General Musings

Back in January The Artful Manager linked to Peter Sellar’s speech before the American Symphony Orchestra League (text found here.) One of the comments he made was that Beethoven didn’t write polite music.

On the way into work the next day I heard an ad that said something to the effect of “this moment of calm is brought to you by…” and named the local symphony while playing some sedate music. I wryly thought to myself that they were taking the wrong approach and should be advertising that they performed impolite music by the bad boys of their day.

I almost immediately started wondering how symphonies defined what music they played. Is it music that has stood the test of time? If so, why don’t they try to adapt enduring music by groups like Led Zeppelin and the Doors. Some of the pieces might might not be appropriate, but “Kashmir” had orchestral backing and I think a symphony could do something interesting with “Riders on the Storm.” Some effort in arranging the music for a symphony might create the basis of an interesting program that might attract some new audiences. These artists were certainly not writing polite music and were bad boys of their day.

About two weeks later at the APAP convention I actually came across a group in a showcase that had arranged many classic rock tunes for chamber instruments. I have subsequently learned that the London Symphony Orchestra has performed an orchestral arrangement of “Kashmir” and The Who’s rock opera Tommy, which I had forgotten.

I suspect that symphonies define the music they play as falling within a certain aesthetic that bears similar elements to works by predecessors like Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, etc. This seems like a very limiting approach. Admittedly, there is some logic to this. Nora Jones is defined as a jazz artist based on similarities in song choice and vocal execution to Bille Holiday and Nina Simone.

I looked around at the websites of about 15 symphonies, both large and small, and saw that some were performing works by composers who are still very much alive and haven’t needed to stand any tests of time. The only person I knew enough about to call a “bad boy” was John Cage.

I don’t want to get into a whole elitism debate regarding orchestral music so I will simply say I can see why the music of Led Zeppelin, The Doors and The Who, while standing the test of time, might not be considered appropriate for the main season. So I started looking at the Pops seasons for each of the 15 groups I mentioned before. By and large, most of the pops programming seemed to consist of the orchestras performing with popular artists like Manhattan Transfer, The Chieftans and Marvin Hamlisch. Old standbys like Gershwin tunes and the 1812 Overture appeared in Pops seasons, too.

I don’t know if I was looking in the wrong places or if performing arrangements of these songs represents a trend that has passed, but there seems to be a missed opportunity by not performing more contemporary but enduring works, even if only in a Pops season. If video game themes and cell phone rings can be the subject of symphony performances, why not these works? There is some real power, majesty and craftsmanship in these songs (or at least opportunities to use orchestra instruments to infuse these things into them.)

One of the strengths musicians of any stripe have is the ability to choose from a wide variety of songs. In theatre and dance, unless you are doing a series of short plays or short dance pieces, you are usually tied to performing a show linearly as written. People go to the symphony expecting they will hear selections from different artists in programs with titles like “A Foreign Affair” and “Glances of Love”. I will be the first to admit that I have no idea how the music integrates with these titles. From my vantage, it appears as if some sort of randomization computer program is used to pick the titles.

My point is symphonies have a ready made format and an audience that probably only knows slightly more about the logic process that places these songs together on the same night. If someone advertised a program titled “Bach You Tonight” that featured Bach and “Stairway to Heaven” at the right price, people who had never attended a concert might be intrigued enough to attend. (I certainly would because I am having a hard time imagining them working together. Who knows.)

I am not going to suggest that people will come for the Zeppelin and be entranced enough to return for the “Strictly Strauss.” It may be that the new attendees never become comfortable with anything more than the annual “Rock N’ Rachmaninoff” series. (Yes, I am having fun making up these names. I promise to stop before something really goofy like Haydn and Halen). These type of programs would also need to be part of a larger effort to attract and welcome new people, to be sure.

Folks will say if I really understood how symphonies operate, I wouldn’t make such ludicrous suggestions. Yeah, admittedly this may all be akin to the suggestions on our surveys that I present Christina Aguilera in my little theatre. From my perspective it can’t be too far afield from what Pops programs already do. Even if I am off base, perhaps all this will inspire someone with the practical knowledge to make something similar happen.

The biggest problems I anticipate are 1) Some drunk guy standing up and yelling, “Play Freebird!” and 2) Existing patrons feeling that it is dumbing down the program to include it in the main season. Good monitoring at the bar will solve the first problem. The second problem–well even as unexperienced as I am with classical music, I know that it will take a lot of skill to arrange some of this music so it sounds awesome at a performance. Dumb ain’t gonna cut it.

While I am talking a lot about classic rock, I don’t want anyone to get their minds stuck on that. There is plenty of other enduring material to explore for rearranging like some of the works of Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, etc.

Not everything deserves to be arranged to be interpreted by a symphony. It should be more about showing off the symphony’s prowess than playing something just because it is easily recognizable. Yet something recognizable can also make it easier for a person with a low level of experience to appreciate the skill with which a piece is rendered.

Many people recognize the “Blue Danube Waltz” but might not be able to discern whether it is played well. On the other hand, an existing familiarity with “Gallows Pole” (which has absolutely endured centuries) provides a reference point from which to judge a symphony’s rendition.

When I was at the APAP conference last month, Neill Archer Roan commented that sometimes it was difficult to figure out who bloggers were. I mentioned that I tried to keep identifiable specifics out of my entries because I wanted to create an everyman-everywhere environment. When writing about my own experiences I wanted to avoid having people dismiss them as having no application in their situation because they weren’t in the same region or discipline as me.

From some discussions I have had and comments the blog has received, I think it was a good choice to make. In some cases like yesterday’s entry, I think I may have gone a little overboard. In my attempt to avoid identifying the specific discipline by using words like “field” and “genre”, I think the entry may have been confusing and difficult to read. (And why didn’t I use the vastly better term, discipline, I will never know.)

I apologize to my readers for obfuscating matters in my zeal for greater relevance. I am not going to reveal the discipline out of a desire not to be seen as pronouncing its imminent demise. The other reason I am purposely vague is to protect the identities of the innocent or at least those deserving of compassion. If you really, want to know, email me and I will tell you.

One of the moderators of the Emerging Leadership Institute I attended, Rosalba Rolon, is the Artistic Director of Pergones Theater in Bronx, NY. She spoke briefly about the organization during the institute but it wasn’t until I read her brochure that something had caught my eye that synched with the stories she told.

She spoke a lot about the support the theater had received from the neighborhood and how indebted the organization was to their neighbors for their survival. Now things are looking up and the area, formerly one of the most crime ridden places in the country, is becoming gentrified. (Apparently, there is talk of changing the name from South Bronx to Downtown Bronx to support the spiffed up image.)

Many arts organizations target mailings to zip codes with affluent neighborhoods because they are more likely to be comprised of a demographic that is inclined to attend events and hopefully donate funds. Pergones uses zip codes to cultivate a different kind of currency.

The theatre remembers to whom it is indebted and offers 50% discounts (scroll to Zip Tickets) on tickets to anyone living in zip code 10451 up until 30 minutes before a performance. At first I misread this as a type of rush ticket available at 30 minutes before the performance but this anytime prior to 30 minutes before the performance.

As rush tickets, I thought this was nice, but when I realized this was a discount on advanced tickets, I thought it was great! This goes to creating a sense of investment, value and good will in the immediate community.

And even if you don’t live in the specific zip code, the theater has negotiated a reciprocal agreement for its members giving them a 40% discount at a theater in Manhattan, one in Washington, DC and a festival in Coral Gables, FL. Maybe few will ever be in a position to redeem the discount in the other cities. Still, they have an incentive to experiment and attend while they are away from home rather than doing something else.

The immediate message to the member is that their theater is working on their behalf to give them privileges when they are away from home. The goodwill generated from that is probably more valuable than any discount they might realize while on the road.

Since I have been invoking the idea of assessing technology and only using what is suitable for you instead of jumping on the latest trend, I need to issue a mea culpa.

At various times I have suggested in my entries that organizations should have the artistic staff blog about their rehearsal experience. I still think this is a good idea. However, of the few organizations I have seen who have had their artistic staff blog, I have to say I have been really unimpressed.

Many of them start out the first couple days of rehearsals and then either come to a dead stop or don’t pick up again until just around opening night. The entries that are there are pretty predictable. They start out talking about the great group that has been assembled and how exciting it all is. Then often nothing more.

Certainly one could get more entries generated if one made it a contractual requirement and set aside time each day during which performers and the creative team were to scribe their musings. After reading the experiences of a college professor who required her classes to blog, I am not sure this is the most constructive or productive tack to take.

