opera being a trans person. So much of the movie is pretty run of the mill as far as productions go, but also relatable for people who aren’t in the arts world. Lucas has been a huge video game fan since she was younger. We see her playing video games while rehearsing in her room as a way to disconnect her brain. She also draws a parallel between being able to play Magic: The Gathering online versus playing in person to the experience of watching arts online being no substitute for experiencing it live in person.
There is a section where Lucas and the artistic director, Tobias Picker, are playing a Mario Brothers game where Picker talks about the challenges of his career as a composer and being married in the Supreme Court by Ruth Bader Ginsberg who is a fan of his work. The conversations between Lucas and Picker are some of the best moments of the movie.
The director of the opera, Denni Sayers, has some good moments waxing philosophical about art and celebrity–kids today want to be famous, but can’t answer when you ask what they want to be famous for when there are so many things to be involved with from politics, racial justice, environment, science, arts, etc.
As I said, the movie is really about arts organizations and the environment in which they operate. If you have an opportunity to see the movie, I think you will enjoy it. Right now it is playing a few film festivals, but the producers alluded to an ability to stream it that will be announced soon.
Collen Dilenschneider most a recent post about the factors that influence a cultural organization’s reputation. In order they are: Favorability, Mission Execution, Onsite Experience, Stability, Social Impact, Leadership, Testimonials, Business Results and Contributions to Education.
Dilenschneider starts out saying it isn’t about the Yelp/Trip Advisory reviews so I knew testimonials wouldn’t be listed near the top. I was really surprised to see that Mission Execution came in second and before Onsite Experience. My first thought was that we would need to rethinks the types of questions we were using on surveys because so few are oriented toward mission execution.
Now to be clear, Dilenschneider says this isn’t about your ability to recite your mission statement on command, but how well you have internalized and manifest your mission.
“But this measurement and its rank suggest that knowing what you stand for matters – and knowing that you take action surrounding what you stand for matters, too.”
As you might anticipate, she says many of these categories are inter-related. The perception of organizational stability is shaped by leadership and business results, the latter of which is basically financial stability.
Two of the significant observations Dilenschneider made speak to the need to always be working on cultivating a good reputation as a hedge against times of crisis. Or to metaphorically employ my grandmother’s advice – “Always wear clean underwear because you never know if you will be in an accident.”
The entities with better reputational equities prior to the pandemic seem to be faring better during it. … it seems those that had better reputation-related metrics prior to the pandemic are doing a better job keeping them for now. This may be because those institutions had already made investments in social media, for instance, and had established a reputation for engaging audiences digitally before they had to… Entities with better reputations may have similarly already been promulgating educational resources, also resulting in their coming to mind compared to entities that may be only really starting this effort now.
The web may now play an even bigger role in maintaining a positive reputation that inspires attendance. …The web – and social media, in particular – played a critical role in motivating attendance and shaping reputation prior to that pandemic. With more time spent online and fewer folks out and about, digital engagement and seeing stories from others may influence the perceptions of all of these factors influencing reputation to an even greater extent.
Nina Simon was recently a guest on a podcast hosted by Culture Reset. As always, I find anything she has to say increases my contemplation about the way arts organizations, including my own, operate and interact with the community.
There was one part of Nina’s commentary about her career that caught my attention because it resonates closely with a central topic I have been writing on for a couple years. (By the way, MANY thanks to Culture Reset for providing a transcript of the podcast, I was not looking forward to having to transcribe this by ear.) (also, my emphasis)
…I identify very quickly the board cared about attendance, dollars and good press. And so I said, ‘OK, I’m going to make change in the direction I want, that generates those outcomes, and then I’m going to show them those numbers on a platter. And I’m going to tell them here are the activities, the weird activities we did that led to those outcomes. And I am going to buy myself more and more space to pursue this strategy as long as it delivers these outcomes.
But the fatal mistake I made is that (and this is very personal for me. I actually haven’t talked about this before) is that as the years went on and we did more and more of this work, I kept delivering those same outcomes to the board and I delivered the strategy where we shared that area of change, we shared all the data, blah, blah, blah, blah. But when I was getting ready to leave and when they started to recruit my successor, there was a real battle that was rooted in the fact I think, that the board had never fully internalised these strategies, led to those outcomes. And that is my fault because it was easier for me to sell them those outcomes and have them nod and be happy and for me to go on with my team doing the great work we were doing than it was to really say to them, we’ve got to talk about how different this is and what we are willing to do to keep this, you know, that what is in the DNA of the success that you’re so proud of.
While anecdotal, this is another example of why we can’t continue to simply use economic value of the arts as a justification of its existence.
But this never teaches them why we value the arts. It is not a conversation that discusses the arts the way we feel about them. Its not a picture of the intrinsic value of the arts, because in talking about instrumentality we always make the arts subservient. That’s never only what they are to us. Sometimes we just have to make the case for a lesser value as the expedient means to secure funding or policy decisions. It’s better than not making any sense at all.
Nina basically says at first she used these metrics to help her gain some room to operate so that the board would be more open to some of the more orthodox approaches she was looking to implement. If you know Nina’s history, with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, you know it was in dire shape when she took up the mantle of executive director so there was a need to implement a turn around couched in the terms that met the board’s criteria of success.
But even in the face a wondrous revitalization which included a growth in staff and attendance and a expansion into adjoining property, she and the board never got around to having a serious conversation about the fact that it was those wacky ideas she and the staff implemented that made people feel the museum was a place made for them. The metrics they were looking for followed that effort, but the metrics weren’t the measure of the organization’s success. The measure was that people felt heard, represented, and respected. To them museum was more invested in them than before, and they became more invested in turn and showed up at the door.
The conversation Nina regrets not having needs to happen more often and it will get easier with each attempt. (Not to mention it is the stuff of good grant narratives.)
Success isn’t a matter of good budgeting, advertising and the highest quality programs the organization can afford. From what I remember, I think some of the stuff Nina did that people engaged with most involved activity prompts, paper, and magic markers. Success is a matter of the highest quality experiences and interactions.
