General Musings

Given the dearth of conductors with the celebrity grade gravitas to attract audiences, the Detroit Symphony is trying out a replacement in the form of a robot made by Honda. Asimo, as the robot is known is said to be a strict task master and citing a perceived lack of discipline among the musicians, has ordered them fitted with electrodes in order to monitor when their focus is about to waver. When the brain waves associated with an imminent change in focus are detected, a mild shock will be automatically administered to the musician. Asimo will also have manual control of the system and has stated he hasn’t ruled out its use as a general disciplinary tool.

Ah, it is a pity these stories didn’t come out around April 1st!

While the robot is conducting and the technology to detect a loss of focus before it occurs does exist, they are independent of one another. Initially I was going to suggest the brainwave monitoring for orchestra/ballet/opera audiences to ensure their attention throughout. When I came across the robot story though, the idea of it torturing the musicians was much more fun. Frankly, given some of Jason Heath’s gig stories, a sadistic robot conductor may not necessarily be far fetched.

I have to admit that one of my guilty pleasures when working in theatres is giving tours. It is probably because I don’t have to give them often and so don’t become bored with the process. I am a bit of a history buff so I tend to learn all I can about the facility in which I am working.

The interior of the Asolo Theatre in Sarasota, FL was once the interior of the Dunfermline Opera House in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland and was built there by Andrew Carnegie. When I was working there many moons ago, I had the pleasure of giving a tour to the then current mayor of Dunfermline who was visiting the U.S.

Today we gave a tour to a school group that visits once a year as part of their tour of all the theatres in town. I have to confess, I look forward to their visit and actually called them about 6 weeks ago to find out when they would be coming. To make something of a double confession, in doing so I wasn’t so much committing my time as my technical director’s. He typically handles the bulk of the tour with some comments thrown in by myself. Mostly, I just follow along and listen.

Don’t get me wrong. I can do an interesting tour too. I have been a big proponent of having science classes come through because a theatre is a great practical example of physics employing counterweight systems, electrical calculations, additive and subtractive light, lens, load bearing construction that has to move, etc. Whenever someone asks what they have to learn math or science for, the reason can often be found in the theatre. I have spoken to some classes on these topics.

But as for the theatre itself, the technical director has been with the theatre for over 30 years so he knows all the stories and nooks and crannies. He has all the great stories to tell as the budding arts students ride the pit elevator down 20 feet and climb to the grid 70 feet above the stage.

Technology wise, our theatre is woefully behind the times but some of the most exciting parts of our tour are not technology dependent. I think one of the reasons why this school keeps coming back here year after year is because we are taking them to places they usually don’t see and telling them great stories about what it is they are looking at. Again, this springs from the TD’s love for his job and his facility. The stage was completely bare and lit by work lights. When we got to our lab classroom space, the always ready to ham it up students ran the small lighting board and instrument hang through its special effect paces. But that was at the end of the tour after plenty of pictures had been taken and questions had been asked about our big, empty space.

The technical director’s ability to keep a group engaged with few bells and whistles reminds us where the true source of theatre’s appeal is. Perhaps some might say it follows that his job isn’t really a necessary part of the transaction. I would counter that it is his mastery of this very concept that has allowed him to create minimal sets that evoke much more with the meager production budget he is allocated. (Well, that along with heroic recycling efforts.)

I am not waxing so sentimental as to claim the look in the kids’ eyes are all the thanks I need. I am proud of the theatre and like to show it off, however. I have been in and out of theatres so much I forget what a novelty it is for most people to be able to climb around and place their hands on things. I talk about so many problems and challenges on the blog I wanted to celebrate the wonder people can experience in an empty theatre space.

Much to my disappointment, Gene Weingarten got a Pulitzer for his little “experiment” with Joshua Bell in a Metro Station. While the award is for the quality of writing rather than the subject, it does lend credibility to the premise of the story itself. But I have already expressed my feelings on that matter as well as the attempt to replicate it in London with Tasmin Little.

In an attempt to dance with the one that brung me and pay local culture its due, I wanted to mention a production we presented this weekend. One of our consortium partners re-mounted a production about the life of the last pre-Contact chief of Maui island, Kahekili. The original performance was about 10 years ago. The current production expands on the original and marks the first time the National Endowment for the Arts has recognized hula kahiko with in their American Masterpieces grant program.

I don’t usually promote performances on my blog but I do feel some loyalty to culture in which I am living. Productions of this kind which expand on traditional hula performances are few and far between so I am eager to advance what I feel is a part of a renaissance in Hawaiian culture.

What I find fascinating about the story of Kahekili is the parallels to Arthurian legend. Kahekili essentially ruled 7 of the 8 major Hawaiian islands through either conquest or capitulation. Unfortunately, like Uther, he couldn’t close the deal and unite all into all into a single kingdom. That fell to Kamehameha the Great who is said to be Kahekili’s son. Since Kamehameha didn’t live in the Maui court there is a sense that like Arthur, there is some illegitimacy attached. That is where the similarities end. Kamehameha denied Kahekili was his father and even opposed the Maui chief’s conquest of the Big Island of Hawaii.

Since most of Kahekili’s activities occurred prior to Captain Cook’s arrival, it is interesting to see a parallel to Arthurian legend emerge. On the other hand, given that all knowledge was transmitted orally at the time, some alterations to the story to bring it in line with Camelot may have crept in post-Contact. Especially if someone was trying to validate his reign and right to treat with other monarchs and leaders.

The other reason I promote shows like this for the educational elements. During the production’s tour on the U.S. Mainland, the group had to explain the difference between Hawaiian hula and other related forms like Samoan fire knives and the frenetic hips and drumming of Tahitian dance. The one indication the group had that the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau was doing a good job with their advertising was that some people were surprised by the battles portrayed in the show. They thought Hawaiians were all aloha and didn’t fight.

In fact, Kahekili was incredibly ruthless in war. The district our theatre is located in was the site of a particularly infamous massacre by his armies where he wiped out all the noble houses on the island. Any nobles living here after that came from the Neighboring Islands. One of the most scenic spots on the island is the location where Kamehameha’s troops drove their opposition over the cliffs during his conquests.

The production was equally as educational for local audiences as it portrays fertility, wedding and chiefly practices rarely witnessed these days. Kahekili having been eclipsed by Kamehameha, is also not a very well known figure so his story is also informative for the community. The tour is winding down this summer though there are whispers of some interest from a place in Germany. If there is additional interest, who knows what might be arranged….

I have no stake in the success of the show so if there is any interest from my readers, they should contact these folks.

Observant folks and readers of the Adaptistration blog will have noted that I have joined with Drew McManus and his Merry Band over at InsidetheArts.com. Unlike the existing blogs associated with Inside the Arts which are hosted under Drew’s Typepad account, I am still solely in control of what appears here.

So don’t blame Drew for any strangeness found on Butts in the Seats like the Tag Cloud on the left which won’t turn into a weighted cloud no matter how many code changes I have made in Movable Type. Unfortunately, Drew can’t help because he just clicks a few boxes in Typepad and what he wants to happen magically appears. Movable Type is made by the same company but requires changes by hand. Something I am usually quite adept at. I am thinking I should have switched to TypePad when I upgraded my software.

Anyhow, I am happy to have joined up on Inside the Arts. I have been corresponding with Drew for a few years now and even contributed to his Take A Friend to the Orchestra project a couple times. I am very excited by the way he thinks and his vision for Inside the Arts.

I have also corresponded with Sticks and Drones contributor Ron Spigelman who has had his students at Drury University read Butts in the Seats as part of the class he teaches. How can I not want to be associated with someone with such obvious wisdom and taste?

And Ron’s partner in crime, Bill Eddins has had people complain that he wiggles his bum too much while conducting. How could I not want to be associated with a person who brings so much energy and enthusiasm to orchestra music.

As for the Arts Addict, Jason Heath– he drive a fire breathing Saturn. I am pretty sure a guy that tough can take me so I am not going to say anything that might offend.

Anyhow, I look forward to my association with these folks and those slated to join. I anticipate there will be some cross blog conversations because there are things I am curious about regarding the artistic and educational circles these guys travel in. I figure many of our readers probably are too.