Frankly, the blog postings I required my students to write were just not very interesting. Those students are bright, insightful, frequently opinionated, and, as a whole, a pleasure to be around. Their blogs were not.

I imagine that if you assembled the most brilliant group of performers and artistic collaborators the world could imagine, you might find that their brilliance was less apparent in what they produced for the blogosphere.

So I take it back. If you can do it well and your audiences will benefit from it, blog away! If not, turn the creative energies toward creating a great performance.

To pick up a little where I left off yesterday.

A good part of the rest of the first day was devoted to reading literature and discussing the difference between leadership and management and how you can exhibit leadership even if you aren’t an area or department head.

The second day we were a little bit more crunched for time because it had been requested that the ELI participants attend the plenary session and super sessions planned that day. (More on them in a later entry.) One of the exercises the institute leaders had us engage in was August Boal’s Forum Theatre practice. Members of the group were given a script and scenario and then the rest of us were encouraged to stop the action and replace one of the actors to move the situation in a more positive direction. I had heard about Forum Theatre before but never witnessed it in action. It was quite an interesting experience.

Another exercise we engaged in was Story Circle (explanation starts on pg 3). This activity is often to assist with conflict resolution. We used it to talk about people who have exhibited leadership in our lives and then examine the common elements.

There were a number of observations that came out of these activities. Some members of the group felt they would put their jobs in jeopardy if they attempted to shift the direction of meetings to make them more constructive. By which I don’t mean trying to use these activities in their organization, but rather recognizing where things were falling apart and trying to shift the tenor of the conversation. Other than working very gradually and subtly, we didn’t see any solution to this dilemma.

One of the biggest issues that came out of our discussions was succession planning. Many felt there wasn’t any effort being made to secure succession in arts organizations in general. A few felt like the discussion about it in their organizations was going something like this:

Leader: OH WOE! OH WOE! WHO WILL TAKE OVER WHEN I AM GONE? THE NEXT GENERATION HAS NO DEDICATION. WHO WILL TAKE THE REINS?

Emerging Leader: me! me! mentor me! i love all this. look over here. i am energetic and excited.

Leader: OH WOE! OH WOE! ALL THAT I HAVE WORKED FOR DOWN THE DRAIN…..

To some degree we wondered if the existing leadership might be holding out for a clone of themselves when changing times required different skill sets.

After discussing the plenary and super sessions we had attended, we met with alumni of the Emerging Leadership Institute. This was apparently something that had never been done before. The alumni had been meeting earlier to discuss plans for Institute graduates.

Many of the alumni still felt a strong bond to those with whom they had gone through the program and some kept in touch. Unfortunately, the graduates as a whole didn’t keep in touch. At one time there was a person who put a lot of work into keeping the members abreast of each others’ activities. Once she stopped, everything fell apart.

The alumni (including the most recent batch) have expressed an interest in not only staying active on the listserv/discussion forums but also increasing the visibility of program graduates at the conference. Among the ways the graduates would like to participate are moderating panels and introducing speakers so that the same people don’t have to hustle from session to session.

Also, since participants in the institute are early in their careers and rather poor, the plan is to request some sort of break in conference fees for 5 years in return for volunteer work on the conference. The alumni that attended this year is only a small portion of those who have gone through the institute. The thought is to make it easy for graduates to continue to stay involved with APAP and the conference allowing them to expand their network of contacts and improve their leadership skills.

One of the concerns the alumni had was that the Emerging Leadership Institute isn’t perceived as important or valuable to arts organizations. One graduate was in the position to encourage and approve the participation of a colleague from her organization. She said her decision to do so was second guessed by her superiors who questioned it as a waste of time and money.

This was one of the reasons why the alumni are so interested in keeping everyone communicating. The better a resource of advice and answers the group becomes for its graduates, the more valuable attendance at the institute may be seen. This is also the reason why we want to be more visible at conferences as well.

I just wanted to observe–Like social networking sites (Myspace.com) and technology sites like YouTube, this is an example of users essentially taking the initiative to promote something they value and asking the host company for assistance in doing so. This was a theme that came up a lot during the conference–but I will talk about it later.

I should mention that despite the poor image organizations might have about the ELI, the 22 or so accepted were culled from a much larger pool of applicants. The process is fairly competitive and hopefully will become more so with alumni input.

Okay, so obviously there was a lot I liked about my experience. There were also a few places I felt things fell short. I have already submitted a written evaluation and had a discussion about all this with the group leaders so I am not telling tales out of school.

First- The application to the institute required us talk about the strengths, weaknesses and threats to our organization. I went expecting part of the conversation to include that. It never was.

According to one of the ELI leaders, they had been trying to get rid of that application for quite some time now since it did not reflect the content of the program and hoped to revamp the form for next year.

I don’t know if any sort of discussion in that area was supplanted by the request that we attend the plenary and super sessions or if it never occurs. I do think a discussion of the threats to the industry could have been valuable. I wouldn’t have been interested in an open grousing session where people laid out a lot of blame on the K-12 education system, home entertainment systems and the internet. The second day would have been the right time to have it. By then the ground rules for thoughtful discussion would have been firmly established.

But really, you can engage in discussion about threats to the industry in a lot of locations. What I think would have been really essential was an opportunity to address weaknesses in ones own leadership and how to better take a leadership role in ones current position. The environment was specifically designed to preserve confidentiality and to create bonds between participants to serve as resources for each other.

The more I think about it, the more I believe this was what many attendees were looking for. There were a lot of clues throughout the two days. Early on people specifically admitted they weren’t good at dealing with conflict. As I noted earlier, others mentioned that they were in dysfunctional environments. I went up to a person and told them I empathized with their situation based on my own history. And of course, some felt they were being overlooked as potential inheritors.

We were given some good tools and activities for dealing with conflict and affecting change when we returned to our organizations. I strongly suspect, however, that many in the group would have welcomed the opportunity to essentially engaged in a group therapy session, air their concerns and fears with colleagues and receive some advice and guidance in return.

I imagine that would have run things into a third day and even at the conference rate, it was pretty dang expensive to stay in those hotels! The whole experience was absolutely worthwhile. I am going to put some effort into making it even more so for those who follow by providing feedback and encouraging increased alumni involvement.

As I noted earlier, I was at the Arts Presenters Conference over the last week. I will be writing about the experience over the next couple days and maybe even longer. I took a lot of notes and picked up some literature I still need to digest.

On the whole, it was really a great experience. I took the opportunity to see a lot of artists and to talk to many colleagues. I debated my theories about press release writing and marketing.

I also spoke at some length to one of the APAP board members about creating discussion forums as I recently vowed to do. Of course, she challenged me to step up to my convictions and join the communications committee.

What I wanted to talk about in today’s entry was my participation in the Emerging Leadership Institute. The Institute is one of many conference leadership training efforts associated with a conference. I listed many of them in an earlier entry. In that same entry, I cited Andrew Taylor’s frustration that there are so many of these programs and none of them talk to each other.

At one point during the institute I spoke to the aforementioned board member, (who was helping to lead the institute), suggesting that if APAP was pondering conducting leadership activities regionally, they should first look to tap into the existing leadership seminar infrastructures like the National Arts Leadership Institute (NALI) rather than reinventing the wheel. I then sought out Philip Horn who is associated with NALI, asked him how things were going with the organization and told him what I had suggested.

Anyway, there were about 22 people attending the institute. Everyone was in the first 5-10 years of their career in presenting. Almost everyone was a presenter with a couple artist agents, a couple of service organizations but no artists. Apparently, this year was unusual in that there were no artists participating.

I also noticed and commented that nearly everyone was from either a university, city or state associated institution. There were few people from “independent” presenting organizations. I was told this was reflective of the general membership–it started 50 years as a university presenters organization and remains generally so. I noted this as another reason I think APAP should host open bulletin board forums. If the website is viewed as a resource for many, perhaps the conferences will be as well and attendance will diversify.

One thing I was surprised at was that the institute sessions were lead by an artist agent and a presenter rather than a professional leadership consultant. In my mind this was a strength because the leaders had a practical understanding of the environment in which the attendees were operating. Consultants tend to live in a more theoretical place. This type of objectivity is certainly useful in many cases.

In this particular instance I think the arrangement helped the group develop a trust bond with each other and the leaders much faster than if it had been lead by consultants. And lord knows, we had little enough time to waste.

One of the first major activities we engaged in was splitting into groups based on our major leadership style. One group was comprised of those who look at the big picture and storm full speed ahead toward it pulling everyone else along. Another group was the process oriented people who make sure everything is well organized and accounted for. The third group were people who took the feelings and concerns of others into account. The last group were those who celebrate every little victory and act as cheerleaders. Only two people identified themselves in this last group so they merged with the third group.