One of the stand out memories I have of this past Friday is a conversation our marketing director had while asking permission to take the picture of three little girls in a very unsocially distanced hug where one declared “She is practically my best friend!” There wasn’t any special investment on our part, though the father appreciated being asked if we could snap the photo, but it was pretty clear that despite all the Covid related signs and paraphernalia, the group felt good about the interactions they were having.
It often doesn’t take much to help people feel they, their family and friends are welcome. What can be tough is asking and correctly discerning what the things that make them feel welcome are and deciding to effect the changes to include them.
Amid this deluge of performance art offerings flowing into my house, I realized two words marred my experience: remote and control. With remote clenched in one hand and phone in the other, it hit me: No longer a member of an audience, I had become merely a viewer now.
The problem with streaming performing arts for me is that in ordinary times, even when watching a television show or movie at home I truly like, I still tend to fast forward through subplots, characters, dialogue I find tedious…
[..]
Streaming the performing arts at home has taught me that sometimes the visceral power of theater is all about the audience being in it together as a community, but other times its potency lies in all the judging looks I would receive trying to leave the theater in the middle of a scene.
I have come to understand the difference between being a viewer and being an audience is that bit of control we give up to become a part of the we.
Certainly, nothing we haven’t already considered in a general sense. It did get me wondering if there might be some value in messaging, either overtly or as subtext, that says, “We don’t want viewers, we want you to participate as an audience member.”
Basically, the idea would be to make negative associations with being a viewer versus being part of an audience. There is definite potential in associating audience status with people’s existing values about connecting and sharing experiences with others.
It is important to remember that we know from the soon to be mythical pre-Covid times that people yearned to share experiences that were active rather than passive observation of an event. Elevating audience over viewer through reinforced messaging and imagery by itself ain’t gonna cut it.
Back in early June, I mentioned Nina Simon’s talk for the Opera America conference where she encouraged arts organizations to start using social media messaging to build relationships and start conversations with the groups you want to begin attracting to your organization. One of the benefits of doing this when you aren’t operating at your usual capacity is that you can learn about what interests people and start planning future programming to align with those expectations without having your current programming contradict what you are saying.
The general public aren’t necessarily aware that the arrangements for something happening in August 2020 were made 18-24 months or more earlier. So if you are saying communicating “we are committed to X for the future” and what enters your space next week doesn’t seem to align with that messaging, it can make things difficult.
Obviously, seeing not being able to operate as a beneficial opportunity for your organization is an effort to make lemonade with a whole lot of lemons but that aphorism is all about dealing with the present situation, not the more ideal one you wish you had.
I have had a little bit of survey fatigue so I haven’t been keeping up with Colleen Dilenschneider’s ongoing updates on audiences willingness to return to cultural organizations. As a result, I didn’t catch her post last week on the growing importance people are placing on mandatory face masks until recently.
What I felt was a more important reading of her post is that the conditions under which people will feel confident about returning to cultural organizations is increasingly more within the control of the organizations themselves. In particular I base this on the fact that availability of a vaccine has dropped from the most important factor in April to the fifth most important factor. Face masks didn’t appear as a response on their surveys until about six weeks later in May. It started in the top three and as of last week, was the top factor. (my emphasis)
Or perhaps people are simply accepting that returning to normal activities might mean learning how to safely live alongside the virus for a time. The creation, approval, and distribution of a vaccine resulting in herd immunity may be many more months, or a year or longer away. This reality may be why masks now top the chart compared to the availability of a vaccine.
There has also been a dramatic decline in the percentage of people reporting that the government lifting restrictions means that conditions are safe to return to pre-pandemic behaviors…Now it’s seventh… and may still be decreasing.
As of this month, your organization’s own decision to be open is a bigger factor contributing to feeling safe than the government lifting restrictions. This is a big deal, but it’s not surprising. Cultural organizations are trusted entities at the same time that trust in the federal government is low. Many organizations closed before they were mandated to do so in an effort to flatten the curve. A notable 34% of likely visitors trust that you’ve duly considered safety and accordingly revised operations when making your decision to reopen.
If nothing else, these results emphasize the importance of regularly communicating with your community and generating a well-considered plan for an audience experience.
I am sure a lot of people are wondering what other people are doing about performances as you plan for the day you can actually start again. Classicfm.com shared a number of images and videos of the way different venues have been spacing both musicians and audiences.
To me the most novel idea and location was a cello concert at the bottom of an empty pool in Germany. Are the acoustics of a pool conducive to the cello range? There is another article with more pictures from other angles. The lane markers made for good spacing guides and the grade of the floor as it moved toward the shallow end helped with sightlines.
In Hong Kong, they had plexiglass between orchestra members, but in The Netherlands, they had empty seats and dividers to separate audience members.
There are a number of pictures of people arrayed in seating at social distance which may strike many as a bit depressing given the appearance of sparse attendance.
One image I found very striking was that of the London Mozart Players performing in a church. While there was no audience because they were video taping, when I saw all the musicians wearing vibrant red facemasks and bits of red clothing, my first thought was that they really made it work even spaced apart. Granted, some of that is due to good audio and video editing and the ability to zoom in close to the musicians, but for most of the video it is pretty clear everyone is spaced further apart than usual.
Troublemaker that Drew McManus is, he suggested that as people return to live performances post-Covid, arts organizations should re-think the hallowed curtain speech. He argues that patrons won’t have the patience to endure the lengthy speeches after months of ad free Netflix and Disney Plus watching bliss.
I definitely agree that a lot of people do very long, poorly considered curtain speeches at their events. I try to keep my short and entertaining, but occasionally the stars misalign and it stinks and I resolve to get better.
Let me tell you, I have been to a number of organizations in my time where I wonder if they are investing any effort into trying to get better. If our expectations are that the performers should be working to be at the top of their game, the staff delivering the curtain speeches should be aiming for the same goal.
I know that some places want to have artists, donors and board members speak so that there is better representation and variety in the appeals and some people will be better than others. In those cases, if you can’t guarantee that the speech is well-rehearsed, the time limit should be strictly enforced.