So stay tuned and see what develops!

A little audience participation activity in the spirit of the season—

I was looking up the story behind terming a Broadway flop a turkey and discovered I can’t find anything definitive. The story I had originally heard was that any show that couldn’t sustain itself past the holiday season was termed a turkey. Good for consumption only during the holiday season I suppose.

Searching the internet, I came up with this quiz about turkeys in general which claims the term originates “After a show called “Cage Me a Turkey” that was so bad it closed before intermission on opening night.”

That story frankly doesn’t ring true for me.

I found another explanation on a listserv archivepost by Gerald Cohen that literally employed a turkey or the egg argument that doesn’t solve the mystery.

“Theatrical _turkey_ is traceable to burlesque theatre, but here a problem arises: we find reference both to _turkey shows_ and _turkey troupes_. Which one came first? Were the turkey shows so called because they were performed by turkey troupes? Or were the turkey troupes so called because they performed turkey shows? And whichever came first, why was _turkey_ used?”

Cohen later gives the best explanation I have found.

“In the mid-1920s _turkey (show)_ was extended from a strictly burlesque context to the legitimate theatre — a development apparently due to an unusual streak of bad quality that hit the legitimate theatre in Syracuse at that time. The road shows were derided in Syracuse as ‘turkeys,’ with clear reference to the itinerant (fly-by-night, grossly incompetent) turkey troupes of burlesque vintage. From Syracuse the extended use of _turkey_ ‘third rate production (in the legitimate theatre too)’ spread to New YorkCity and hence into standard slang.”

But that is merely the best explanation in terms of best research. I am interested in hearing what other stories are out there to back up the use of the turkey label. If you a story, I wanna hear it, so tell it in the comments section.

So, we have a new look here at Butts in the Seats. Things are still under construction as I work to figure out how to use this new version of Movable Type. My main motivation for upgrading was that I was getting nearly 1000 spam comments a day and I heard MT 4 had better spam filters.

Well, I haven’t gotten any yet.

I was also thinking it was about time that I upgraded the look to take advantage of new features blogging software have these days.

I will be poking around improving the look over time. Today is my only day off until Thanksgiving so some of the changes will be slow in coming.

On the positive side, you can make your visits to the site a game and try to discover what changes I have made each day!

This weekend we had some pretty heavy rains which revealed leaks in places we didn’t know we had them. And I am not using literary license when I say that. Two years ago we had 6 weeks of rain and there weren’t leaks anywhere near where it was cascading down the walls yesterday.

As a result, I spent the day repositioning fans to blow the carpet dry. However, before I left this evening I had to unplug many of them and return them backstage because they were being used for our production of the Odyssey opening this weekend. Not a few people remarked how fortuitous it was that the production design required us to buy fans to replicate the winds in the story.

One of the things I like about working in a creative setting is that one has requisite tools for said creation at one’s disposal for other purposes. You are able to respond better to problems when they tend to crop up. For example, we don’t need to put in work orders to replace light bulbs because we have ladders and genie lifts. We can rewire broken lighting fixtures, solder wires back together and test for circuit continuity. We can tighten what is loose and patch what is leaking.

Well, up to a point anyway. This weekend, all my staff could do was mop up what was leaking. Our theory is that a cast iron drain pipe has cracked in a place we can’t get to.

Of course, some times self sufficiency can be a curse as well. Since our facilities are used after normal work hours, we have the janitorial department provide us with extra stock for the restrooms in case we run out in the middle of a performance. Since the cast and crew often use the building directly behind us, we often end up restocking the restrooms there as well. Heck, about 8-10 years ago, I learned how to stop a urinals and toilets from constantly flushing and return them to service. I have been fixing the problem ever since saving lots of water. Some member of the custodial staff is getting off easy during our show runs!

Given that I have had to master a wide variety of financial, desktop publishing, database, image manipulation and word processing software in the course of my job, I figure I have picked up a goodly amount of skills in my life.

Last week I suggested that being in the arts hadn’t really helped out my math scores as much as the arts education advocacy ads suggest. I can’t deny that being involved with the arts has provided me with self confidence, self-reliance and the ability manipulate the world and address the challenges I encounter both physically and virtually.

Has participation in the creative arts prepared me for life in ways that other academic subjects, television, movies and video games never can?

You betcha.

Will it do the same for your kids? Like everything else, it depends on how long they are involved and how thoroughly they embrace it. The current stage craft class at my theatre has involved themselves with a gusto and in numbers I have never seen and the professor has rarely seen. If I knew what it was that was motivating this group, I would bottle it.

I know they are growing in knowledge and skill from the experience because they are coming in when there is no class and using what they have learned to create projects for other class—far in advance of deadlines! (Honestly, I think they are pod people or something, they are so atypical of the usual students in this class.)

So yes, working in the arts might be a thankless job with long hours, little pay and low prestige. It may not make the most convincing ad copy for the arts in education people, but I have always prized my experience in the arts for the self-reliance having such a wide variety of tools at ones disposal affords you.

As much as I love to see the arts kept in K-12 education, I am often a little skeptical about how effective arts exposure is to improving math scores, etc. Cause frankly, I had a fair bit of arts exposure and I got awful math grades. Some of my doubts come partially as a backlash to the make your baby an Einstein by playing Mozart while they are in the womb movement.

I think the thing that turns me off about the Mozart genius babies is that uses the music prescriptively rather than encouraging trying to comprehend music and learn about Mozart. The whole K-12 has always seemed similar in that it implies you just add arts for quick instant SAT scores.

I had a couple entries about six months ago on the statistical correlations between arts experiences in youth and attendance as an adult so I won’t get in to any of that again. (Again noting, I was never good in math.)

But perhaps I protest too much about being bad in math. I have to concede my comprehension did come later in life. I still can’t do calculus, but I do see the relationships I didn’t before. And my claims of doing poorly in math are not entirely true. As a junior in high school, I was flabbergasted to learn I had gotten an A on the state regents’ math exam. This was mostly due to the fact the exam was heavy with logic problems which have a strong verbal component.

My verbal skills haven’t been overly lacking and I could probably credit the arts for cultivating those skills in part. So technically, the arts probably did help me with my math scores, at least for one year.

As the Boston Globe article on the value of arts education I posted on mentioned, there are all sorts of ancillary benefits to the development of a person. I believe that being in school plays in elementary and high school helped develop my confidence and gain me a modicum of respect among peers outside my general circle of friends.

And while I haven’t made my million and probably never will, I have done well enough in the arts that I could walk proudly into my class reunion next month. (Unfortunately, I can’t make it 🙁 )

What we need are ads soliciting support of the arts in school that tout the benefits as more than a recipe for better grades. There are other arguments that people can identify more closely with than grades. Granted, that is the focus of schools and if you want arts in schools, the grade improvement has to be there. But parents are also looking for schools to make their kids better people. History and science lectures aren’t going to be able to accomplish that as well as hands-on creative activities.

The best way to make the appeal for arts in schools might not be the most obvious. I had read somewhere recently that most anti-drug ads have failed to lead to a drop in drug use until the current campaign showing kids just lethargically sitting around doing nothing and having no impact on the world. Whether the impact will be long lived or if the drop in use is just coincidental, I don’t know.

The ads that had run prior to the campaign showing people getting in dangerous situations leading to death and injury met with the approval of older folks who tended to value safety in their lives. The concept of danger actually appealed to kids who tend to believe themselves immortal and they went out and tried drugs. These new ads make older folks uneasy because they explicitly say, I tried drugs and nobody died implying drugs aren’t dangerous. But apparently kids see the users portrayed as not being the life of the party and are having second thoughts.

My point is, the most convincing argument for arts education in schools might not be the most obvious one or the one people are most comfortable with. The best argument might end up promoting the value of non-arts activities too.

A couple weeks ago I came across a webpage where an author was encouraging people to buy his book and had links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Powells. Since following any link would allow you to buy the same product, I started to wonder if choosing to buy from a certain bookseller was a personal statement.