Each group was then assigned to go off and list what they felt were the hallmarks of that particular leadership style. I was in the third group and had joined it semi-reluctantly because it sounded a little too touchy-feelie, but suited me better than the descriptions of the other areas. Come to find out, most people in the group didn’t feel the category wholly defined them and that they had strong elements from the other areas. Many, like me, were very much lovers of spreadsheets and databases as decision making tools. The institute leaders are going to transcribe our notes and email them to us so I can touch on the specific elements of each style at a later date.

Briefly, my group decided our style was focussed on generating consensus and buy-in from people. It was felt that involving people in this way was important because the pay in the industry was so unrewarding. Many of us said that we knew we needed to be decisive at the end of the day even knowing that some people disagreed. A few admitted that they shied away from confrontation and these type of decisions. We felt it was important to have people like us around in a presenting environment because often artists visit us as the 35th stop on a 50 city tour and people like us work hard to make them feel safe and comfortable.

When the groups came together to discuss the hallmarks of our style, we had a little bit of a surprise. While we compared and contrasted ourselves against the other groups privately, we realized we were an amalgam with the other styles. One of the other groups, (I won’t say which) essentially dismissed our leadership style publicly generally characterizing us as touchie-feelie and really only good for organizing receptions, parties and soothing hurt feelings.

Now to be honest, a couple people in my group did admit that their boss was the yeller and their role was to motivate and organize the traumatized staff when meetings were over. That wasn’t what we saw as our primary function. For many of us, throwing parties and making people comfortable wasn’t even something we did directly but rather delegated and enjoined others to do.

After this stage of the exercise, we were asked to go back in our groups and create a definition of leadership. This information too will be emailed to me so I will address it more directly at a later time. When we got back in our group, we discussed the comments directed at our style during the session we just left. Then a number of us wryly observed we were probably the only group actually doing so. One member confirmed that before he left the other room he overheard one group launching into a discussion before all the members had assembled.

Despite the differences in our leadership styles, each group created remarkably similar definitions of what leadership was. Even though we used varying tactics to demonstrate leadership, we agreed what the ultimate product of those actions should be.

At this point my entry is getting pretty long so I will continue with my ELI experiences tomorrow.

One thing I want to say before I end is that the attendees of the institute really developed strong bonds with each other fairly quickly. I can’t speak for everyone in my leadership style group, I will say that while I can remember which leadership style group made the unflattering comments, I can’t remember who was actually a member of that group. In speaking with others from my particular sub-group at other times during the week that followed, no one ever said anything critical about any other institute attendee, much less commented that they were going to keep an eye on X because he/she was a member of “that” group.

I won’t be posting for a couple days because I am at the Arts Presenters Conference in NYC. I hadn’t posted earlier because I was using the opportunity to surprise my sister who works there and she occassionally reads the blog.

I have been participating in the Emerging Leadership Institute and been talking and listening to a whole bunch of interesting folks so I will have much to post when I return.

I have also met, albeit briefly, Andrew Taylor and Neill Archer Roan. Watch their blogs as well. This is a big conference and their experiences will undoubtably be wholly different from my own.

..and it is one of the many reasons I have a rule against quoting review blurbs provided in press packets. Contextomy is the practice of quoting people out of context. (The term caught my eye while I was brushing up on logical fallacies.) It has found applications in many arenas, but is widely practiced with movie and theatre reviews as noted in this Wikipedia article.

If you don’t like Wikipedia as a source (though most of that article is footnoted and cited pretty well) here is an article from Gelf Magazine on the subject with many amusing examples of the lengths publicists go to in order to make a dud sound great.
(Added: This article is actually the inaugural entry for a continuing series where the magazine tracks misleading quotes. Didn’t realize that when I first posted.)

I have a suspicion that this practice which is already being recognized by an increasingly skeptical audience may be approaching its final days. The difference is that in the past audiences were suspicious. Now they can access information on the web via their cell phones. As people walk out of movies and performances thinking “Geez, that was godawful, how could she say it was a cinematic tour de force?” they are going go online with their cell phones and search (reviewer) (show name) and discover that the reviewer said the show made Teletubbies look like a cinematic tour de force.

Without the drive home with a stop at Starbucks to buffer the disgust that will inspire them to go online and check things out, the distrust level could skyrocket. That is assuming people weren’t skeptical enough to check things out in advance.

And hey, if I am wrong and the practice flourishes for years to come, at least you have a fancy vocabulary word with which to impress your friends as you mutter “‘Superb and invigorating?’ Bah, it is probably just another case of contextomy..”

I heard a poem today that really electrified me because it succinctly and adroitly summarized the relationships between artist, consumer and a work. I was excited by “The Secret,” by Denise Levertov, because it points out that your perception of a work doesn’t need to be in synch with that of the creator for you to have an authentic experience.

For that reason alone I think every beginning level fine art and literature class should start with this poem. Handing it out at arts events to assuage the fears of attendees that they are stupid if they don’t “get it” would be valuable, too.

The only flaw with this is that people have to understand the message of the poem without much need of explanation. Lengthy instruction about what they are supposed to think runs counter to the whole intent after all.

The poem also talks about how revisiting a work multiple times can be rewarding. Often I wonder if people don’t recognize this about art: How there are valid reasons to read a book, listen to a symphony work, see a play, a sculpture, a dance piece many times over the course of your life.

I could go on and on for a bit talking about what great messages I see in the poem. As I said though, that is a bit counterproductive. I am including the poem below and hope if you don’t find it particularly inspiring, you at least enjoy the sentiment.

“The Secret” Denise Levertov

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line.

I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

While revisiting some of the resource links on the blog, the title of a piece on the Community Arts Network site caught my eye- Putting Culture Back in Agriculture. The piece is a grant report for the University of Wisconsin Extension, but don’t let that dissuade you from reading it. It is not dry in the least and is very inspirational.

As a small town boy who goes nostalgic at the smell of cow manure, there were a lot of tidbits that caught my eye. The first was the vision of one of the earliest university presidents, Charles Van Hise.

“I would have no mute, inglorious Milton in this state-I would have everybody who has a talent have an opportunity to find his way so far as his talent will carry him, and that is only possible through university extension supplementing the schools and colleges.”

My imagination was also set afire by the story of John Steuart Curry

“…hired as the nation’s first visual artist-in-residence, with a job description of helping anyone on the farm – farmer, farm wife, farm youth – to paint. …he believed that everyone has the ability to paint what was most alive to him – that it was just a matter of enabling people to do so. He emphasized personal vision over technique. As a result, paintings by farmers who worked with Curry are dramatic, breathtakingly alive.”

I am sure the reality isn’t as ideal as my imagination makes it given that Curry was going around Wisconsin during the middle of the Great Depression. It is hard to imagine him being welcomed with open arms at least initially. In fact, according to the piece farmers are a little suspicious of artists in these days of prosperity (relative to the 1930s).

One of the observations the grant writers make as they report about the project is that “Rural arts groups have tended to emulate urban arts groups, and management books have suggested that nothing but scale distinguishes urban and rural arts groups. More and more, we are realizing that this is not the case.”

The writers openly admit that their initial plan of having a statewide conference where they were setting the agenda was probably wrongheaded. It was only due to having to cut back their planned activities because they weren’t fully funded that they feel they ended up stumbling on a much more constructive approach.

In the interests of brevity, I will leave it to you to read how they ended up supporting projects at four locations around the state and what the projects entailed. Some of the project conclusions that jumped right out at me came from the program at a place called The Wormfarm Institute.

Conclusions included: 1) putting ‘agri’ back into ‘culture’ is perhaps more important than putting ‘culture’ back into ‘agriculture’; 2) culture and agriculture are interdependent and this does not mean that ‘artists interpret farmers’ lives; nor does it mean artists are marketers or political mouthpieces for farmers;…

There were a plethora of valuable observations throughout the report at the other sites, including why it was better for them to have taken this route than implementing their initial conference plan. The next thing that really jumped out at me was in the “What We Learned” section.

That ‘art’ is indistinguishable from ‘culture,’ and that this is a good thing and it resonates with people. ‘Art’ may conjure up the stage, galleries, appropriate audience behavior. Even the word can leave people out; where blending creativity with food, traditions, history, meals and conversation communicates and invites people in.

This is a loaded observation for two reasons. First, because solutions to problems like the ones they had getting artists and farmers to talk to each other productively go deeper than just saying culture rather than art. The reporter writers certainly know this. Honestly, I am making this point because I have come across a number of egregious examples of late where people seem convinced they can solve their problems by shuffling terms and buzzwords.