All this being said, what I feel is going to be most important post-Covid is a sense of reassurance and trust. While many in the Facebook discussion advocated for getting rid of curtain speeches, I wrote about the value of getting up and standing in front of people to assure them that the staff of your venue is taking steps to ensure their health and safety, even if you don’t explicitly say that. (I quoted someone in a post a few weeks ago that cautioned about leaning in too heavily on safety messaging.)
Depending on the dynamics of your community and audience, delivering the curtain speech while wearing a facemask might be necessary to reinforce and model the expectations you have of audience members.
And as much as anyone is reluctant to have patrons getting in their face, literally or figuratively, with complaints, it may prove cathartic for audience members to vocalize their fears. If you have done a credible job keeping things safe and are able to identify what you can do better, then you just need to have a thick skin.
I am sure it won’t be necessary for some time to remind you that whomever showed up for the performance made a number of conscious decisions to do so, (or at least impulse factored into it much less than before). So perhaps the most valuable part of doing curtain speeches will be thanking people for coming out. I suspect it will take very little effort to make the sentiment sound much more heartfelt than it had in the past.
Even if you are convinced by my argument, if you want to vent about bad curtain speech experiences, head over to Drew McManus’ Facebook post and join the conversation.
You may have seen the news today that the results of the Culture Track Covid-19 report were publicly released today. While some of the data about audience willingness to return to arts and culture organizations is a little dated due to the survey being conducted at the end of April through May 19, the majority of the findings can be very valuable to arts and cultural organizations.
They had only expected about 50,000 people to participate but had over 124,000 respondents to the survey. Participants ranged from knitting groups and walking clubs to organizations you might typically associate with arts and culture activities. Back on June 17, Advisory Board for the Arts hosted a webinar where staff from Slover Linnet and LaPlaca Cohen gave an early preview of the results to organizations that had participated in the study. If you want a deeper view of the results, you can watch the webinar.
The infographic layout of the report that came out today does a good job presenting the data, but there is one thing I don’t think they made clear enough which may cause people to question the results. Especially since the methodology is explained in a separate document rather than included as an appendix to the Key Finding report.
Since so many of the respondents were people on the mailing lists of arts and culture organizations around the country, you would correctly assume that it might skew the data. The Culture Track folks worked with another organization to distribute the survey a representative sample of the US population. The results you see in the key findings report are weighted to be representative of the US population.
The webinar presents both the core subscriber/ticket buyer response percentages and weighted percentages. While the core supporters are much more likely to say the arts are important and worthy of preservation than the general population, they also more likely to expect organizations to implement strict health and safety protocols upon re-opening.
A couple of the bigger takeaways for me:
• People said they were feeling lonely, bored and disconnected and one of the things they missed most was sharing experiences with family and friends. In the webinar, the presenters suggested if there were a way for arts organizations to digitally allow people to share experiences, it would potentially serve a large need.
• Something to keep in mind is that people may want a much more interactive experience in the future. 81% of respondents said they were doing something creative while quarantined. Cooking, singing, handcrafting (knitting, painting, pottery, woodwork, etc), photography and writing were among the top responses.
• Many people were engaging in digital cultural experiences in the 30 days prior to taking the survey. In the webinar, the speakers noted that the demographics of people participating digitally was more diverse in terms of education, gender, race/ethnicity than those attending in person. They suggested that digital content might be a way to attract more diverse groups to in person experiences over the long term. (Obviously online content needs to align with an in-person experience–including how welcome one feels.) There are also some who appreciated digital content as a solution to concerns about affordability, transportation and schedule.
• Unfortunately few people reported paying for digital content. In the webinar, they said 2% of people reported they paid for digital content, but in the Key Findings report that came out today, it says 13% have paid for content. It made me wonder if they received additional or corrected data since June 17. Most of the other numbers I was using to cross reference the webinar and Key Findings report remained the same.
• In general, what people crave the most upon an anticipated return to in-person experiences is ability to enjoy oneself/de-stress in the company of family and friends.
Obviously, a lot of nuance and detail not included here so take a look at the report and/or webinar. Overall the the title of this post reflects the reality of the next normal. Those that physically engage in-person won’t be the same as before in both the literal sense demographically and metaphoric “no one can enter the same river twice” sense. The faces may be familiar, but they will have different expectations.
Interesting short piece on the FastCompany website that points out the current uncertainty about the future created the the Covid-19 pandemic makes deferring on a decision seem the wise option, however there is always a cost associated with delaying on that decision. The author of the piece, Art Markman, says that because deferring the decision seems so attractive, people don’t actually think through whether the delay will make any difference or not. (my emphasis)
Leaders might think it prudent to wait for more information about the status of the pandemic before moving forward. However, it is always worth making a decision tree to determine whether a different decision would be reached in each of these conditions. Key leaders do not always take this step. In some cases, leaders might find that the best outcome is actually the same regardless of the status of the pandemic. In that case, deferring the decision would involve paying a cost to defer the decision in order to get information that does not change the decision that gets made. There was no reason to incur that cost.
I haven’t come up with a scenario other than capital improvements/repairs and staffing decisions in which this might apply to arts and cultural organizations. I may be too entrenched right now in thinking about the pros and cons of re-opening venues in the context of economics and public perception/willingness to broaden my imagination. However, I figure some readers might be in situations where being reminded to make a decision tree might be useful for helping move things forward.
There is a piece on ArtsHacker I recently published dealing with a lot of the legal questions arts and cultural venues face when trying to make re-opening plans. You may be aware that people are pulling out official looking cards saying they are exempt from wearing face masks under the ADA. Those cards are fake in terms of having any authority behind them.
There are many reasons why people will have problems wearing face masks, but there is no automatic exemption. My Arts Hacker post includes a link to a resource provided by the Southeast ADA Center that provides guidance on this issue, including possible modifications that might be implemented.
The post also contains links to three videos by entertainment lawyer Steve Adelman who answers questions about whether you can require people to wear masks, if you can be held liable if someone contracts Covid-19 at your venue, and whether you should you have people sign liability waivers acknowledging they might be exposed to the virus.