While an author would want to offer people the most options to purchase their book, it is clearly not in his/her best interest to link to Amazon because they won’t receive any money on sales of the large stock of used editions Amazon makes available.

I have read some screeds on the internet about why one store is more evil than another but I haven’t read enough to justify a theory that people feel like they are making a statement when they buy from a certain bookstore.

When you shop in Tiffany’s or carry an iconic blue bag, people can see you and be impressed. What you are reading might say something about you, but if you buy a book online, unless you are carrying the box it came in around with you, the source of the book you are reading on the bus is invisible. As the purchasers, you know where it came from and perhaps you derive pleasure from your association with the place of purchase.

I don’t think there is a question that people are motivated to do things by factors that will never receive external recognition. I have recently been pondering if there is a way arts organizations can structure the choices they offer people in a way that allows them to make a personal statement even though the ultimate result is no different from the person standing next to them.

For awhile credit card companies were emphasizing choice of card art, payment date and rewards plan as an individual decision. Other than the art, no one at the cash register had any inkling about what choices you had made unless you started tallying aloud how many frequent flier miles you were racking up.

The obvious choice for arts organizations might be donation options which benefit really specific areas with which the donor might identify and privately recognize. No one else in the audience may know or care, but that Fresnel on the first electric is there because of you baby!

In many ways, this is too easy and probably ignores other opportunities. It has also been done to death in many other forms like adopt a seat and cobblestone campaigns. It is hard to imagine other options because it is difficult to know what secretly motivates our patrons’ choices and the Internet allows them even more privacy by circumventing the Tiffany’s building and bags altogether.

It wouldn’t surprise me if organizations started to tap into some obvious sources of personal statements and advertise that building renovations had earned some form of LEED certification in order to attract environmentally conscious individuals.

Eventually, that will become trite so the trick is to identify motivators with a similarly powerful appeal that aren’t quite so obvious that might be sincerely embraced. With all the arts organizations that create new programs just to get grant funding, the last thing groups need to do is replicate this mistake by hitching to a trend that isn’t compatible with their mission.

I have some irons in the fire but nothing has developed. I did want to note the inexplicable absence of Adaptistration from the ArtsJournal.com.

I am not a big symphony fan, but I do respect Drew’s writing and check him out every weekday morning. I was surprised to find the link to his blog gone today and upon typing in the blog’s URL, find myself redirected to Adaptistration’s new home at www.adaptistration.com.

I have dutifully changed the links on my home page. The links from my posts to Drew’s entries on Artsjournal.com are still active but I don’t know for how long.

In the absence of any post on either Artsjournal or the new Adaptistration regarding the change, my musing on the subject have run from the mostly benign scenario where Drew wants more control over the appearance of his blog. A more disturbing scenario has occurred to me where his assessments of orchestra websites and reporting on negotiations and revelations of other details have been welcome by many and they in turn have put pressure on Artsjournal editor Doug McLennan to reign Drew in.

The concept of the latter option has such chilling implications, I tend toward the former. Hopefully Drew will offer an explanation soon.

It bears noting that in the internet age, it can be important to get ahead of things by providing information about changes lest unfounded rumors start to emerge from idle speculations such as those offered above.

Yes, you can damn me for inconsistency by simultaneous noting this fact and posting idle speculation. But please note that most people don’t provide a disclaimer that allows you to damn them for inconsistency.

In the comments to my recent post on Gov. Mike Huckabee, Fractured Atlas Executive Director, Adam Huttler, pointed out that some groups like the NRA supported candidates on the single issue of gun ownership. Acknowledging that it was damned effective, albeit narrow minded, he asked,

Imagine a candidate who will quadruple public funding for the arts and ensure that every arts organization in the country never has to beg for its budget again. Now imagine that he’s also pro-life, pro-gun, pro-death penalty, and anti-gay. Can you imagine anyone from our community supporting him?

The first, admittedly crass, thought that came to mind was that it would be akin to supporting a head of state because of an anti-communist stance despite his record of rapacious greed, corruption and human rights atrocities.

The musing that followed were, by their very nature more considered responses to the question. Still the basic idea that any cause is not well served by supporting someone who embraces ideals that are repugnant to their core beliefs remained.

That said, while I think many in the arts hold strong opinions about right to choose, gun control and the death penalty, I don’t think they are defining characteristics of the arts community. If a politician stepped forward who was going fund the hell out of the arts, infuse the educational process with it and espoused pro-life, pro-gun, pro-death penalty sentiments but held favorable views on other important issues like the environment and social services, maybe the arts community would be advised to grin and bear it.

The anti-gay issue though does impact the core identity of the arts. Depending on how restrictive the views a candidate held were, the mass support of such a person could be disastrous for the arts. In my own organization alone which is pretty small, we would probably lose about 15-20 people upon whose goodwill and assistance we regularly depend.

That is just the people who are homosexuals. The amount of support we would lose from their sympathetic friends and family of any sexual inclination should we support a candidate espousing restrictive policies would be immeasurable. Presenting shows that have traditionally raised a furor in communities like Angels in America or Oh! Calcutta! wouldn’t lead to the ruin of my theatre as fast as if groups like Americans for the Arts, Actor’s Equity and DanceUSA, among others, banded together to urge the support of someone who reproached the gay community.

Using the NRA as an example of what the arts should do is not quite valid. For one thing, the NRA doesn’t typically ask for funding. In fact, they often encourage the government not to spend tax dollars on programs that might impact their members like information tracking. Politicians are happy to support people who give them a lot of money and don’t ask for any to be spent in return.

I do think Huttler’s comparison is apt in one respect, expression of passion. I don’t think that arts people are active enough in advocating for funding and assume others will do it in their place.

But even more importantly, arts people don’t talk about their passion publicly the way members of the NRA do. You walk into store to get coffee, sit in a diner, go to a wedding or graduation and you might hear someone talking about how the government is infringing on the right to bear arms. A tension might infuse the atmosphere and a debate might erupt, but everyone standing around is already familiar with the views of the NRA even if they aren’t members of the organization because the conversation is public and widespread.

Can the same be said of the NEA? How many people outside of the arts world know Dana Gioia is the chairman? Actually, how many audience members and gallery/museum attendees who nominally support the arts know who Dana Gioia is? People may not know Wayne LaPierre is the current CEO of the NRA and that John C. Sigler is the president, but can probably identify Charlton Heston as a primary spokesperson, if not past president.

While the argument for arts funding doesn’t have a basis as a constitutional right, the opportunities for spreading a positive narrative are expansive. It can be as simple as talking about the joys of teaching kids to fire pottery while waiting in line at Starbucks.

Better still is taking advantage of opportunities to have other people talk about how great the arts are. While sitting at a table at a wedding reception, ask where people are from and then about the arts life in that city. With any luck, you can ask leading questions to get them to talk about how much they have enjoyed different experiences and they will leave the wedding with a warm fuzzy feeling about the arts.

If you aren’t so lucky, the conversation might be why they don’t like to attend. Leading the conversation in a positive direction might take more skill and humility. If one were a visual artist and people were dead set against that discipline because they didn’t understand modern art, ignoring the urge to lecture about Jackson Pollack to pursue a path of less resistance in a stated interest in music or powerful acting to nudge them toward trying a pops concert or play might be tough.

Engaging in informal public conversations about the arts can help the arts person cultivate the ability to speak persuasively among people who have a low level of comfort with the arts and discover what their barriers to participation might be.

The general public becomes more familiar and hopefully more positively inclined toward the arts as their understanding expands and the general subject enters their subconscious via background conversations.

The more I read and write on this topic, the more convinced I am that funding for the arts isn’t going to be achieved by mobilizing the base in times of crisis or even during legislative cycles but rather by taking a long view and making the arts part of the daily interactions. In order to convince people that arts are central to their lives, they must experience the arts centrally in their lives and not as an alternative to the mainstream practiced by perceived fringe groups.

There must be something in the air because I keep finding interesting articles on employment. I am going to have to create a category specifically for the topic if this keeps up.

This time around it is a piece by Arthur C. Brooks in The American called “I Love My Work.” In it, Brooks talks about how important work is to providing meaning and direction in day to day living.