The second reason is that the observation touches upon the whole “What is Art?” and “Art vs. Craft” debate. Yes, they seem to be celebrating rural culture more than art. But they are also saying art and culture are the same and are specifically getting artists, whom they label separately as a group from the farmers, involved in the program so they presumably have something to offer.

So then, is a loaf of homemade bread equivalent to a painting?

The debate has never been clearly resolved in my view but it can be fun to engage in from time to time. Certainly for me a loaf of homemade bread has a greater emotional and sensory appeal than most paintings. I am actually tearing up as I write this remembering baking (and eating!) bread.

Apparently, I am not the only one befuddled by Phil Cubeta’s many faceted mind. Sean Stannard-Stockton at Tactical Philanthropy emailed me a link to his blog addressing my entry on the subject last week.

My awareness of philanthropy blogs has been growing by leaps and bounds this past week. I am going to have to start a category in my links section (though I have quite a backlog of links to add at the moment. That’s what Christmas vacation is for I suppose.)

In case you were wondering what Tactical Philanthropy is, he outlines the process here and even discusses strategic vs. tactical a bit later on. He gives practical examples of the way to apply some of these ideas throughout the November entries. Some of these take the form of case studies for well-considered planned giving arrangements.

I know I seem to be dwelling on these blogs a great deal of late, but as I noted earlier this is virgin territory to me. Having only just begun exploring, it is all so very interesting and exciting to ponder.

I got a comment on one of my older entries today from a guy who has recognized that many surveys of audience participation say people often choose to attend a performance because others are going or someone else has made the arrangements for them.

Ric Mazereeuw runs Two for the Show, a site specifically aimed at getting people together for event attendance. Better formatted than Craigslist and more focussed than Meetup (though large as neither), the site allows you to connect with people with similar interests without providing your actual email address.

I am going to hazard a guess and say that the service started in Canada given that the Toronto and Vancouver pages have the most people signed up and most of the US pages are flagged “New”.

The whole behavior of depending one person to initiate the idea of going to a performance and making the arrangements is so prevelant (at least according to studies I have read) that I specifically ask on our audience surveys how we can make the process easier for the coordinators.

I also started offering a mini-group discount for groups of 8 or more and a larger one for the traditional 20+. People were actually taking advantage of the 8+ discount in satisfying numbers. I probably need to do a better job of prominently promoting it since the highest point of activity was right after the brochure mailed.

It also occurs to me that it might not be a bad idea for arts organizations to link to the MeetUp and Two for the Show sites and direct people there to find like minded with whom to hang out and attend. Last year when I participated in Take A Friend to the Orchestra, I sent out a call and ended up going with people I had never met before.

As I was looking at the sites I was thinking that there might be more participants if only they were advertised more. Then of course it struck me that arts organizations could help by actually directing people there. MeetUp has a page for my city but there really aren’t any arts and culture attendance groups.

If I created a group on Craiglist or got Two for the Show to make one for my city, prominently linked to it, mentioned it in my monthly newsletters and encouraged other organizations to do the same, it might get a little momentum going in the community.

Even if it only resulted in a handful of people getting together, the service is free and it takes nearly no effort to point people toward it. If you get 10 extra people coming to a show each year, you are doing pretty well for your investment.

One thing to note, MeetUp is a little different than Two for the Show in that it is structured to help people organize get togethers so starting a group there carries an expectation that you will be getting folks together and does carry a cost.

If anyone else knows of other social networking services that might be helpful in getting people together and their butts moving toward seats, lemme know!

Yesterday I linked to an entry on Where Most Needed blog detailing how to protect against donors who may renege on their pledges. Where Most Needed and the accompanying linked Wall Street Journal article talk about how it can be tricky to broach the subject of a legally binding pledge agreement lest you offend your wealthy and influential benefactor.

What they don’t mention is the possible public relations problems you might face as well. Some years ago I worked for a theatre that a well known celebrity had pledged to in return for the naming of one of the performance spaces. Unfortunately, his wife filed for divorce. Seeing large alimony payments in his future combined with some other financial troubles, he chose to discontinue his payments.

The theatre was undergoing some financial problems of its own so the board felt it was irresponsible not to pursue the collection of the pledge and chose to sue the celebrity.

The way it ended up playing out in the newspaper editorials and letters to the theatre was that the organization should be grateful for the money it had already received and stop kicking a favorite son when he is down.

This seems to be one of the trickiest points for non-profits. When someone makes a pledge, I think we would all agree they are doing it out of the kindness of their heart. (With perhaps some advice from their accountant.) I think we can all at least empathize with the point of view that if you, as a donor, run into financial problems, you are going to want to reserve the right to hold on to the money you have earned. You are probably going to feel bad about it, but you are going to see your choice as logical.

The problem for non-profits in situations like the one I mention is that people can empathize. This type of thing easily happens on the family level. You promise your child a car when they turn 18, you run into financial trouble and you find you have to tell your child that if they want to keep the car they are going to have to get a job to continue making payments. The child has to work harder or see if grandma can help with the money.

I think this might be partially what happened in the case of my experience. People in the community could imagine themselves falling upon hard times and didn’t like the idea of the theatre coming after them, even for a $100 pledge, because they made a generous gesture.

The public may have sympathy for your non-profit organization because you built based on a promise of money but there is a good chance they are going to see the donor’s decision as practical. The expectation is going to be that you will work harder and find other benefactors. The consequence of not doing so in my car example is to take the bus or bum a ride from friends. The equivalence for a capital project is tougher- scaling back activities (not easy if you don’t even have a roof on yet) or performing in other facilities.

It would be extremely important to have a good solid public relations plan in place before deciding to legally pursue a large lapsed donation. One wrong move and you can poison the well for donations from an entire community.

I am going to peer around philanthropy blogs to see if there are any detailed suggestions of how to be well prepared in these instances. I would be very interested to learn if anyone has come across any good plans or has executed a public relations campaign that preserved the communal good will in a situation where it may have been lost. (Instances where the donor reneges due to their own financial malfeasance tends to create sympathy for the deprived recipient.)

As I promised yesterday, I have a couple ideas about the direction things could go in terms of interactivity in the arts. As I had said, I think the format and perhaps physical environment in which new events might happen will have to change. I can see them happening in smaller theatres, but it is difficult to have a really interactive event in a huge hall seating 2400 people.

A couple years ago I did an entry where I imagined at one time we would be able to plug in and experience a performance from the point of view of the performer. Among the many alluring benefits might be experiencing the performance opposite an attractive romantic lead whereby you saw yourself being kissed by the person.

Since then I have come to see possibilities in other areas that are more immediately achievable. With the rise in iPod ownership these days as well as the ease of processing and projecting video on computers I don’t think it is beyond the realm of possibility that in the next few years we will see performances where people are encouraged to bring music, images and video to a show in the iPod in order to contribute to it.

It might start out simple and small with people encouraged to go online to read a single scene and then either send in music/images/video that are appropriate for that scene. At the performance the audience might see or hear the submitted material underscore the action.

In time, as technology improved and performance groups refined their technique for assessing and integrating donated material into the performance, we might see events where people enter the theatre, download their offerings at the door and see/hear material being added to the show on the fly throughout the performance.

A creative team for a theatrical work may not only include the director and choreographer but a new position of technology integrator-a person who chooses among multimedia materials within the director’s umbrella vision to support a performance with new music/images/video every night.

This is the sort of practice I think would get people deeply involved if they were excited by it. People might get enthusiastic enough to go online and read the script, check out the costume sketches, etc., in advance so they could review their iPod library and then submit something along with suggestions about where it might best be included in the show.

What would really be fabulous, given copyright restrictions which would necessitate having an ASCAP/BMI license to cover music, is if people started composing their own music or shooting photos and video to contribute to a performance. The way things are going the lines of intellectual property ownership are blurring. The idea of directors and designers owning their work is probably going to morph into a communal ownership. Might be better to tap into this energy and involve the community rather than to let them appropriate it for their own ends.

Yes, it would be labor intensive as all get out at first for all sides involved until the whole process essentially got invented. You can certainly see this type of thing coming out of the smaller experimental spaces and then going mainstream. But there is so much potential for really connecting back with audiences by giving them involvement and ownership that they may become highly interested in participating even if the final product is presented in the current passive viewing state. (Though I bet that situation evolves by itself as a by product of new efforts.)

One of the most exciting things about art of any kind is that different people see it from different perspectives. The problem we have run into of late is that the general message people get is that there is only way correct way to interpret the art you see. By involving the community you can acknowledge the validity of these different visions and even recognize that someone touched upon an option you had never considered. There are some visions you may never use like the suggestion of zombies in the graveyard scene of Hamlet.