One of the things I learned from the third video is that half the disclaimers on the back of tickets shifting risk of injury to visitors or waiving their right to sue probably won’t be enforceable in practice.
At first I was just drawn to listen because Kadakia presented a familiar story of someone who loved dance and continued dancing even as she was studying Operations Research and Economics at MIT. As I got into the story, I realized it held some lessons about discounting and subscriptions for arts and culture non-profits.
It was the desire to dance that lead her to found the earliest iteration of ClassPass. She was looking to take a class in NYC and couldn’t figure out time, place, price and transportation. She struck on the idea of making a search engine that would unify this information and allow you to find and make reservations for classes in the way OpenTable allows you to make restaurant reservations.
The idea was so compelling to people that when her boss at Warner Music called in her to ask why she was quitting, she walked out with a $10,000 check from him as an investment in her unformed company. While the company was feted with great fanfare, it took 10 days before they had their first reservation. Kadakia says that is when they approached the dance & exercise studios to get a sense of customer behavior and realized that unlike plane and restaurant reservations where people have already made a decision they are going to fly or go out to eat, people looking for classes (this is ~2012) hadn’t decided to take a class.
This is where the lessons about human nature, discounts and subscriptions starts to kick in (about 34 minutes into the show.) As Guy Raz observes, in the course of about 5 years, Kadakia ends up running 5 different companies because the business model changes so drastically. (It may not seem drastic on a small scale, but when you realize she goes from raising around $40 million in her second round of funding to a recent $1 billion valuation, each change has big implications.) Kadakia says each time they changed the model, human behavior changed on them.
One of the first things they did was offer 30 day passes to a range of different classes. They promised studios around 70% of people would convert to more permanent students. It ended up about only 10% did which Kadakia admits was unfair to the studios. What they discovered was that people were continuing to take classes by signing up with a new email address. Now, my first instinct was to accuse them of gaming the system and curse them under my breath.
Kadakia and her team may have done that, but what she said they realized was that people enjoyed being able to attend a variety of classes. Instead of $45 for a 30 day product, they moved to a subscription model for $99 where you could take up to 10 classes a month, but no more than three at the same studio. Eventually they moved to an unlimited class model.
As the company grew, the fitness industry of spin, barre, bootcamp, etc classes was growing as well and they began doing business with bigger, more marquee names. This raised the average per-class rate they had to pay to studios. Kadakia says they reached a place where they were faced with adopting the business model most gyms use where they are counting on you not exercising in order to make their money. As someone who both continued to dance and took classes every day, she felt the idea of betting against their customers was anti-ethical to their founding principles of getting people to exercise.
Faced with the prospect of having a lot of people angry at them for drastically raising the price of the unlimited pass, they moved away from that as their core product and now package classes differently.
As referenced earlier, one of the main things I took away from this was that sales and subscription models not only need to be structured differently for different communities, but potentially changed up across the lifespan of your organization because audience dynamics and expectations are likely to evolve. I fully expect most venues will find the ticketing model and policies they had in place pre-Covid won’t as fit well for audiences now.
Tyler Green’s tweet today about art museums acting like corporations rather than charities got me to look at the full series of tweets on the subject. He is angered by the fact that instead of stepping up to support museums in a time of crisis, the billionaire members of boards are voting for mass lay-offs of staffs.
In brief, his argument seems to be that while museum boards are comprised of people who make the largest individual donations to museums, they are not the largest sources of support for those museums.
He notes that many charities have board members who represent the membership or community the organization serves, but institutions like San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) don’t have any.
Many art museums fail to represent their non-billionaire-class givers on their boards.
Example: I can't think of a major art museum that has members' reps on its board.
Take SFMOMA, where 9% of revenue comes from member dues. I bet no trustee kicked in 9% of SFMOMA's revenue.
All this is worth serious consideration as our organizations seek to move on to the next normal. Those who have supported our organizations in the past with their participation may no longer feel safe engaging with the general public. There is an opportunity to start working toward oft expressed ideals of engaging a broader audience with whom you haven’t had the time and resources to initiate a conversation. Because they are increasingly likely to be your new audience.
Their numbers may not be as large as your old audience, but social distancing rules have reduced your top capacity so you have some cover to explain the smaller crowds.
But perhaps most importantly in the context of Tyler Green’s posts, it is probably time to broaden the membership of the board. This is likely to necessitate a shift in corporate/board culture. Even if your board isn’t comprised of billionaires, it is highly likely that the group dynamics of the board are going to feel alienating to any new members chosen to represent the core demographics served by your organization.
An owner of a movie chain in Omaha has decided to rely on a mix of subtle imagery and social proof:
One conclusion: Leaning in to safety messaging is a surefire way to turn off customers.
“If you’re leading off the pitch with ‘It’s so clean you’re not going to get sick’ then you’ve already lost the argument,” said Barstow, whose company is about to open a new Omaha location. Instead of talking about disinfectant and distancing, he says, he believes it more effective to roll out traditional marketing that slips in the requisite information — an image of a shiny lobby with an employee in the background who just happens to be wearing a mask, for instance.
“You let people know you’re taking care of them, but very subtly,” he said.
Barstow said he and his daughter, who runs the company’s marketing operation, have discovered that the best weapon for luring customers might be not what the theater is doing at all — it’s the sight of other customers.
[…]
“Seeing someone like a mom bring her three kids to a matinee is I think going to be the best tool to make people feel comfortable about coming themselves.” Of course, he acknowledges, such events need to happen organically, captured instead of contrived on social media.
At my venue, we had already been planning to start showing movies in late July before our governor added live performance venues alongside movie theaters as places that are allowed to hold events. One of the major points of concern for employees was whether customers would wear masks. We weren’t sure how forceful we could be, but the recent decision by the AMC movie theater chain to make masks mandatory gives us a little more support, regardless of how insistent we decide to be.
One interesting observation from the Washington Post article I hadn’t really considered was the importance of having mask wearing staff communicate reassurance with their eyes and posture since the rest of the face won’t be visible. In this, perhaps the performing arts have a competitive advantage.