As I have noted before, the feeling that one’s work is meaningful, at least by ones own standards, is a powerful motivator.

“…people who think their work allows them to be productive are about five times more likely to be very satisfied with their jobs than people who do not feel they can be productive. And those who are proud to work for their employers are more than ten times as likely to be very satisfied with their jobs as those who are not proud.”

Brooks cites a survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago which showed that 89% of people who worked at least 10 hours a week were very to somewhat satisfied with their jobs. The percentages remained about the same whether people were in high income or low income jobs, whether they completed college or not and regardless of working in private, non-profit or government jobs.

And given an opportunity to be financially secure for life without having to work again, 69% of American adults would continue working in some capacity.

One of the areas that I was a little skeptical about was the idea that pay and benefits such as vacations actually detracted from people’s enjoyment of work.

“Indeed, there is strong evidence that compensation such as pay and vacation

I went to visit the Memphis Manifesto website today to find it gone. Well, more accurately, that the account hosting the site had been suspended. You can click on that link if you don’t believe me.

Does anyone know why the site has disappeared? The physical manifesto is easily found as an Acrobat document. But I wonder what the disappearance of the site might portend. Since the impetus for the Creative 100 who met and signed the Manifesto came from Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, I wonder if this is a sign that the whole idea that cities must attract the creatives has fallen out of vogue.

The Manifesto it self doesn’t seem to be dated in anyway (in these days of fast technological development, ideas can get stale after 4 years). There doesn’t seem to be anything in there a community wouldn’t want to strive for.

So what happened? Did the dream die or has it morphed into a bigger, better concept that was only held back by the ideas on the old website?

Anyone know?

At some point in the process, every acting teacher tries to dissuade their students from pursuing the craft professionally with tales of the incredibly high unemployment rate in the Actors union and the dismal amount most of those who are working get paid.

Still, hope springs eternal and the warnings fall on generally deaf ears.

When you think about it, they have some reason for hope given that the status of actors has risen from the historical lows it once occupied. As those of Shakespeare’s age reckoned, Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being looked something like this:

God
Angels
Kings/Queens
Archbishops
Dukes/Duchesses
Bishops
Marquises/Marchionesses
Earls/Countesses
Viscounts/Viscountesses
Barons/Baronesses
Abbots/Deacons
Knights/Local Officials
Ladies-in-Waiting
Priests/Monks
Squires
Pages
Messengers
Merchants/Shopkeepers
Tradesmen
Yeomen Farmers
Soldiers/Town Watch
Household Servants
Tennant Farmers
Shephards/Herders
Beggars
Actors
Thieves/Pirates
Gypsies
Animals
Birds
Worms
Plants
Rocks
Thanks to the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival

Of course, these days actors rate a little higher. Though in light of the role executive directors must increasingly play these days, actors still rank below beggars.

I recently came across a theatre that had shirts, mugs, totes, etc available with this list on their Cafepress shop. The puzzling thing for me was that they have never been associated with an Elizabethean/Jacobean production as long as I can remember. Since they mostly have live music and dance, a smattering of musicals and nearly no dramas, I wondered if it might be sending the wrong message to donors who may not get the joke.

In any case, the parents of aspiring actors can take comfort today, as they did in ages past, that at the very least, their kids didn’t want to become pirates.

We are interviewing for a new staff position at work and have gotten a better batch of applicants than we have in the past. I think it might be in part due the fact that I rewrote the job description that was being printed up on some industry job sites to be easier to read than the 40 sentence sans paragraph breaks monstrosity that the computer software generates.

I still had to link to the monstrosity but I think my summary of the job and specific mention about what point in one’s career the position was suited made the process more welcoming and easier to understand. Given that the official job title, recategorized for reasons of “efficiency” some years ago, bears no hint of the performing arts, I am guessing my alterations helped catch the eye of people who might actually be qualified for the job.

Participating in this search process has illuminated some unpleasant facts about being a person looking for a new job.

Since I work for a state institution there are hoops people have to jump through that it wouldn’t occur to most search committees to erect. From the applications we received, I imagine that it didn’t occur to most of the candidates that they were supposed to explicitly jump through them. For example, one of the minimum qualifications (MQ) for the job is willingness to work nights and weekends. Most people in the performing arts would take it as a given that if they listed working on 30 performances annually on their resume, they were showing that they were willing to work nights and weekends.

Unfortunately, Human Resource people having no experience in the performing arts and even some committee members who do have the background look for specific reference to a willingness to work at these times before crediting that MQ.

One of the rules about resumes and cover letters is that they should tell a story about your experience. Naturally, the story you tell about yourself should be one that matches the requirements of the position. If you are highly educated and are applying for a position where you will be working with highly educated people, you may try to talk about your experience in a sophisticated manner. By this, I mean that you might reference how you were personally involved in the logistical arrangements necessary to transport equipment to various venues throughout the community before and immediately at the completion of an event.

You might feel this answers whether you can drive and are willing to work evenings and weekends. From the last 4-5 search committees I have served on, I hate to say that making awkward but explicit statements that you have a license and will work evenings and weekends may be best. Some of the committees I have been on haven’t be in my field or a state institution and I have spent more trying to convince people that all questions have been answered implicitly via the available information than I care to count.

In light of my experience on these search committees I wonder if I might have better served in my own job searches by writing, “I have a driver’s license; I work nights and weekends; I am detail oriented enough to transport the correct equipment for performances to remote venue we don’t own”, instead of trying to signal these things with the sort of example I used two paragraphs ago.

This sort of thing sounds hackneyed and grates against my pride in my writing ability. I wonder how many jobs I might have lost refusing to sacrifice the flow of my prose. (Which is not to say it can’t always use more work.)

I hate to say it, but search committees seem to use picayune points to disqualify applications because they don’t want to do the work of evaluating all of them. The more applications there are, the pickier people seem to get about things like Ph.Ds not listing where they went to high school.

The high school itself never emerges as a criteria for job selection. The person is eliminated because “if they can’t be bothered to fill in all the blanks, how good can they be?” Frankly, when faced with a form from an office supply store that asks what my high school major, minor and degree was and if I have a CDL license for a job that doesn’t require driving, I have to wonder if an employer can’t be bothered to create an application form that is pertinent to the position, how good a work environment can it be? (Happily, the form I had to fill out for my current job was both short and pertinent to the position.)

I should note again that I am not only referring to state institutions in these examples. There are a couple non-profit committees I have sat on that operated similarly. If a creative economy is indeed upon us, I have to think that the only way creativity is going to bloom in companies that use such rigid hiring criteria is going to emerge in spite of these practices. I understand that fear of lawsuits informs decisions to reduce subjectivity in the interview process. But it seems that some people use the structure to abdicate the responsibility to do a thorough job vetting the candidates and finding the best person to fill the position rather than the person best at filling out forms.

Being human, it is inevitable that we compare our experiences and progress with others. Whether it is in our personal and professional lives or measuring our organization against others in our community or region, the grass is always greener elsewhere in some respect even if you are on top.

Coveting another’s success will often move you to examine how they obtained fame, fortune, life of ease, etc., in the hopes of replicating the ends by duplicating the path they took.

Some times this works, but many times it does not. There is a story Joseph Campbell tells in a number of his works about King Arthur and his knight’s search for the Holy Grail that has stuck in my head for years. As they begin the quest for the grail, they come to a forest

“‘They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest at the point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and there was no way or path.’

“No way or path! Because where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path.”

This always seemed like a potent bit of wisdom whether one is seeking personal enlightenment, examining one’s career path or running a business. Life is not like a marathon where the path is cleared and marked and progress is easy to measure and compare against others. It is more like that forest.

If you have ever pushed into a forest where a path is not, you often find to your surprise that once you are past the outer layer of entwined branches and brambles, the way through the forest is much clearer. Other times there is more of the same and a swamp to boot. Like the grail search, the distance, location and actual appearance of the goal is unknown.