Other things you will use and little by little people will feel they have the capacity to understand and participate in the arts. Initial contributions may contain more dross than gold but as people feel more comfortable and familiar with the way design concepts are generated they will chuckle about the zombie ideas and make suggestions with real promise. (Of course, same qualification as yesterday, those who feel motivated to improve will do so.)

Yesterday as I closing my entry and was thinking about my promise to talk about this idea for interactivity, I knew I wanted to talk about how the great thing about art is that different things jump out at people as significant/appealing about the work.

Imagine my delight then when I received an email this morning that illustrated just that. Michael Clark at ShowBizRadio.net which features internet reviews for Washington D.C. area read yesterday’s entry and latched on to the paragraph about “Blogging on the internet is opening up new opportunities. It is allowing educated people who have never been hired by a newspaper to speak.”

The general topic about that entry wasn’t really about internet reviews. I didn’t even know I was going to even reference internet reviews until shortly after I realized what the question “How do you remember all those lines?” was indicative of. When I did write about internet reviews I was actually imagining the reviews I have read that said the show sucked when it was pretty clear that the cause was a friend/significant other had dragged someone to a romance/action/foreign film/symphony/ballet… that the person didn’t want to see to begin with.

Right after giving me permission to quote his email, Michael wrote that I must be talking about his website among others. He then continued to write a fairly long email that I haven’t had time to fully digest yet. Later in the day he sent me a link from The Guardian Unlimited dealing with the issue of newspaper reviewers vs. internet reviewers. (Though mostly book reviewers.)

I am not saying Butts In The Seats is a work of art. But what I thought was a minor theme to support my larger argument appeared to be an important point for someone else. In the next few days I anticipate we will be interacting a bit more. See, it is working already! Just as I said!

Only downside is that by the very nature of this interaction, I don’t anticipate that it will lead to us getting away from the screens in our homes which was the ideal of yesterday’s entry. But you gotta start somewhere.

For awhile now I have been pondering the 20/20 hindsight elevation of past practices in the arts as a yardstick by which we should measure the current situation. I often find fault with the reasoning, as do many others, when people start using the phrasing “if only people would do X” to propose that seats would fill as a result.

Recently though people have been using the same thought processes about behavior at arts events and I am just as uneasy about it. The example of the audience being rowdy in Mozart’s day is often called to justify why people shouldn’t be glared at when they clap between orchestra movements. Andrew Taylor had entries on his Artful Manager blog a couple weeks ago citing that people used to interact and talk more during performances before the 19th century placed the audiences in a position of being performed at.

I’m not saying that people should be glared at for clapping or that audiences should be passive receivers. I think the current situation is sitting at an extreme and needs to move toward a happen medium. I just don’t agree with wistfully looking to the past for guidance.

When I think back to the times people are evoking, I wonder how much respect the performer received. As an undergrad I did a research paper on Shakespearean actors and it was a testament to an actor’s power if he could make the audience and food vendors stop and quiet down.

I wonder how many great composers and musicians went undiscovered because their efforts were drown out by chatter in a concert hall or in a salon where they were providing background music.

It seems to me a good thing that audiences started to take a respectful posture toward artists. I do agree with the observation Taylor cites about the arts ending up being placed on too much of a pedestal. A middle ground between ignoring and enshrining needs to be found.

The fact that one of the most frequently asked questions at a play Q&A is “How did you memorize all those lines?” just proves to me that audiences are too far divorced from the arts and the process. That they marvel at memorization means they lack the tools or confidence to evaluate much of anything else happening on stage. The absence of that question would herald great things to me.

The irony is that the methodology for assessing works is fairly highly developed and thanks to the internet, becoming more democratic. When I was researching for that Shakespearean actors paper the one thing I noticed and still remember to this day was that the great actors of yore could do no wrong and could cure cancer with their inspired recitations. As time progressed the actors’ performances started to develop flaws until they became downright human. (Perhaps too much so in the case of the Barrymores.)

As time has progressed, some people have developed skills at assessing performances and were able to critique and criticize. While I think most people have an innate sense of quality, most don’t know what specifically about the performance is good or bad. People have relied on reviewers to tell them what is quality further reinforcing their isolation from the arts.

Blogging on the internet is opening up new opportunities. It is allowing educated people who have never been hired by a newspaper to speak. It is providing a forum for people who have never expressed an opinion publically. Most of what this latter group produces is godawful. And unless they are motivated to improve their technique by internal or external forces, it is going to remain godawful. They are taking the first step to becoming engaged though.

Ultimately, I think trying to go back and make the arts as we know them interactive is futile. The horse has left the barn on that one. I think it might be possible to make it more interactive, but not too much more so in the current physical environments. People have become used to the spectator format for entertainment. If they are fidgeting in their seats it is because they want their experience tailored specifically for them.

On surveys for attendance at movie theaters one of the top reasons people say they aren’t going to the multiplex is that there is too much noise in the theater. Now with a big screen TV at home, they have an alternative choice to the movie theater. Chances are there is a good bit of noise at home but they can shush the kids at home.

The same is true for experiences where you expect a lot of noise. A recent article in the local paper said attendance at the university football games has been dropping steadily while subscriptions to the pay per view for the games has been rising. People have cited the fact that it is cheaper to have a bunch of people gather around their big screen at home than to buy tickets. They also talk about the comfort and convenience of cooking at home and watching in air conditioning.

I have some ideas which I will share tomorrow about how to get people interested in leaving their homes. As I mentioned before, I think the future of live performance will be found in different physical surroundings which are more conducive to interaction. I also think the performance space and discipline may be called by a different name to avoid negative connotations that terms like “theater” might present when trying to convince people to leave their big screen TV.

If you haven’t run into this new trend in hiring, you may find this interesting as a sign of things to come. If you have ever sat on a search committee, you know that sometimes some folks divert from the rest of the group in their assessment because they didn’t like something about the way a question was answered.

Apparently, other people recognize this situation as well and have sued companies suggesting that some committee members were prejudiced against them due to their appearance, the ethnicity suggested by their name, their voice, etc,.

To stave off any accusation of subjectivity in the hiring process, companies are trying to make committees stick to strict criteria in hiring. I recently had to adhere to these new standards in a search we did.

What the Human Resource office is having us do is not only submit questions for them to review but also the answers we expect. For each question we have to suggest a five point answer, a three point answer and a one point answer. This leaves a little bit of gray area between answers for people with experience sets you didn’t anticipate that fall somewhere in between.

Now I will admit, the Human Resource folks have been pretty good in the past with weeding out irrelevant questions. For example, if you are a rental house which has broadway shows, opera, ballet, rock and country concerts come through every year, where on your scale does person who likes broadway and rock, doesn’t care for opera and ballet and likes some country acts rate? Will these answers really offset years of intensive experience? And do you really think this answer will have any bearing on how good a job someone does focusing lights?

While it is annoying to have people scrutinizing your answers now as well, I guess it does help to clarify what you value in a candidate when you rate what answers make a person more valuable to your organization than others.

What this process doesn’t allow is the awarding of extra points to people for unanticipated answers that are discovered in the course of an interview. Most of the committee might ignore the mention of a kid friendly attitude, but the education director might latch on to it as a positive sign for a newly implemented mentoring program. The candidate is therefore more valuable to the education director and might rate higher if not for the rigid guidelines of scoring.

The other danger is that this process rewards having all the right answers. I was once on a search committee where I thought the most promising candidate was spouting a little too much of the latest jargon and theories, but was pretty good for the most part. Almost everyone rated him high based on his answers, but one guy was skeptical in the face of what he admitted were strong answers.

His suspicion lead to some specific questions of references and others that revealed a person who talked a good game but wasn’t very substantial (and perhaps a little deceitful) otherwise.

In a system that placed a heavy value on scores only in an attempt to be objective, I wonder if his intuition would have been heeded. If it hadn’t our company might have ended up trying to find a way to get rid of an undesirable employee which is a lot tougher than not hiring him.

I apologize for falling down a little on my entries last week. My writing suffered a little from the need for crisis management and the onset of a cold.

The cold still has its teeth set in me so I am going to tend toward some lighter observations rather than deeper musings. Mainly, I thought I would share a little bit of my experience this weekend because the confluence of events is a reminder of just how interesting live performance can be.

We were just entering the final weekend performing Mary Zimmerman’s The Arabian Nights (great play) when we got word that the woman who does the opening lines of the show was rear ended by a large truck and taken to the hospital.

The difficult decisionmaking process involving the director, choreographer and I discussing whom to replace her with throughout the play was made even harder by one of the actors. She took it upon herself to decide who would be the replacement, discussed this among the other actors and called the fight choreographer and asked him to come in to re-block the scene.