“You have to train staff how to reassure customers with their eyes, because no one will be able to see their mouths,” said Barstow, who is mandating employees wear masks.
“Maybe,” he mused, “we should hire local drama students.”
It was all a bit revelatory about consumer psychology and how you can’t always take what people say they want at face value.
As I pointed out in my post at the time, it also illustrates that money does not build relationships and loyalty. I would suggest that most non-profit arts organizations are in the relationship building/facilitation business. If we weren’t, would people be donating the value of their tickets on cancelled events and increasing the amount they typically donate in a year? I say facilitation because participation in an activity with friends and family contributes to the development of relationships.
As much as your organization is struggling, those donations and other expressions of concern are what distinguish your identity and role in the community from larger corporations, even if you suspect you may be soon accompanying JC Penny on the road to dissolution. In that 2012 post, I also linked to a post I made about the expiration date of arts organizations. At the time I was speaking theoretically. Sorry to say it may be emerging into reality.
Back in 2012 when I first wrote my post, I quoted Collen Dilenschneider. She has since come out with much better research and advice for arts organizations use of discounts, but the basics still remain the same.
One thing of course, I need to point out is that price does not develop loyalty. You can not develop a relationship with your community if interactions with your organization are based on price. I stated that in the early days of this blog and as Dilenschneider notes this is true even in these days of social media:
“It is far better for your brand and bottom line to have 100 fans who share and interact with your content to create a meaningful relationship, than to have 1,000 fans who never share your message and liked you just for the discount.”
Dilenschneider also points to some data that there are diminishing returns from social media discounts. This may illustrate be where arts organizations and retailers differ. Retailers can offer myriad discounts annually and not suffer, but arts and cultural organizations offer a product valued entirely differently from that of retailers
Today he points out that when you are part of the dominant culture, you don’t see it around you like the proverbial fish that aren’t aware they are in water. It isn’t until you go to another country that you recognize every small assumption comprising your daily routine needs to be examined closely just to cross the street to get breakfast.
This experience can be part of what is fun and engaging about your visit. But part of what makes it fun is that you know you can return to a familiar environment later where you will have many stories to tell. The prospect of living in that foreign place for a longer time can be more daunting.
When media images, policies and corporate standards tell someone that they are an outsider who needs to fit in in non-relevant ways, we’re establishing patterns of inequity and stress. We need to be clear about the job that needs to be done, the utility we’re seeking to create, but not erect irrelevant barriers, especially ones we can’t see without effort.
Good systems are resilient and designed to benefit the people who use them.
If the dominant culture makes it harder for people who don’t match the prevailing irrelevant metrics to contribute and thrive, it’s painful and wasteful and wrong.
If you think about the above quote from Godin a bit, you might see that there are a good many times when the dominant culture shows little regard about alienating its own members. We have seen it happen often in recent years in both large and small ways. Currently we are in a period where many people are realizing their membership isn’t as secure as they thought or that they are no longer in synch with the terms of membership. The result is, they are finding greater common cause with those who have felt themselves outsiders.
But also, lest it get lost in the macro level big societal questions being wrestled with on the national and international stage, Godin’s admonishment about good systems being resilient and designed to benefit the users is just as applicable on the micro level of your organizational business hours and admission practices.
I arrived in my office last Friday to find a heck of a lot more emails in my Inbox than I am used to. It turned out the evening before the governor had announced a change of guidelines that would allow performing arts organizations to open after July 1 and people immediately started scrambling trying to ascertain what it all meant. Ultimately, nothing the new order contained deviated from our expectations by much at all in terms of how it would impact seating capacity or operational practices. We were on a Zoom call with the county attorney today and he had nothing surprising to say in his reading of the order, but it was good to have our understanding confirmed.
Like me, you may have heard that Texas’ governor had issued guidance on performing arts centers last week. However, I was surprised to learn that Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, FL was having concerts last week. I hadn’t heard that things had opened that far in any other state.
The performances in Clearwater were in their lobby in a cabaret type setting with attendance capped at 80 people. It looks like the three shows on June 11 sold out quickly and the added shows on June 14, 19 & 25 sold out as well. I was wondering if there are any readers in Florida who may have attended who could talk about the show and what their experience was. I see from an article on the show there were some screening procedures and people were seated at a social distance.
Fans were offered face masks at the gate, temperature-checked upon entry, and delivered drinks and snacks by servers in gloves and black masks. They sat in groups of four or fewer, and for the most part, only got up to hit the head.
– Venue staff will be wearing face masks; we encourage patrons to do the same. Face masks are available at the door upon request.
– Hand sanitizer stations are readily available. If you are in need of an attendant with cleaning supplies, please ask the wait staff.
– Table selection is on a first-come/first-served basis. We ask that you not change tables once you are seated.
– We encourage remaining at your table during the show. If you wish to stand, you will be asked to move behind the seated area and maintain social distancing.
– All food and beverage service will be table-side. There will be no walk-up service available.
– If you suspect you are ill or reside with someone who is ill with flu-like symptoms, we ask you to exchange for a future show.
– While we are committed to providing a clean and safe environment, it is impossible to eliminate all health risk in any location so please use discretion.
This seems a good example upon which to base your own venue communications as you start to open so that you don’t have to invent it all from scratch.
I don’t know about everyone else, but not having a slate of performances on my schedule has kept me just as occupied as actually having events. While I am definitely grateful to still have a job, albeit warily eyeing its status, I have never not had enough to keep me occupied on an Monday-Friday, 8 am-5 pm+ basis.
It almost seems like we are going through the many stages of coronavirus coping analogous to the stages of grief. I am not sure how many stages we will go through for coronavirus, but this how I have partitioned my experience thus far:
First came the frenetic activity of crisis management, review of force majeure clauses, cancellations, communications and processing of refunds.
Then came the scrutinizing of governor’s orders and generation of seat maps, processes and shopping lists of sanitizing product in order to comply with what we anticipate the rules will be once we are permitted to re-open, whenever that may be.