It is hard to remember all this when you hear about the success others are having, the distance they are covering, the treasure they are finding. It is easy to think you should be using rope because the successful guys are using rope. But their forest passes over a mountain and yours is full with brambles where a machete is more useful. Even if your path takes you through a swamp where a rope might be helpful, you are going to use it in a different manner than those traversing mountains.

I use this lengthy metaphor to reinforce the advice I have issued before about carefully assessing technology tools rather than jumping on the bandwagon because everyone else seems to be doing so. The same goes with programming decisions, marketing plans, construction and pretty much every other choice you may have to make.

In the last few weeks I linked to a video where Malcolm Gladwell talked about how Prego overtook Ragu in the spaghetti sauce market when their research figured out that people’s general preference is for either regular, chunky or zesty/spicy sauce. Now you can walk into the store and have 20-30 choices of sauce from Prego alone. Ragu hired Prego’s researcher in an attempt to catch up and offers a similarly large variety of sauce.

Knowing that Prego met with success and knowing that Gladwell is considered a real smart, insightful guys these days, you may decide he is right and there is no one perfect product for everyone. But is offering a wide variety of arts experiences right for your organization? Is it even within its capacity to execute?

Inspiring stories of success can be great to hear but the strategies aren’t sure things for everyone. The now cliched phrase “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we X” only proves that different people with different expertise and different resources were able to put a man on the moon.

And there have been very few attempts to follow that path since.

This being my 500th entry, I thought I would wax a little philosophical.

Back when I was actually taking philosophy in college, I was always intrigued by the basic idea of what it is that comprises identity. Generally, the concept is introduced with a question like-If your arm is chopped off and replaced with a prosthetic, are you still the same person you were before? Then what about a leg? The questioning goes on removing and adding body parts to start the conversation about how much has to be removed before you are no longer you. Accompanying the question is also the idea of whether the loss of certain senses changes you since you no longer experience the world in the same manner.

The final examine for the course challenged us to compare what different philosophers would say about the identity of crew members on the Star Trek television shows given that the process of “beaming down” demolecularized and then reconstituted them.

Sure it sounds strange, but the essential questions of identity come up quite often in conversation on many topics. Certainly, it emerges all the time in regard to art. One of the first questions most arts students are asked explicitly or implicitly is what is art? One of the initial separations people try to make is between art and craft and then pare their definitions down little by little hoping to find that one defining element wherein art resides.

Given that a pieces of clay shaped into water jugs by Incan potters 500 years ago are enshrined as art objects in museums and private collections, people are often uneasy making definite statements about the difference between art and craft and never get beyond that point.

If distilling the elements of art were so easy to do, someone would mix it with the ingredients of quality, bottle and sell it.

If things do get bogged down or boring during your debate about art, you can always introduce James Joyce’s idea that all the art we see these days, including Norman Rockwell’s paintings, is pornography.

The truth is, seeking the ingredients of art can be just as fun as boldly walking into a room and accusing Norman Rockwell of being an arch-pornographer.

Go into the rehearsals for a new play and try to figure out when it becomes art. Does it happen during rehearsals? Does it happen on opening night? Does it happen some 10 days into the run when everyone settles into their stride? Does it happen at different times for different actors? Has the set and lighting always been artistic from the start but the show doesn’t become art until the acting ensemble integrates itself with these elements?

Was art created the moment the platonic ideal of the show coalesced in the director’s head? Since performance is meant to be experienced by others, is it not validated as art until someone has witnessed it?

If the performance is awful, was art created? Given that the work of many visual artists wasn’t appreciated until after their deaths, art can obviously exist independently of perceived quality and value.

Similar criteria can be applied to paint brush strokes, musical notes and poetic phrases.

Engaging in this sort of speculation with a light heart can make an arts experience enjoyable and I daresay will sharpen one’s perceptions as one endeavors to spot the point at which the ingredients transmuted into art.

Now some may think that coming to these realizations is a great argument for the teaching of philosophy. I should note that I believe I got a C+ in the class and that was probably mercy on the part of the professor. At some point, the lessons started to sink in and make sense in the context of the world at large.

Hmm, I wonder if I can discern the point in my life when the knowledge finally turned in to comprehension….

A lot of bloggers, myself included, talk a good deal about engaging audiences, being relevant to the community and getting people to be less passive participants but we rarely point to any examples that work.

You may not agree with their politics, but Bread and Puppet does all of these things pretty well. They are completely dedicated to doing all the things I have mentioned along with keeping art accessible to all. They have been doing it for about 40 years and until 1998, had tens of thousands of people showing up to an unadvertised annual event to participate.

Now granted, it can be easy to get people interested in what you do when they see an immense puppet hovering in the tree (third photo). And the lure of great homemade bread with garlic aioli can’t be underestimated.

They get people involved with the performance of their pieces. During the summer they have shows every Sunday that are rehearsed with members of the community on Saturday.

Back when I was an undergraduate the theatre department at my college had Bread and Puppet come in to get the students involved in a performance. I couldn’t help but be impressed by the costuming and scale of the puppets we were taught to manipulate. I still remember it quite clearly even though it was (mumble) years ago. I also recall how flexible company founder Peter Schumann was with his vision when the number of students who showed up was less than the amount he requested.

So the lesson here is to hone your papier mache and giant puppet manipulation skills, right? Well no. That is their core competency. They are good at it. Chances are you will look foolish if you aren’t. Better to say the lesson is to find a way to tell your community “this is what we do well, come join us in doing it for a day or so.”

Yes, it isn’t appropriate for everywhere. Yet this might be one of the few suggestions I have made that favors the smaller arts organization with more direct ties to the community over the larger ones with the resources to implement new technologies. Getting things rolling might be as simple as an open house with activities. Though I suspect with so many other options available to people, it will take greater cleverness and long term effort to see satisfying results.

I can be pretty dang certain that it will also take an unflinching dedication to the ideals of your effort on the scale of Bread and Puppet’s to realize success. Strange as it may sound, people seem to respond. Bread and Puppet has an apprenticeship program in which they promise apprentices hard work for no pay and a month of sleeping in a tent. Currently, they have filled their 35 apprentice slots for this summer and have a waiting list.

I did plenty of suffering for my art in squalid conditions that didn’t seem to phase me when I was younger. From the description of what the program is not in an attempt to dissuade those with an incorrect understanding of the program, it appears that more than just young students are looking to participate.

I know we would all love that sort of zeal from our employees, audiences and admirerers.

By way of Arts and Letters Daily is the text of National Endowment of the Arts Chair Dana Gioia’s graduation address at Stanford University.

He uses the apparent controversy that he wasn’t a big enough celebrity to address the graduation as a springboard for discussing the decline in appreciation of the artist, scientist and intellectual in the country over the last 50 years. But he doesn’t lay the blame entirely on popular culture and technology–

“Most American artists, intellectuals, and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.”

While he does engage in some lengthy nostalgia for the way things used to be, I think he makes a valid point about the role of culture in general when he comments, (my emphasis)

“The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.”

I liked how he addressed issue of the disappearance of the arts in schools. He supported up his claim that arts classes don’t train artists, but rather create “complete human beings” by noting that people will need the skills they confer in the emerging creative economy.

He also mentioned that studies in civic participation were showing the emergence of two types of groups, those who sat entranced before their televisions, computers and game consoles and those who balanced these things with exercise, charity work and greater social engagement. What appealed to me in this argument was the evidence that- 1) The numbers show that these behaviors are not specific to education, geography or income so everyone is equally able to participate; 2) The elements that defined what group you tended to be in were reading for enjoyment and participation in the arts.

What I appreciated is that this approach takes advantage of the underlying sentiment of the current “get up, get out and do something” well-being campaign you see a lot of these days to bolster the arts make the whole person argument. Since there has been a feeling that the arts may not be best served by advocacy stressing economic benefit, it was important to provide additional support alongside the future employability point.

As he drew his speech to a close Gioia urges the graduates to be cognizant that while the graduates may have spent a lot of time playing and socializing on their computers, their lives were balanced by intellectual rigor. He notes that this equalizing presence they may have taken for granted will now be absent from their lives upon graduation. They will be entirely responsible for how actively they live their lives.