A cautionary tale I guess against casting people who REALLY want to be the assistant director.

The other thing that happened was that we got a review that was something of a mixed blessing. It was the best review we had gotten from this particular critic ever and was especially gratifying given that the shows reviewed in the paper the day before were awful. We had gone to great lengths to warn the public via various media that there are mature themes in the show and make it clear there the tales of Aladdin, Sinbad or Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves were not included.

Alas, the review talked about how much great fun there was for kids in the show in the story of Abu Hasan’s fart. This was echoed in the newspaper’s Saturday theatre round up. Apparently he felt this mitigated the sexual content and graphic violence that bookended the story for an hour before and hour after.

We did have people walk away from the box office with their children when we warned them and a few people who asked for refunds after thinking better of their decision while awaiting the start of the show. To date we haven’t had any complaints about the content.

My last little observation is about the fart joke. The story about Abu Hasan is that he eats a lot of chickpeas and then lets loose a great fart at his wedding. Mortified, he goes to India for 7 years and then returns thinking no one remembers him. As he passes a woman and her children, he hears each one asking when they were born. Most of the answers are mundane but to the last, the mother answers she was born the year of Abu Hasan’s great fart.

Funny, yes, but not worth note, eh? As far as I can tell from my research, the story has been a part of the 1001 Arabian Nights collection since before the European translations. What is interesting though is that it bears a striking resemblance to a supposed true story about the Earl of Oxford and Queen Elizabeth I recorded by John Aubrey in his Brief Lives:

“When the Earl made a low obeisance to the Queen, he happened to let go a fart, at which he was so ashamed that he left the country for 7 years. At his return the Queen welcomed him and said, “My lord, I had forgot the fart”

I am just interested in the origins of the story and the direction it travelled. Certainly, fart jokes are universal but these are so similar that I wonder if Aubrey made it up or was repeating an anecdote he had heard originating in the Arab world. Likewise, I wonder if the story moved with merchants to the Middle East and got incorporated into the collection of stories there.

It may seem silly to wonder about such picayune things, but it is upon these sort of musings that books and plays get written.
(Though if someone knows the true story, I wouldn’t mind having my romantic notations dissolved.)

About a month ago I was at a meeting of arts people hovering on the edge of a conversation discussing the creation of a consolidated database of arts attendees or some sort of limited sharing of lists.

My first thought wasn’t about jealously guarding my list from their greedy grasping hands. There are quite a few people with whom I wouldn’t feel threatened sharing my list.

My initial concern was that have I gone to great pains to assure my ticket buyers that we will not sell, trade, etc., their information. There is such a concern about spam, phone calls and identity theft, that audiences need a high degree of assurances about the use of their information before they provide it to you.

In fact, we often have people who have signed up on our mailing list sheet in the lobby at intermission upset that it is still out at the end of the performance. Considering there is no information that can’t be acquired from the phonebook, their fear is a little irrational. It is difficult to steal someone’s identity with their address and the added information that they attended a show at the theatre. People usually feel a little silly when I point out the reality of this.

Which is not to say that we don’t handle information with which a person could steal someone’s identity. We are very careful about getting proof of ID before handing out credit card receipts at will call. Even if people act a little irrationally about their personal information, it only goes to show how important protecting it is to your relationship with them.

But back to the mailing list issue.

When I am signing up on a website that collects information, there is often a opt in/out box where the company asks permission to share information with their partners in order to offer the widest range of options and the best customer service.

Now I don’t buy for a moment that I will benefit from whatever their partners have to offer. I wonder if a similar approach could be applied to ones patrons though– “As an arts lover we would like to offer you information on the widest range of activities in town. May we share your information with other arts organizations?” I guess as an arts person, I would have a less cynical view of that approach coming from a theatre than I do when my credit card company uses it. I don’t know how the average patron who already gets appeals from a theatre, the United Way and college alumni association around year end might see it.

I was wondering if anyone had dealt with the issue of sharing names in the last year or two. Did you ask your patrons if you could share the info or did you just do it? If you did ask, how did you go about doing it? Did people know in advance that you might share their information?

When you did share your list, did you place stipulations on its use? For example, one brochure mailing and then the list is destroyed so that the only way to capture the information is if the person buys a ticket. I once had a condo association give me a list with the provision that they send it directly to my mail house who had signed a promise to immediately destroy the disk.

If you did share the list with such restrictions, did your partner abide by the rules or did your planted address get appeals and mailing beyond what you had agreed to? (Common trick when sharing lists is to add the names and addresses of employees with a low public profile or friends/family members who have agreed to help you keep an eye on how the list is used.)

I had a bit of a cautionary lesson in the last few days about providing services to persons with disabilities. The director of our Fall student drama production was approached a few weeks ago by a student in his class. The student is studying to be a sign language interpreter and wanted to know if he could use the performance as practice.

The director and I both agreed and the student and another more experienced interpreter in his cohort have been attending nearly every rehearsal for the last 6 weeks.

I was just preparing to advertise the signed performance in our ads and press releases when the assistant theatre manager mentioned that fact to the more experienced interpreter. He went into a panic and begged us not to publicize the fact.

It turns out we misunderstood the original intent of the request which was to simply just practice. The reason why they only wanted to practice is because they feared being blacklisted for taking jobs away from professional interpreters. I pointed out that they were students practicing on a student production at a college. Technically we are taking jobs away from professional actors but no one begrudges the students’ the opportunity to learn the craft.

The older interpreter having worked professionally (he was taking classes to improve his skill) in the community for sometime now was concerned that there would be trouble even if we billed the interpretation as a student effort. (Something I intended to do from the beginning under the assumption they might mess up now and again.)

My surprise at some of the stories he told me about problems people have faced in the past was somewhat mild since I have belonged to some small groups who have tended to be protective and insular. Not to make excuses for the extreme treatment to which people have been subject.

The situation did frustrate me to some degree though because we have tried to get signers before and were told they weren’t interested in traveling out to our location. Here were some guys who were willing to put the effort in and they were too intimidated to do it live.

I will say I have new respect for the process people go through to prepare to sign shows. I worked at a theatre that offered audio-described performances for the sight impaired. The preparation time the describers invested seems a lot shorter than what these guys tell me is involved with signing for a performance.

The cautionary lesson I referred to earlier is that offering services to people with disabilities is sometimes more involved than simply making plans and arrangements well in advance.

Of course, I also have a lot of respect for these two guys for coming out every night to rehearsal despite having no prospect of working before a live audience or given getting graded for the effort. I wish them luck. It seems like a tough career they are dedicating themselves to.

Just something quick to think about. The US population reaching 300 million has had a lot of press of late. I don’t know if you noticed though that the US fertility rate is only 2.1 children per woman and has been for awhile now. At that rate, the US population will hold static. We would have never reached 300 million from birth rate alone.

The population growth has been and will be, due to immigrants. So the question to ponder is, what is your organizations long range plan for serving your community in recognition of this fact?

If you have the brain power to ponder many things at once, try this for a bonus- Andrew Taylor links to an article suggesting a hybrid corporate status for non-profits. Or rather, hybrid status for corporations performing non-profit like activities.

On the whole, I think Andrew is right about needing a more flexible approaching with the tools we got. It is absolutely worth reading the long version of the article though if you feel the need for change.

Okay, I am just going to toot my horn a little here, as under deserving as I might be. On the other hand, I would be a little hypocritical to talk about how theatres should blog about their activities and not mention some of my own.

This past weekend we held the world premiere of the contemporary opera I had mentioned earlier. I was pleased to have generated so much buzz about the show it was sold out before the time the entertainment section stories and public radio story came out on Friday. The woman doing the public radio story called me the day before it aired asking how I suggested she close the story given the fact we were already sold out.

Fortunately, the work is playing in two other cities in the state and plane tickets are super cheap due to a fare war because we were fielding a heck of a lot of calls on Friday and Saturday.

Now that my performance is over, I have no financial interest in the show or any interests at all other than the compulsory playbill listing of my facility as the development and world premiere location.

Out of pride though, I do want to promote it a little bit more to the world in general. The company is looking for a US tour and a Japan tour. Japan is wild to consume Hawaiian culture and I am noticing more and more Hawaiian cultural performances showing up in season brochures.

I would also like to promote the show for the simple reason that it will help a local artist remain a viable employer of local performers. As I noted months ago, the state essentially exports its artistic talent for lack of opportunities.

So, if you are looking for an interesting contemporary cultural piece and would like to learn more about Naupaka: A Hawaiian Love Story, here are a few links to the stories-

Honolulu Star Bulletin, Honolulu Advertiser (has video footage from rehearsal), Hawaii Public Radio broadcast.