Now things seem to be in the phase when organizations facing the prospect of cancelling their signature events try to formulate alternative plans. Their primary intent is to have something in place so that when they say they are cancelling their big event, they can simultaneously announce what smaller endeavors they will engaged in instead. The underlying goal being to create a situation where they retain relevance in the minds of community members in the absence of their big event.
I stayed late at work today to participate in my third Zoom meeting of the day to brainstorm contingency plans with a community organization. When I asked one of my staff if she would be on the meeting, she said she couldn’t because she was participating in the same conversation with another organization.
At the same time, it surprises me that some organizations are adamantly sticking to their traditional practices and ticketing policies–or at the very least, are doing a poor job communicating with their audiences. This week we had a spate of angry phone calls mistaking us for an organization in another part of the country that has a similar name. My guess is either something happened recently or some information was released that made 3-4 people so angry they didn’t realize the phone number they googled was at a place 800 miles away.
Though my understanding is that some ticketing services’ policies have exacerbated the refunding process so the blame may not lay entirely with venues.
In any case, I think it is clear to most everyone that you can’t take it for granted that you will retain the goodwill and reputation you may have built up. Those with poor reputations may find that a shift in personal priorities means there is no longer a begrudging tolerance of poor practices accorded them due to their stature and influence.
Thanks to funding from a mysterious third party, today my state presenter consortium was able to participate in a webinar lead by Collen Dilenschneider and her colleagues at IMPACTS where they discussed the data Colleen has been writing about on her blog.
If you have been following her posts, or my posts on her posts, you know that she is currently releasing weekly updates about people’s willingness to participate in cultural events. By and large, that is what she shared today, including data from her most recent post on factors that will drive participation.
If anything her research reinforces a concept that has been discussed for years now — the programming doesn’t matter as much as the quality of the experience and relationships associated with your organization. While people will be willing to participate in an environment where they can exert greater control over their experience earlier than one where they feel they have to cede control (i.e. gardens/museums/historical sites before crowded theaters), every other factor she listed in the webinar and her post today are about relationships.
There will be data they will release next week showing that observing what others in ones community are doing now replaces government declarations about reopening by a slight margin as the #2 contributor to confidence about attending. If the general tenor of the community is open to re-engaging in communal life, people are more likely to start attending sooner.
Another big factor she mentioned in the webinar and her post today was the importance of keeping awareness of your organization at the forefront of people’s minds. If you have been quiet as a way to save marketing funds, it may prove detrimental to your ability to re-engage people’s participation in the future. Just providing content on social media or sending out regular emails with status updates is better than totally hunkering down and going silent.
Dilenschneider also mentioned that the trust you engendered when making the decision to shutdown to help flatten the curve can contribute to people feeling secure about returning. If the last impressions people had before you shutdown were that you were taking steps to sanitize surfaces and keep them safe, they will feel more assured that your decision to reopen reflects a confidence that your plans and procedures will provide a safe environment.
Obviously, not everyone will feel safe about returning at the same time and the appeal of what is being offered will definitely always be a factor, even in times when risk and reward are more in balance. The overall quality of one’s relationship with the organization will always loom large.
There was a piece on Vox today that I jumped on with interest because the title seemed to imply it was about a family run dance school applying for the Paycheck Protection Program. I should have just read the subtitle more closely. There are only a couple of sentences about their interaction with the PPP near the end of the article and the subtitle summarizes it pretty well: The bank rejected them for not having a pre-existing business relationship and now they are waiting on an application submitted through an online broker.
The rest of the piece is worth reading because it emphasizes the importance of developing relationships with your constituency. The mother and daughter running the Connecticut dance school have adults and children paying to take dance class via Zoom. (The other daughter also teaches in the school, but is on maternity leave and wasn’t interviewed.) I have talked to dance schools in my local area and they bemoan the difficulty of teaching over video. One woman says her non-touch screen video display has fingerprints all over it because she keeps trying to correct her students’ postures as she would for an in-person class.
For the CT dance school in the Vox article, they had an outstanding obligation to offer the children’s class because parents had pre-paid through June. The adult classes are run on a drop-in basis, but there is enough of a demand for both live and taped classes for that age group. According to the owners of the school, there is a lengthy social period built in before and after the formal class session where students catch up with each other.
From how they talk about the evolution of their school, it appears this sense of community developed over years of their in-person classes.
Founder Linda Freyer says,
So we started teaching adults in the morning and children in the afternoon — and the adults wanted this art form, they wanted to learn classical ballet, and they became passionate. I have adults that started, who never had dance training as children, and with a lot of work and discipline I got them en pointe. In toe shoes. They never believed that could happen! I have women who are still dancing with me 25 years later. We have gone through deaths of parents, we have gone through breast cancer, we have gone through brain tumors, we have gone through divorces, we have gone through so many life-changing crises, and they find solace coming to this ballet class.
[…]
We are such a community — I was teaching a class on the morning of 9/11, and it was adults, and people were drifting in saying, “Did you hear? Did you hear?” We were shell-shocked. And I remember one dancer saying, “Do you want to just cancel class?” We were speechless. And one of our students looked at the group and said, “Please teach us, Linda. I have a funny feeling this class will be the highlight of the next period of time.” So I turned off the news and I taught that class, and I will tell you — the gals who were in that class still talk about it.
Petra, the daughter who was also interviewed for the article mentioned she had danced all the way through college, but started a career in finance before deciding it wasn’t for her and pursued training in dance education. Petra’s story along with her mother’s discussion of adult students developing their skills to a place they could dance en pointe reminded me of a post I wrote on Lisa Mara who started a dance company for people who loved dance enough maintain their dance practice, but were pursuing other avenues as a career. The interview in Vox made it sound like the dance school had similarly cultivated an environment for adults who wished to rigorously pursue an avocation in dance.
There has been a lot of conversation among my peers about how to revamp our venue seating charts to comply with social distancing. Some people were seating in every other row with 3-4 seats between every single person, the latter part which seemed crazy to me.
