Building Public Will For Arts And Culture

Gather Your Neighbors For A Castle Raising

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I am always up for spreading around awesome ideas that people execute. I wanted to give a shout out to my old collaborators, at the Creative Cult. They have been involved with all sorts of cool stuff since I moved away from my previous job, but recently they did something I knew I needed to call attention to.

They partnered with a group who was showing, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the documentary film about Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood to add a little something to the attendance experience.

In advance of the show, the Creative Cult sent out a call informing people that they would be building a cardboard castle in the spirit of Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make Believe.

Roger. Legends say of him that he wrote every show until his very last. He will be dearly missed. WE WILL BUILD THE…

Posted by Creative Cult Lives – cmar on Tuesday, April 2, 2019

And of course, they got people to help them build it and turned it into the primary entry point for entering the screening.  Seeing stuff like this makes me ask, why haven’t I thought of something like that? Don’t tell them—I am definitely gonna steal the idea 😉

https://www.facebook.com/creativecultlives/posts/1249691825197286

The Games That Are Played In Cultural Facilities

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Hate the fact that your city will provide millions to fund an arena that only gets used 20 times a year but not arts organizations that each host hundreds of events a year?

Concerned that the availability of home entertainment systems with huge screens and gaming systems are keeping people at home rather than participating in cultural activities?

Well now your fears and concerns are combining to haunt you even more!

According to CityLab a $50 million eSports Arena is being constructed in Philadelphia. There are other eSports facilities around the country, but this will be the first standalone facility.  Just to be clear, I am not sure if the local government has subsidized the construction of this arena. According to the article, it is being built by Comcast Spectror.

Some might see this as an unnecessary shrine to a niche subculture. But for fans of esports (or professional video-game competitions), this was an inevitable next step. An estimated 250 million people watch esports, although most do so from the comfort of their homes. Global revenue is slated to hit $1.1 billion this year, and the industry is growing into a more social, spectator sport.

This article didn’t catch my eye because I perceived eSports arenas as a threat to arts and cultural organizations. Actually, I see some potential in providing a venue for gaming.

I was at a meeting a couple months ago and someone said they had started hosting video game related activities in their facility. They identified people living within a certain radius of their facility who posted game walk-through videos on YouTube and Twitch and set up sessions where local residents could come in and play against them.

They were only charging about $5 a person, but the overhead was low and they also earned money from concessions. They saw getting a new group of people walking into the facility and feeling comfortable as a win. Plus they got an opportunity to get a sense of what the people might be looking for in terms of programming.

I have started talking to staff about trying to set up something in our facility. One of my tech crew is a professional gamer who travels around the country competing. We haven’t lined anything up yet. If anyone else has had success and has some tips, let me know.

People might be horrified that a performing arts space is being desecrated by such base activities as video game tournaments.

I am not actually raising a hypothetical situation here. A director of the state opera house in Kyrgyzstan was fired for allowing a video game tournament in the building.

Many people were aghast at the thought of the competition in that space, but others felt that it was both relevant and fiscally responsible:

Liberal opinion leader Bektour Iskender disagreed in a January 21 Facebook post:

Hello?! A Dota tournament at the Opera and Ballet Theatre is one of the coolest ways of advertising opera and ballet. And its not as if you can just find 180,000 som (the total Beeline paid to rent out the building) lying on the ground.

Note: 180,000 som is about $2,600

You Are Never Too Young To Start Producing Shows

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So given the context of all the deserved gushing over a North Bergen, NJ’s stage version of the movie Aliens with a $5,000 budget and recycled materials,  Ken Davenport’s suggestion that high school productions have general managers and press agents doesn’t seem terribly unreasonable.

Davenport’s  motivation is to get as many kids involved in a production as possible. Everyone knows the larger cast you have on stage, the larger an audience you are likely to have as friends and family show up to support students. But he also notes that being involved in administrative roles opens people’s eyes to a much wider range of career opportunities than just actors and technicians. (his emphasis)

Because whether a student decides to pursue a career in the theater or decides to be a lawyer, I firmly believe that there is no endeavor in the world that teaches collaboration better than putting up a musical.

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They’re probably the type that thinks putting on a musical is just a hobby.  Because no one has told them any different. But you and I know it’s a business . . . just like any other.  And that businesses need all sorts of talents to make a show a success.

He outlines the following as tasks students could pursue in the different roles.  Davenport encourages everyone to pass the post link on to any high school teachers who might be interested in pursuing this. He says he will even write up the job description and list of duties so the teacher doesn’t have to.

The Producer would be in charge of overseeing the production, of course, as well as fundraising.  Yep, give him or her a goal of raising $X and let them find a way to do it (car washes, bake sales, Kickstarter and more).

The General Manager would learn how to put a budget together for the show and keep everyone on a budget.

The Press Agent would try to get articles written in the newspapers, online, and even invite people like me to come to see it.

The Advertising and Marketing Director would get the word out to sell tickets, get a logo designed, manage the social media, and more.

The Casting Directors would schedule the auditions, run them, put out the offers and maybe even convince the high school quarterback that he’d make a great Teyve.

A Splash Of Color And The Hope That One Day Prince Will Come

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I was half listening to a TED Talk given by Amanda Williams where she spoke about turning abandoned homes in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago into art. She would check the city’s register of houses slated to be demolished and then would descend upon them over the weekend, painting them in a bright monochrome to change a blighted building into a beacon of color in the neighborhood.

As her palette, she choose colors that had relevance to black residents of Chicago: Ultrasheen conditioner; Pink Oil Moisturizer; Harold’s Chicken Shack; Currency Exchange and Safe Passage signs; and Crown Royal bags.

I started paying somewhat closer attention when she talked about how a passerby thought the house painted in Crown Royal bag purple was a sign that Prince would be descending on the neighborhood to do a concert.

And though that block was almost all but erased, it was the idea that Prince could pop up in unexpected places and give free concerts in areas that the music industry and society had deemed were not valuable anymore. For him, the idea that just the image of this house was enough to bring Prince there meant that it was possible…And once I revealed that in fact this project had absolutely nothing to do with Prince, Eric nodded in seeming agreement, and as we parted ways and he drove off, he said, “But he could still come!”

He had assumed full ownership of this project and was not willing to relinquish it, even to me, its author. That, for me, was success.

I loved that Williams had this experience. It reminded me of the poem, “The Secret” by Denise Levertov which also mentions the viewer taking ownership of a work.

But I really perked up and paid attention to what Williams said next (my emphasis)

I wish I could tell you that this project transformed the neighborhood and all the indices that we like to rely on: increased jobs, reduced crime, no alcoholism — but in fact it’s more gray than that. “Color(ed) Theory” catalyzed new conversations about the value of blackness. “Color(ed) Theory” made unmistakably visible the uncomfortable questions that institutions and governments have to ask themselves about why they do what they do…. One of the neighborhood members and paint crew members said it best when he said, “This didn’t change the neighborhood, it changed people’s perceptions about what’s possible for their neighborhood,” in big and small ways.

The value of her artistic/creative/community building activity couldn’t be measured by any of those usual metrics. How can you measure the benefit of a splash of bright color that brings a moment of hope that someday Prince will come? Not to mention the secret hopes and joys that may have been kindled within the hearts of neighborhood residents that they would never admit on a survey?