And you can always contact me as well. After the stories get put into the archives, I imagine I will be one of the only sources of additional information along with Tau Dance Theater.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Kerry Sopher at Brigham Young University comes clean about his love for ballet and how he employs it in his lectures. This self-taught dancer uses ballet moves to illustrate diplomatic relations throughout history.

“…the glaring flaws of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies dissected with the help of a series of deftly executed entrechats…a re-creation of the tension surrounding the Bay of Pigs crisis by remaining en pointe for as long as possible (20 seconds on a good day!)… To the strains of Stravinsky’s joyfully martial Rite of Spring, I performed an athletic, 15-minute-long, tightly choreographed celebration of the war on terrorism…I found this performance to be so emotionally and physically exhausting that I was forced to end the class 30 minutes early, right there on that high note.”

It is an interesting story in its own right and an a fairly novel approach to integrating the arts into other subjects. I have never been a real big fan of interpretive dance, but I have to admit that the moves he applies to the various historical occurrences seem appropriate. (Especially his pas de deux with a nervous student to illustrate Anwar el-Sadat’s suspicions of Menachem Begin.)

I also have to empathize with him over his mortification at being snickered at the first time he used dance to illustrate his point in class. To have had the guts to do it in the first place, much less to screw his courage to continue after the laughter from the back of the room is commendable.

I actually went to Ratemyprofessor.com to check him out and see if any students had any comments about the dancing. From the ratings you can’t tell he is anything but a real good teacher. That is probably as it should be. His use of dance is as a illustrative tool to help students learn and not some out of context indulgence or eccentricity.

A little bit of incredulous griping today.

With all the discussions and advice we get about keeping our organizations relevant in our communities, refining our marketing approaches to be more efficient and using technology to meet the expectations of our customers, I often wonder if Tams Witmark Music Library either doesn’t get it or is just complacent from their success.

The company administers the rights to some of the biggest classics in musical theatre. They send out a catalog every year and I am amazed at how unappealing it makes their shows look. Most of the photos are from the original Broadway productions back in the 1960s and 70s.

Yes, it is nice to see what Julie Andrews looked like in her late 20s when she was in Camelot. But the dated costumes and hairstyles just scream “this is staid show with nothing to offer your audiences in 2006” every time I get the catalogue in the mail. I have seen and been a part of these shows and it makes me cringe when I think that people will be turned off from producing them because of these godawful pictures.

The only saving grace I see is that they don’t have these awful pictures on the website. (There are almost no pictures at all.) So between Broadway revivals and seeing/participating in productions, people will have a positive enough impression of the shows that they don’t need images to help them make a choice when they visit the website.

I am sure the catalog works for the company just fine but I wonder if business might increase if they solicited images from even good amateur productions with which to update their catalog.

One thing that is depressing is that the catalog is that by putting in pictures of the original casts, the publication bears witness to the fact that there have been so few great original musicals produced in the last few decades.

Berlin’s Deutsche Oper decision to cancel Mozart’s opera Idomeneo because it may enrage Muslims has gotten me to thinking about the implications.

Artists have often skirted controversy and many venues have cancelled performance under public pressure. These things are not new. Likewise, artists have frequently come under death threats as have the audiences who attend the works. Back in the late 80s/early 90s I had to go through a metal detector and a pat down because a production featuring Vanessa Redgrave had received bomb threats in response to her views on Palestine.

While you should never be in danger of being slain by someone at anytime in your life, as an artist or attendee, you recognized the threat to yourself by others by advancing ideas or choosing to be present at a performance. Just as your car should never be subject to damage, you recognize by driving during rush hour someone may hit you intentionally out of road rage.

What concerns me is that people will harm oblivious, uninvolved individuals within 10 miles of them for something occuring 3000 miles away. The opera is, of course, worried about problems locally because Germany has many guest workers from Islamic countries. Their decision is being made in the context of the violence and slaying for from Rome in response to the pope’s recent comments about Islam. I am afraid people will see the effectiveness of the ploy in cowing people and use the threat as a means of shutting down something they have never seen but have heard enough about to get whipped into a frenzy over.

For example someone in California upon hearing that the Vagina Monologues promote a lesbian lifestyle and is the primary instrument by which young girls are brainwashed into a homosexual relationship may decide to blow up a bookstore in a California town selling the script when Oprah announces on her show that she is sponoring a huge production in Chicago.

The fact that people thousands of miles away who probably have no knowledge of or opinion on a show could be endangered is frightening. The idea that artistic choices one makes might need to be altered out of concern for people half the world away from a production gives one a lot of pause.

The questions and decisions may start out attached to religious beliefs but there is nothing to stop people from employing the tactic with economic and ecologic ones. If you don’t back down to pressure now, you may rob the tactic as a viable tool for the future but end up shouldering the blame for injury and death for people today.

The argument that if we can put a man on the moon why can’t we X is a logical disconnect because all that proves is that a different group of people possessing different skillsets were able to solve a different problem.

So too will people probably discover that what worked to influence decisions globally for a different group for a short time (because I think people will eventually become inured to the threats) won’t be effective for them in another arena.

But it won’t stop them from trying and people most likely will be hurt in the process of discovering how ineffective the tactic might be.

I was talking to a friend yesterday and he happened to mention how great a mutual acquaintance in the arts was at her job. It just so happened that I had been talking to her earlier that day and she had mentioned that her parents didn’t think her profession was suitable for a proper woman and that she should come home and get serious about her life.

This is a woman in arts administration whose steady paycheck is accompanied by pretty good medical, dental and vision. She doesn’t get paid much, but she manages to sock some away. Much to my envy, she easily impresses people with her personality and professional skills within 5 minutes of meeting them.

I could understand from previous conversations why her parents might think acting was improper for a woman. The computer and business skills she has developed would be respected in most industries so I can only think that they don’t quite understand what she does.

The threshold for my male friend’s parents was a little lower. They grudgingly stopped nagging him when he started getting a steady salary and health insurance.

I had a friend in grad school from Canada who characterized the prevailing attitude in her country (or at least British Columbia) as theatre was fine for other people’s kids, but not your own. People who would think nothing of driving three hours one way, she said, would give her father a pitying look when they learned she was studying theatre.

It is easy to claim that the lack of arts education in schools is creating generations who don’t have any appreciation for the craft. While this may be true, I have seen and spoken to people whose parents spent hundreds of dollars each year to send their kids to acting and dance classes and then rounded up family and friends at $15-$20 each to watch them perform.

Heck, some of best rentals come from these schools. Most renters come in for a day or two, these guys rent for an entire week to allow for construction and rehearsal time.

Then I have seen these kids enter college and tell me their parents want them to quit their major or stop hanging out with the drama kids. I wonder at the dichotomy. Undoubtably in some cases it is due to the child leaving the discipline of home and having their grades crash. In many cases it appears to be a situation of “When I became a man I put childish things behind me.” What was fine to support for years suddenly becomes frivolous.

Now I will be the first to admit that it is a damn tough path in life to follow. Heck, I have tried to dim the stars in the eyes of some in the hope of allowing them to see the rough road before them a little more clearly.

Just like teaching, it is a life of low pay, long hours and respect in low proportion to expectations and effort expended. People often try to dissuade friends and family from becoming teachers for this reason.

But they never say teaching isn’t proper. Teachers are useful, after all.

We have all had that conversation. An internal dialogue at the very least. What are we really contributing to the world? When it all hits the fan, will my words/movement/painting help restore and set things aright? Personally, I take consolation in the fact I can pickle, can, bake bread from scratch, make candles and spin flax into thread. And I am not something totally useless like a lawyer.

I have no easy insight for solutions to offer here. I just wanted to introduce the topic in the hopes of spurring a conversation. Quite a few of my posts and news stories you read deal with arts funding being cut for organizations and schools. We talk about getting funding restored, attracting grants and audiences and doing a better job for less.

We often don’t talk about, at least that I have seen, is dealing with the self-doubt we experience or the subtle/overt messages we get from family and friends about our choices. It is one thing to watch a sitcom with the periennially out of work actor who moves from sleeping on each of his friends’ couches in turn and another to be living it.

Starving artists can’t afford career counseling from anyone who doesn’t think they are a bum or isn’t starving themselves. They either get told to find a new line of work and start paying rent or to hang in there, they will make it one day because their fellow starving artist wants that hope for themselves.

I have never heard of the service being offered, but have any artists who have done well for themselves (besides college professors) turned around and given career advice to the starving ones? If they have or ever do, did anyone listen to the advice? We have all heard the story of the one person who was rejected by 99 arbiters of taste only to earn the belief of the 100th and become fabulously rich. Nevermind this was the 1 case in 100,000 and the 99 arbiters were wise to reject the other 99,999. Slim hope tells us we are the 100,000th case.