At my venue, we worked up a plan that skipped every other row and had four seats open and four seats blocked so that families could be seated together. We found a way to set our ticketing system so that if you bought two of four open seats, it would immediately block the adjacent open seats so strangers couldn’t buy the seats next to you.
I figured it would be a month or two before any state got to the point of allowing live performance events to occur.
To my surprise, someone already put this general model into action. I was reading a piece in San Francisco Classical Voice because it extensively quotes Adaptistration author Drew McManus when I came across this bit of information:
In fact, the first test of a live-concert in the U.S. was to have taken place May 18, with a socially-distanced performance by country singer Travis McCready at TempleLive in Fort Smith, Arkansas. However, on May 12 the state’s Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, announced the state’s health department would be issuing a cease-and-desist order for the concert due to the extension of the state’s coronavirus lockdown measures.
Had the concert proceeded, it would have taken place in a hall with a capacity of 1,100 reduced to 229. The audience would have had their temperatures taken when they arrived, been directed to their seats along one-way walkways, with a limit of 10 people in the bathroom at any one time. Seating would be in “pods,” defined as “small gatherings restricted to friends and relatives comfortable with sitting together.” Each group, between two and 12 in number, would be seated together while the rest of the audience sat six feet from one another other. In addition, the concert’s Ticketmaster page said TempleLive planned to sanitize the venue using fog sprayers and would require masks to be worn by the audience and staff. The three-member band would maintain social distancing onstage but had not planned to wear masks.
Even with these limitations, the concert was sold out. Would it have been a preview of coming attractions?
Other than feeling allowing up to twelve people who didn’t regularly live in close quarters to sit together might be problematic to efforts to control the spread, I sort of wish the concert could have happened so we could start to get some tips on traffic control through the different spaces.
Since I am clearly wrong in my assumption no one would be trying to do it yet, has anyone heard of any other instances where someone has actually executed a post-Covid revised seating plan?
Now you probably feel that when are stumbling blind through an environment everyone says is without precedent, no existing data will aid in productive decision making. I suggest this is actually the perfect time to both scrutinize the data you do have on hand very closely to provide you with insights you may have been overlooking for years and to create processes and procedures to more effectively collect and analyze data moving forward.
I have written about data driven decision making before, as has Drew McManus. In most of these posts we both focused on the influence of Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) which often overrides data informed decisions and focuses on simple numbers absent of context and analysis.
The Harvard Business Review takes a different approach focusing more on employees vs. supervisors/board members. In both scenarios, people are acting in a manner that is not conducive to a company wide culture of data.
These organizations are “masquerading” as data-driven, meaning they have the data, technologies, and even the expertise, but their culture and processes are not aligned with those elements to produce the best outcomes. For example, data might be a part of every decision made, but employees may be making decisions first, then looking for data to back them up.
Factors like these explain the disconnect between investment levels and the disappointing results some companies report seeing. Businesses have more data than ever, but a culture rooted in top-down decision making and traditional tools like weekly reports and preconfigured dashboards means they cannot take full advantage of it.
Among the factors the authors say contribute to this situation are:
“Your Employees are Making Decisions Based on the Tyranny of Averages” – this encompasses modeling the average of all cases as the optimal approach rather than making note of significant differences. For example, if you determined in 2013 there was no need to ensure your website looks good on phones because the average ticket buyer uses a desktop computer, not only would you have created a barrier for younger users, you are creating a situation that will reinforce desktop users as an average user because phone users will have no interest visiting the webpage. Given the demographics of people using phones to navigate the web have broadened since 2013, your online purchases would probably have dropped even as the average remained steady.
Everyone Has Their Own Version of the Truth When employees argue that “my truth is better than your truth,” it’s a sign you’re masquerading as data-driven. Each team may be acting on data, but if they have different information, they are bound to disagree and some may even be misled…Getting stakeholders to agree on which data is important establishes a common source of truth to guide decisions and strategy.
More broadly, data should be available uniformly throughout an organization so all teams have access to the same information. The goal is outcomes, not ownership, and this may require a cultural shift that loosens the grip on data among senior managers.
Decisions Precede Data – this is the aforementioned scenario where you make a decision and then seek the data that confirms you are correct.
A number of theaters around the country have started posting messages on their marquees to bolster the morale of their community. Here at my venue, we were trying to think of a message to post on our marquee so my marketing director did some research and gathered these images. I identified the ones I know or could figure out. I apologize for not knowing every place. I offer this as a bit of inspiration for other places that might want to do something similar.
Flynn Theater, Burlington, VT
Paramount, Seattle, WA
Hayworth Theatre, Los Angeles, CA
Laurelhurst, Portland, OR
Nitehawk Cinema, Brooklyn, NY
North Park Theater, Buffalo, NY
Fox Theatre, Atlanta, GA
I wanted to figure out messaging that was more tailored to our community. We discovered that Little Richard, who had been born here in Macon, had said “I love Macon. I love it better than anywhere I’ve ever been in my life,” so we came up with the following images. We had the images up on Friday, May 1 and then Little Richard died a week later which made the whole thing a little bittersweet for us.
The third screen about picking up the beat was something we developed in consultation with the local convention and visitors bureau.
In the video, he makes the case for the value of live performance based on the shared experience. Apparently there was a study in 2017 that showed audiences hearts beat in unison during live performances which generates a sense of trust and empathy you don’t experience when watching a video. (You also don’t get footnotes. I would really be interested in learning more about that study.)
I don’t know about you, but last week I started having a hard time remaining focused on Zoom sessions that were providing content that was of great importance and interest to me and my organization. Lord help me if I had pets or children around to distract me as well. Trying to deliver educational content is likewise experiencing problems with participation and retention of information.
Granted, the fact that people are trying to use a virtual platform in the same way they conduct face to face meetings is probably to blame for this disconnection. In the future we may see presentation techniques and technological features that will make the experience more valuable. Think about the fact that the first motorized vehicles literally were horseless carriages because that was the dominant mode of transportation at the time. There has been quite a bit of refinement since then in terms of design and use.