I was having a conversation with a friend from a previous job that brought up a few questions for me about what motivates people who work in the arts to attend arts events.

This gentleman was assistant marketing director and then marketing director for a theater at which I once worked. He eventually left to work for another marketing company, formed his own company which was acquired by another and is now a partner in that combined company.

In the same period his wife has been phasing herself out of a career in which her services were in high demand and is trying to earn her Actors’ Equity card. A couple years ago they both traveled to Scotland, young children in tow, to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe.

My friend tells me he hasn’t gone to see a show at the place we worked or almost anywhere else in years because of the ticket plus babysitter costs. This is a barrier to attendance that is commonly cited so there was no surprise in that.

What I was thinking as he told me was that if a guy who was paid to convince others that there was value for them in surmounting this barrier is unwilling to attend, how much harder is it these days to appeal to those without any background in arts attendance at all.

Granted, there is the element of his daughters’ youth that has to be factored in as well. Arts person or not, there is a necessity of child rearing that must be heeded. He gave the impression that he might be attending events more often now that his girls were getting older. It will be interesting to revisit the topic in a couple years to see if he did indeed start paying to attend shows more often.

I make the specific qualifier about paying to attend because he has been attending the shows his wife performs in using the comp tickets she gets. This fact spawned another train of thought that does not reflect on my friend’s practice, but is something I have observed in general.

I have known about 20 people in the last 15 years who haven’t been able to make the philosophical transition from starving artist to paying member of public. They got used to paying $5 or getting comps when they were students and/or starting out and years after won’t attend a show unless they receive the same treatment. In some cases they appeal to some pretty tenuous connections with people they only talk to when they want tickets. At least once a year I get a call invoking the name of someone 10 years gone.

I am betting some of my readers know these people. I am also willing to wager that some of them are pretty well off and put their ramen eating days behind them or worse, are successful professionals in the industry and feel their importance earns them free admission. (I have to confess, much to my chagrin every year I am sent two season passes to a theatre based on my theoretical importance. I am typically too busy and embarrassed by the idea to attend more than once or twice a year.)

I don’t know that this type of behavior is necessarily solely endemic to the arts rather than just being a component of a personality type. I am sure there are people who expect free food when they return to a restaurant where they once worked. Personally, I would prefer the problem to be personality related than to think that a lot of arts people are parasitic jerks.

The problem with this answer is that it provides more evidence that us arts people just like everyone else. If a guy who has performed and worked in theatres for over a decade leaves the performing arts world and has as hard a time motivating himself past to attend as the couple next door, maybe the arts aren’t a calling for a special segment of the population.

Frankly, I hate to have this sort of pessimism creep into my world view. The idea that being part of the arts confers a special grace and nobility makes being flat broke a little more tolerable. (It also dovetails nicely with a Catholic upbringing replete with tales of suffering saints.) And even though I am in administration, I feel the phrase “run arts like a business” robs it of some value.

I have come to realize that this grace and nobility isn’t the sole providence of those working in the industry but rather can be shared among all those encountering it. (Which is not to say that a dirt poor existence doesn’t sharpen the senses and appreciation of those who are receptive to experiencing art!) Partaking of this grace and nobility as a suffering poverty stricken artist in your youth certainly hasn’t earned you comps for life. You can’t be part of the in-crowd forever. One day you have to join the great unwashed and pay for your tickets.

Via Americans for the Arts ArtsBlog is a three part discussion about Joshua Bell’s experience playing anonymously at a Washington, DC train station back in April.

The three parts were actually recorded on the same day but have been posted periodically on the Polysemy Woodshed podcast/blog page. (Links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Their discussions were some of the most thoughtful on the event that I have come across. The participants tackled a lot of the same issues about respect and recognition of talent, appropriateness of venue and curiosity of the children that I and others who have blogged on this topic have.

Among the specific ideas I found intriguing was the concept of an agreement existing between the performer and listener. Another was comments in part two by one of the participants where she talks about how discouraging it was that people walking by Bell seemed determined to ignore him. A short time later she acknowledges the common practice of tuning out information that is not immediately pertinent when she admits that she has only just noticed there were a lot of birds singing in her backyard and she has no idea if they have recently taken up residence there or if she has been tuning them out for a long time now.

The idea that you have have to have a frame of reference of some sort to assist your evaluation of art also came up in relation to art appearing in familiar and unfamiliar situations as well as simply having had enough prior experience that you can make a deliberate choice between stopping or walking away.

Part of the allure of Joshua Bell, one commenter argues is that there are a series of actions one engages in prior to attending a performance that create a sense of excitement and anticipation. Having circumvented these preparatory stages by appearing unannounced in a train station, Bell divested himself of much of the framework that make his performances so valued. He became merely a good violin player in the subway.

For those of you who recoil at the idea that Joshua Bell has much less value unannounced outside the symphony hall as he does inside let me point out that the U.S. dollar has no value outside what we invest in it. It is not backed by gold or silver–just belief. Print the exact design of a dollar bill on the exact same paper using only black ink and it is worth only the paper it is printed on. Add the blues, greens, yellows and reds and suddenly it is worth a bit more. It isn’t perfect analogy but in the same manner do tickets, clothes, dinner arrangements and nice performance halls contribute additional value to Joshua Bell.

As those discussing the situation point out, all these ancillary elements that enhance the value of the experience in our minds don’t actually improve the art. They are just things we as attendees have convinced ourselves are important to improving our receptiveness and enjoyment of the event.

One of the people talks about Matt Haimovitz who looked be one of the next great concert cellists but gave it all up because he felt he was disconnected from the audience and instead started playing in rock clubs, ice cream parlors and malls.

As the third segment ended, they pondered whether it was worth having orchestra musicians busk from time to time in the hopes that some ideas about how things might be changed to reach the man on the street would emerge.

I am not quite sure if there will be another installment or not. Each episode didn’t really indicate either overtly or imply by incomplete discussion arc that there would be additional sections posted. Since each segment was posted in two week intervals, I may just have to wait a couple weeks to find out!

Via Arts and Letters Daily is an interview with Ray Bradbury wherein he mentions that he never intended people to interpret Fahrenheit 451 as a warning against censorship, but rather a warning against the lack of substance on television. At a time when the few people who had televisions were watching shows on seven inch black and white screens, he rather presciently foresaw a world where people had wall sized televisions. (One even dominates the wall of his house these days.)

So often in the arts we are in a position of interpreting meaning for others. In many cases we don’t have the creator alive and available to check our perceptions against. To a certain extent, artists cede control over what a work means as soon as they show it to another person. Artists need to accept that people will see things in a work that aren’t there and then will start deconstructing it looking for more.

Of course, if the artist tells you point blank that they didn’t infuse their work with the meanings you are seeing, you as the observer can revel in your discovery of the unintended, but shouldn’t insist it means something else to the artist’s face. Bradbury apparently walked out of a class at UCLA because students wouldn’t stop insisting he was talking about censorship.

This type of situation raises questions about interpreting the meaning of art. First of all, if thousands of high school English teachers have been disseminating the wrong information about the themes intended by a living author, what are educators and those serving the same role at arts organizations getting wrong about dead artists?

As we write program notes, conduct Q&As or talk to ushers and patrons in the lobby, how much are we getting wrong? Maybe the idea that Hamlet was motivated by an Oedipal complex never crossed Shakespeare’s mind. (Especially since the concept is never considered until after Freud coined the term.)

Second is the matter of balance. Where does the balance fall between telling people what is meant and telling people there is no single correct interpretation? People come to educators and arts professionals for the tools to process unfamiliar material. We try to give them language and lenses to assist in this endeavor but part of the joy of encountering art is to see something no one told you was there.

The problem is that sometimes these realizations are tainted by the context we bring to the work and don’t reflect the intentions or reality of the artist. Now granted, personal context is the basis of some works of art like Impressionist paintings. But you are also in the position of not being able to tell people they are wrong about Hamlet since you subscribe to and encourage the “No wrong answer” school of thought.

There are lengthy essays written on this whole concept. But let me just toss a thought out there for you to ponder–

Who owns the meaning of a work of art? Even if you are polite to Ray Bradbury and believe that he only intended the book to be about television, is he essentially only accorded the status of a equal interpreter of art because he has missed all the other aspects of the book that speak to you?