The biggest cause for concern should be that human contact and empathy is what will be refined away as the virtual delivery experience improves. While there is definitely a romance to horse based transportation and the internal combustion engine has created environment pollution problems, I don’t think there were concerns that traveling swiftly and smoothly in an environment of improved climate control was going to undermine societal bonds. (Though certainly, it may have eroded the human-equine relationship.)
If anything, the challenges of these times is probably going to really clarify where the true value of the arts resides. It is going to be the relationships that organizations build with their audiences that will bring them back. Once organizations answer the questions of health and safety, the opportunity to share an experience with others is going to be the compelling appeal, not discounts and comps. It is going to be important to listen and pay attention to what people expect of their experience. The expectations probably won’t be exactly the same as they were in January. The demographics of those most interested in inhabiting spaces and participating in activities may be quite different as well.
There are a lot of stories out there about how some US states are allowing businesses to open. To my knowledge, none have reached the point of allowing live performance venues to open yet, but a lot of people are caught between feelings of anticipation and anxiety.
It would be great to get back to work even on a small scale and then gradually ramp up, but there are lot of things to consider, including public reaction to your decisions. While you are pulling out your tape measure so you can figure out what your seating/attendance capacity will be if you need to maintain six feet of distance, you may want to check out a post I did on Arts Hacker about resources created by the Downtown Professionals Network to help Arts & Cultural entities prepare their spaces.
There is also guidance for restaurants and retail if you happen to have food service and merchandising operations.
The special website also has resources to help people in community leadership roles. If you haven’t already taken up that mantle, this is the time to do so. Whatever emerges as the next normal, you want to be taking a proactive role contributing to policy and practice as well as reinforcing the value your organization contributes to the community.
Apparently there was such a large last minute surge of interest in participating (thank to my blog post, I am sure) that they realized their servers could crash if even a portion of those receiving an email tried visiting the survey site this morning. As a result, my organization has been asked to wait until Saturday to distribute our link.
If that many people are being surveyed, this portends good things for collecting valuable data.
My staff and I had an opportunity to take a look at the survey before it went live. Any data we entered would have been wiped last night in preparation for the actual roll out. The interface was easy to use and was set up so you were often only asked a question relevant to a previous response. For example, if you indicated you weren’t interested in going to a live performance after local restrictions were lifted, the survey would ask what motivated those concerns about live performances but wouldn’t ask about museums if you indicated a willingness to go there.
I was happy to see they were asking questions from previous surveys with an eye to identifying what activities people viewed as cultural events. Like the survey results from 2017, categories like going to the park, eating/cooking food and attending food festivals were in there.
I definitely look forward to seeing the results.
However, if you can’t wait for the survey to finish, head over to Collen Dilenschneider’s blog if you aren’t visiting already. I have seen and heard her weekly updates on survey data mentioned in emails and Zoom meetings dozens of times in the last two weeks. I confess a secret satisfaction at having read the blog for several years now.
The Culture Track survey asks many of the same questions Dilenschneider’s does about how open people are to participating in cultural activities and how long they think it might be before they engage/re-engage. There are really promising signs in the responses she has been getting. While interest in returning is not uniform across all types of cultural organizations, the interest in participation continues to increase.
However, there are a number of steps organizations need to take and communicate to potential audiences to allow them to feel confident about showing up.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I started feeling like the phrases “unprecedented time” and “we’re all in this together” got overused pretty quickly these last couple months. This may sound cynical, but if you really want to communicate empathy, you need to sound like you are actually making an effort instead of mouthing empty platitudes. (A phrase which itself is overused.)
Granted, it can be difficult to express original sentiments when you are feeling pressured by the times. Fortunately, there are some creative people providing us with some useful resources.
There was a piece on Quartz by Elizabeth Weingarten where she supplies, “20 questions to ask instead of “How are you doing right now?” She notes that even in the best of times, that question comes off as rote recitation of pleasantries and right now we need to be exhibiting greater care for each other. These are good questions for developing closer relationships with everyone – family, friends, co-workers, audience members, funders, etc.
Some of the 20 questions she listed that I really appreciated:
What part of your shelter-in-place residence have you come to appreciate the most?
What habit have you started, or broken, during the quarantine?
What are some things you have realized that you don’t really need?
What’s something that you miss that surprises you? What’s something that you don’t miss that surprises you?
What’s the most generous act you’ve seen recently?
How do you want this experience to change you? How do you think it will?
What do you hope we all learn or take away from this experience?
It wasn’t until I started cutting and pasting these into the post that I realized the ones I was selecting were strongly oriented toward self-improvement outcomes.
Weingarten wants to know what sort of conversations result from using these questions. Her email is at the bottom of the article so bookmark it so you can report back.
I noticed something very interesting on Friday morning as I was checking out different news sites. It appears that on at least a subconscious level a number of news outlets equate theaters with a return to economic vibrancy.
On the NBC News site, there was a picture of the Plaza Theatre in Atlanta. Except for a single mention that movie theaters could open starting today, the entire piece was about the concerns hair salons, tattoo and massage parlors had about being permitted to re-open last Friday. Everyone interviewed for the story was associated with one of these businesses, no one from a theater involved in the story.
Within five minutes, I came across another article on Vox.com that was about unemployment benefits in Georgia, but used a picture of The Fox Theatre which had no association with the article at all other than being located in Georgia.
I sent an email out to the members of the state presenting consortium pointing out the use of theatre images as a type of shorthand for a return to vibrancy. I suggested we remember this fact when we moved to an operating environment which felt like the next normal. I don’t know if it is the result of good advocacy work by local, regional and national arts entities, but if there are positive associations between the arts organizations re-opening and socioeconomic vibrancy, it is something to leverage in communications with the community, donors, funders, and government.
In response to my group email, a colleague in Marietta, GA sent out a picture of his theater as it appeared on NBC Nightly News the evening before. Again, he said the broadcast didn’t mention the theater directly.
It can definitely worth paying attention to the images being associated with positive narratives to see if arts organizations are included. Perhaps even something to invite if the opportunity presents itself.
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