The funny thing is, in denying an artist’s stated intent one often holds him/her in greater esteem for being such an adept creator, they subconsciously invested their work with multiple layers of meaning.

Since today is Memorial Day there are forces inspiring me in directions other than blogging. It was by a bit of serendipity that I came across this video last week illustrating that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to B-Boy dancing.

This excerpt from “Detours – An Experimental Dance Collaboration,” alternates between B-Boy and dance/movements that preceded and inspired them from ethnic dancing, martial arts and films. Some of the sources have been obvious, but it was intriguing to see some of the more obscure origins of some of the moves.

While B-Boy dance has always been impressive to watch, viewing this video segment has increased it in my estimation as integrating that which is best of human physical expression.

Warning: Strong Language in Interview Section at Start and End.

Over the last few months I have been serving on a subcommittee advising the Salvation Army on the theatre section of the Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center they plan to build with a portion of the $15 billion the widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc bequeathed to them.

The scope of the entire project which will also include immense athletic facilities, swimming pools, classrooms and daycare, is frankly intimidating so I am glad I am only focused on the performance space planning.

The San Diego facility providing a prototype for the local project was built while Mrs. Kroc was alive. She set very high standards for the project mandating that the normally modest Salvation Army cut no corners. The Salvation Army has some tough decisions to make given that while they want to spread the money around to as many communities as possible, they also need to allocate enough to each to satisfy her wishes.

I think she would be pleased to know that the center will be placed directly adjacent to a burgeoning community that will derive immense benefit from all the services it will provide.

On a related topic, at least three people on the Kroc Center subcommittee, myself included, have been approached by consultants hired by another organization planning to build a theatre nearby. I had been contacted a year earlier by another consultant who was engaged to put a business plan together. After a long discussion I told her I felt one phase of the plan would be valuable to the community but that a second phase was dicey because people didn’t realize what resources were required to run a theatre well. She called me back at the end of her study and essentially told me she agreed.

The second consultant told me they were just double checking the information from the first consultant. Later I wondered if the first consultant hadn’t given her employers the answer they wanted when another arts leader told me the second consultant was trying to persuade him to urge their employers to scale back the project. I wonder if like those living outside Phoenix, the residents of that neighborhood don’t identify with the city core.

I reference this second case not only because I have been pondering if it aligns with the findings of the Rand Corporation regarding arts environments in places like Phoenix, but also to note the different processes organizations go through in construction planning. I don’t know if depending on a consultant is better than putting together a committee of professionals or not. Consultants are probably less likely to have potential conflicts of interest with a project but can impart more sagacious advice based on experience.

Frankly, I was a little concerned that I wasn’t qualified to advise the Salvation Army until I learned the plan had to be vetted by the state, regional, national and international headquarters.

One of the interesting things about serving on the Kroc Center subcommittee is that the people we were advising had no preconceived notions about how the theatre would be used other than wanting to hold a few religious services. At the first committee meeting we were told to outfit the building with everything we wished our theatres had. Most of the meeting was spent with the committee members asking questions about the core purpose of the facility– producing, presenting, rentals, support of the arts classes– with the Salvation Army staff member assigned to us scribbling everything down to pose to her superiors.

By the second meeting the organization had clarified their thoughts in relation to all of our questions and suggestions about the niches the space might fit. It appears they intend to primarily rent the facility to interested parties. This suits me well since the facility will be in my geographic proximity. They won’t compete with my presenting activities but will provide a place for me to refer renters I have to turn away for lack of available dates.

One of the things that impressed me was that they are truly planning for the needs of the community rather than their organization. For example, the seating capacity needed to serve the potential community users will probably exceed attendance at their services for the foreseeable future by a fair amount leaving a lot of empty seats.

There is one more meeting in this phase of the planning and this time we committee members have homework. We have been asked to review three space designs, mostly pertaining to square feet allocated for different rooms and comment on whether it is sufficient for the proposed uses of the facility. We have also been asked to staff the facility with employees and volunteers and generate a list of all the furniture, fixtures and equipment that would fall out if you took the roof off and turned it over.

It has been quite entertaining imagining what would fall out if a giant child caming along, opened the roof of my theatre like a dollhouse’s and inverted it. Given that the assistant theatre manager’s niece turned one of her set models into a dollhouse, it isn’t so far fetched. I’ve been practicing my knots so I can lash myself to the nearest railing or pipe just in case.

When I made my entry on artist neighborhoods and the evicting power of gentrification a couple weeks ago, I meant to link to an additional article in Business Week. Now I am sort of glad I didn’t because it provide me the opportunity to raise the subject of what environments artists really value.

The Business Week article, “Bohemian Today, High-Rent Tomorrow,” obviously deals with the issue of artists making neighborhoods too cool for them to live in.

One of the things the piece discusses is that artists will trade affordability for the chance to live near other artists or at least near people with money to consume their artistic product. The piece is coupled with a slide show of the best places for artists to live. (buttons to advance the slides in upper right hand corner.)

Interestingly, since the list came out in February, people have been regularly posting comments to the site expressing their dismay that NYC and LA and others to a lesser extent were included on the list. (Kingston, NY is the real winner in the comments.) The feeling is that some of the cities on the list are too expensive and inhospitable to artists.

The article had acknowledged this but rated other factors as compensating for these things. Given that one of these factors was a concentration of artists and arts establishments, some people are apparently willing to make the trade off. Whether they enjoy a similar standard of living as artists in the other cities on the list, (i.e. size/condition of housing and number of roommates), is unknown.

So the question for my readers is, what trade offs are you will or not willing to make in regard to the city in which you live?

I am revisiting a couple stories tonight.

The first is some applause for Michael Rice over at Cool As Hell Theatre podcast who has been picked up by station KQED in San Francisco. Michael’s podcast is the first, and at this time only podcast broadcast by the station.

I have to confess, I haven’t been listening to his podcast as often as I would like. Everytime I do listen, I scold myself for neglecting his work. I appreciate that he asks questions you want to know the answers to that most interviewers avoid.

Case in point, in his most recent interview with Alison Jean White. She is the youngest member of American Conservatory Theater’s permanent company, a distinction previously held by Annette Benning. He asks her the requisite questions about feeling pressured to live up to Benning’s legacy. But he also asks her if she felt like she was exploited as cheap labor when she was a student at A.C.T. and talks about how he felt that way when he was in a different acting training program.

Given that she is still employed by A.C.T. and probably wouldn’t want to malign the organization, he probably didn’t expect her to answer negatively if she was disgruntled. I am just always impressed that he asks questions that reveal the inner lives of artists and the struggles and concerns they face. He also makes himself vulnerable to derision by revealing that he felt so exploited and burned out that he turned down offers of employment after a showcase.

Anyhow, I have made up for my past errors by subscribing to his podcast. It will be interesting to see where things go now that he has the potential for greater distribution. (Hopefully those San Francisco Public Radio listeners are hip to podcasts!)

Second issue I wanted to revisit I wrote on a bit more recently. It seems The Independent of London decided to replicate the Joshua Bell experiment the Washington Post conducted a few months ago that I posted about a couple weeks back.

They chose to place violinist Tasmin Little in a station far less appealing than L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C. The railway bridge beside Waterloo Station is described as “…amply layered with pigeon shit, blankets belonging to the homeless lie scrunched in a corner, and no doubt the place is used as an impromptu loo by Friday night binge-drinkers. It’s also windy, cold and, with the passing trains, a bit noisy.”

The article admits the environment isn’t conducive to stopping to listen echoing many of the same complaints a French businessman makes as he passes through. In fact, members of the Philharmonia Orchestra are the first to recognize Little and won’t stop because they have a train to catch.

While I feel both the Washington Post and The Independent articles got a little melodramatic as they wailed about the poor children being heartlessly yanked away from the musicians, in The Independent story, far more young people stopped and gave money than older folks who pay large amounts to see Little in concert halls.

It makes me wonder if my earlier thoughts about finding appropriate places outside of the concert hall to perform and then studying the who, what, when, where and how of getting people to sincerely stop and listen as a way of discovering a better method of delivery might have some validity.

The newly opened Honolulu Design Center is really trying to change the way people think about the place home and office furnishings has in their lives by positioning this facility as a gathering place.

If you have never considered your furniture store a center of social activity, you aren’t alone. The HDC figures this is the first time anyone has ever tried anything like this. If you look at their plans closely, you can see they have really done some thinking about their target audience.

The three story building has a cafe, a wine bar offering 90 choices and a 90 seat fine dining restaurant which will feature some of the furniture they are selling in their 6 showrooms. There is also an events area where Jazz is performed on Thursday nights and Wednesday and Sundays are film nights.

Just as Home Depot and Lowes offer little classes for the do-it yourselfers, HDC offers seminars that fit the lifestyle of their target clientele. The Small Business Administration held a micro-enterprise workshop for people wanting to start their own small business with monthly seminars on other topics to come. Another workshop offered helps people view home construction as an interconnected system so that all the segments integrate well together and result in low operating costs.

A television show, “Generation X and WhY Inquiring” will be filmed there featuring students

“-ages 9 to 17 – from various schools who will discuss and debate…the dynamics between boys and girls and issues ranging from harmless teasing to more serious topics like safety, drugs and health. Other important areas like global conservation, pollution, oceans, Social and educational issues…”

A number of thoughts passed through my mind. First that it must be nice to have the money to build the place as well as the money to buy from this place. While I am told there are pieces I could afford, $42,000 leather couches are more in line with what they offer.

Still, even though they are in a good position to recoup part of their investment being located next to the construction site of two towers of condos which need to be furnished, they are taking a big chance with this project. People might buy coffee or wine while perusing furniture–but are they going to go to a furniture store, nice as it might be, for dinner and a movie?

I also wondered if all the performing arts centers that have been built in the last few years at costs the exceed those of that Honolulu Design Center by millions have had as good a handle on how to serve their target audiences as the furniture place does.

In some respects, clues about what to offer and how to position themselves already exist. As mentioned earlier, they have upgraded the classes that Home Depot offers. They also seem to have improved on Target Stores’ Design for All campaign. At the prices they are charging, they certainly aren’t offering design for all, of course.

As I observed in an entry two years ago, humans seem to have an intrinsic need for art/beauty/meaning/purpose in their lives. Target Stores aim to bring the semblance of the aesthetic high end stores like HDC possess within the reach of everyone. HDC has moved a step further and is trying to bring many elements of the lifestyle their furniture already represents into one location.

To their credit, this isn’t some new initiative that marketing research indicated was a good idea. It is just another chapter in the company’s long history of sincere investment in local arts and culture. Their weekly print ads feature local visual and performing artists and promote their work and upcoming performances.

Thinking about what lessons could be derived from this for the arts, I came up with a great deal of “if onlys”- If only arts organizations had the kind of money to do market research to develop a great plan for serving the needs of a target audience; if only they could maintain a consistent staff and cohesive vision to see the plan through (Took HDC 8 years to come to fruition); if only they had the funding enabling them to ignore the distracting noise of earned/unearned income woes.

What I ultimately end up thinking is that HDC may serve as an example of what an arts organization should be– an unexpected arrangement that suits the community in which it is located rather than based on a standard set in other places. Somewhere out there may be a mini-van dealership/daycare/athletics field/community arts center catering to dual career-soccer parents.

Reflecting upon my use of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to discuss the definition of quality, I wondered if my support of his grading experiment might have been an early predictor of my involvement in the arts.

It seems to me that a person who valued insightful comments on their papers might be more likely to gravitate toward professions that provided more intangible rewards like esteem and self-actualization rather than high pay and material perks. On the other hand, I wonder if people who valued a specific letter or numeric grade over extensive commentary might be more likely to join professions with clearer remuneration.

I did a brief search for studies that might have examined this and didn’t find anything. I suspect the failure to do so is more a factor of not knowing what terms to use in a search than lack of research related to this topic.

About three years ago I included a Harvard Business Review article about the single perfect customer satisfaction survey question in an entry about customer service. (How willing would you be to recommend company X to a friend?)

I would be interested to know if there is any research out there that might support the dependability of using a single question to determine if someone in high school or college was disposed toward a career in the non-profit field based on what form of feedback they valued most on their assignments.

If there was a correlation between preferred form of feedback and profession, perhaps the perfect career path question might be: “What do you find more valuable in assessing the progress of your academic career, a letter/numeric grade or extensive written/verbal feedback?”

Does anyone know of research studies that might prove or disprove this notion?

The question about what constitutes quality is one of those things an arts manager usually doesn’t have time to ponder but which is central to all the activities an arts organization undertakes.

Most mission statements for arts organizations allude to providing quality to the community if they don’t do so outright. But when the doors open, are you offering the very best quality, the top quality you can afford or the top quality people are willing to pay for? Or does your product fall right there in the middle of the bell curve–something of middling quality that the largest group of people is willing to pay for?

Every couple of years I go back and read Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In the book, Pirsig methodically advances through various philosophical schools of thought in an attempt to create a valid definition of quality. He doesn’t actually complete the process until his second book, Lila.

There is a summary of his conclusions here. It is pretty heady stuff and tough to see the application to the arts just by reading the summary unless you are avid about philosophy. There is an essay by Mark S. Lerner called “Management and Art” that takes a crack at it that might be helpful in understanding some of the implications of Pirsig’s work.

I like reading Zen… because it gets me thinking and the detailing of his process aids my comprehension of the issues involved. I will admit I get lost at various points, though I make progress on each rereading. I don’t know if he actually arrives at a valid definition of quality. What he does arrive at makes more sense than what the dictionary says. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I come away with a broader appreciation of the elements and considerations that comprise the measure of quality.

Does reading the book better inform my administration of my theatre and programming of its season?

Yeah, well it is often tough to take satisfaction in knowing that you have been responsible for the propagation and dissemination of a large concentration of quality into the universe when box office receipts are so dismal.

We go before legislatures and tell them that they should be concentrating on all the lives that have been changed and not numbers served when choosing to fund the arts. But when we get back to our offices, damned if it ain’t a lot about the numbers, eh?

In his book Pirsig talks about how he decided not to let his students know what grade they got on a paper but instead give extensive feedback about the work they did and how to improve. The students went crazy. The comments on the quality were well and good, but they wanted a quantitative measure of their success.

When you are running an arts organization it is much the same way. You love the comments about how great the show was, but what you really care about are a satisfying number of butts in the seats (or butts passing through the doors if you are a museum/gallery.)

I should note that subsisting solely on a diet of comments, most of Pirsig’s A & B students improve their performance. The C and D students either saw an improvement or hovered about the same with some D & F students sinking into oblivion. Operating an arts organization in ever fluctuating social, technological and economic environments is a lot more involved than applying oneself in academic studies. It is nigh impossible to survive solely on that diet of feedback, but handled well some nutritional value can be distilled resulting in organizational health and growth.

So yes, absolutely, reading the book definitely informs the day to day decisions I make. I ponder such things as I have written above and throughout this blog. Obviously, I think reading and thoughtful consideration of different issues is important even if the idealism presented in writings seems far divorced from the hectic, time crunched reality of our daily lives.

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A brief related story I wanted to share. I first came across this book while taking a class in college. I wrote a paper supporting his ideas about replacing simple letter grades with brief evaluations of a student’s work. Much to my delight, my professor took me at my word and didn’t grade my paper. (She was already in the practice of writing comments on our papers.)

Given the college’s expectation that she assign a grade, she invited me to come to her office to discuss what grade I should receive. After reviewing her notes on my paper, I decided I had earned a B+. She was prepared to give me whatever grade I chose, but agreed that is what she would have assigned the paper.

Factoring in all the time and energy she invested in this whole encounter, this was very expensive for my professor. It is also one of the incidents that contributed to my feeling that I received a quality education at that school. An experience that resonates with me so many years later though she has probably forgotten all about it. (Though hopefully she offered similar experiences to other students.)