In any case. Thoughts? Ideas? Addresses of starving artist support groups? This is the place to express your mind.

You occasionally will read a story about organizations going through Founder’s Syndrome where the continued involvement of an original founder or group of founders of an organization are inhibiting growth and evolution.

What I had never heard about, until fairly recently, was a case* where the decision to form a non-profit corporation resulted in the formation of a board that acted the shrink the organization rather than work to expand it. I was wondering if anyone has come across similar instances.

What I chalk it up to is poor board recruitment. Even though the board is apparently comprised of many successful business people with excellent social connections, I have wondered if they weren’t properly briefed as to their role as board members.

The back story is this. A guy I have been acquainted with for a number of years had a little performance troupe that was modestly successful with the infusion of a lot of love and energy and money, but he wasn’t reaping what he sowed. When last I saw him, things were growing to a point where he needed more help and funding to continue and he eventually made the decision to incorporate as a not-for profit.

To some extent, his decision was a good one. He had no desire to micromanage and turned over many responsibilities to his board. The board’s connections brought greater recognition and funding to the organization. He is still working his butt off, but at least the burden he bears is somewhat less.

What is rather perplexing though is that the board is urging him to roll back his activities to approximately the place it was before they were recruited. My friend seems pretty much resigned to the fact that it was his decision to subsume his will to that of the board. Indeed, it seems the board is of the same general mind and there is little chance an opposing faction sharing his sentiments will emerge. The good news, I suppose, is that there is great stability and little rancor.

What also seems strange is that the board seems to be acting unusually conservative so early in its organizational life cycle.

I almost wonder if the board members fully comprehend the whole funding concept for non-profits. From what I can tell, they seem rather risk averse to the necessity of looking to unpredictable sources like grants and donations to make up for earned income shortfalls. I think they may proprose limiting activities as a way of limiting deficits.

My friend talks about how young and energetic the group is in administrative, advocacy and event planning roles. I wonder if the group suffers from not having older heads who have experienced fiscially tight times on non-profit boards. From what I can tell, the organization hasn’t experienced any significant losses at the end of their fiscial years.

I think my friend is caught in a bit of a quandry. He has essentially given up control of a brand he established to other people who had no hand in creating it. He is frustrated that the organization hasn’t grown to reach as many people as much as he dreamt it would when he decided to incorporate. However, I think he finding it easier sleeping at night now that someone else is worrying about finances and his own savings are no longer vulnerable.

I was curious to know if anyone had come across a similar situation or had some advice on how to productively effect change. Patience may see the board grow more comfortable or transition favorably as terms expire but there is no guarantee a passive approach will be successful.

*Some non-critical details have been changed to obscure identities.

In response to a postscript I made yesterday on the entry from the day before, Michael Clark asks:

Copyrights are such an “interesting” problem. For community theatre, would still photos of the final set and performers be subject to the whims of the copyright holder of the playwright? Or of the designers for that show? Do you know of a good (or bad) web site that details some of the copyright issues for live theatre?

It is a good set of questions. While I did work for a play publisher and filled out tons of copyright forms, I don’t know of any website that specifically deals with the copyright issues of live theatre. There are a few good ones that deal with copyright in general. The one here deals with visual, audio and digital topics in an easy to understand manner.

In answer to Michael’s specific questions: The playwright really doesn’t have a lot of interests vested in the use of still photos provided you have paid for the performance rights. It might actually be more accurate to say while there are some instances a playwright might have cause for complaint, you are more than likely going to come up against costume and set design issues first. Audio and visual recordings on the other hand, because the action is driven by the playwright’s work will usually require additional permission from the playwright or agent.

In the example Michael gave, the set design is protected by copyright. Costume design is a little tougher according to the United Scenic Artist’s website on copyright. (The link talks about the famous case that established that set design is copyrightable, along with some other design related cases, if you are interested.)

In the case of a photograph, you may need permission of all the people in it to use the photo. Actors’ Equity has guidelines about the use of their member’s images for publicity and at what point additional permission (and payment) needs to be sought. With the advent of viral video like YouTube as a common way to promote shows, I have no idea if the restrictions have or will become looser or stricter. Don’t make the mistake of thinking just because people aren’t members of a union they don’t enjoy protections.

Be aware that with a photo, you need the permission of the photographer to reproduce it. Many photo labs including your local Walmart and Costco will often ask for a signed form if photos look like they are professionally done or if the group in the picture appears to be professionals.

The same is true with video recordings. You not only need clearance from the performers, the designers, the show director and whomever wrote the material being performed, you also need permission from whomever filmed it in order to have it broadcast and reproduced. This is less a factor if you are filming with the intent of broadcasting and everyone involved knows and has signed off on it. But if you decide you want to do something with the footage shot by the kid who has been fooling around with his video camera for the last week, you’re going to need his permission.

With photos and video the choices for lighting, composition, angles, etc all contitute unique artistic decisions which are copyrightable. And every work, once completed is considered copyrighted even if one hasn’t formally filed for it. However, it is easier to defend your copyright if you have filed and created a notice.

Now if you decide to edit raw footage into a commercial, you need the editor’s permission too, because his/her decisions about cuts, transitions, ordering, etc all belong to him/her. You go to have your tape transferred to a format your local television station can use and the lab will definitely ask for clearance forms.

Now if you are organized, you will have let your actors and designers know that at some point during the rehearsal and performance process their work will be used in X formats to promote the show through Y channels and get their permission to do so. You will also get agreements with the folks who are recording, filming and editing that makes it clear what they produce is going to be transmitted by Y channels as well.

You should note, though, that unless the person is an employee of your company, you must have a contract with the creator of a work that specifically says it is a work for hire, else you do not have copyright on the material.

So if you hired someone to shoot footage for a commerical and then later decided to make a retrospective video with snippets from shows over the last 25 years, the person who shot the footage could deny you permission to use it even though you paid him to do the job.

If it is starting to seem like it is not worth trying to promote a show with any work you don’t produce yourself, you begin to see why lawyers get paid a lot to navigate these topics and sue you if you run afoul them. This is EXTREMELY general and not meant to spare the cost of hiring a lawyer. There are a lot of exceptions and nuances. I have seen visual artists specify how their works will be displayed and cared for in a work for hire contract. Such contracts shouldn’t be seen as a way to secure carte blanche to do was you wish with someone’s work.

That said, what really allows the world to keep turning freely is that despite the high profile cases about copyright and intellectual property offenses, most people readily give tacit permission for reasonable use of their image and performance. Of course, this is more true in community theaters where a person’s image, performance or designs aren’t necessarily their livelihood.

I have been rather busy lately and I fear the quality of my blog entries has been suffering. I am helping to produce a world premiere piece that will debut in 3 weeks so right now I am embroiled in program book layouts, marketing and donor reception planning. Since I won’t make a cent from any subsequent touring it might do, I don’t feel any conflict promoting it a bit here.

I do feel a little conflicted though about the fact the show is based on a Hawaiian legend after I have bemoaned the lack of originality in new shows these days. On the other hand, there aren’t any major works outside of Children’s Theater shows based on Hawaiian myths so the stories are due a little recognition. Second, the style of the performance pretty much requires it be a traditional story.

Also I am damned proud to be associated with it. We filmed a commercial two weeks ago and I was astounded at how far along the show was at 5 weeks out.

The story itself is pretty recognizable. Two lovers of different classes are transformed into flowers for engaging in a forbidden relationship. These particular plants, the Naupaka, only bloom in semi-circle flowers so the tradition is to get a flower from the mountains and a flower from the seaside and bring them together to form a full bloom.

The execution of the show is the interesting part. We are billing it as a contemporary Hawaiian opera because it has that feel and scope and will be rendered entirely in Hawaiian with English supertitles. There is a lot more dance and movement than you will find in opera. The dance encompasses modern, ballet and pōhuli.

Pōhuli refers to hula inspired dance. Because of the great respect the company has for the traditional Hawaiian dance form, they are very clear about the fact that they do not do hula. An eminent Hawaiian scholar chose the word pōhuli, which actually refers to a new shoot on a banana plant, as the term to use for hula inspired off shoots.

The musical elements are a mix of traditional and contemporary as well and includes Hawaiian slack key guitar, flamenco guitar, violins, bass alongside the traditional ‘ipu heke and chanters.

I will tell you right now. Hawaiian chant will give any other language a run for its money in opera when it comes to creating a powerful mood or atmosphere. The hair on your arms will stand up when some of the adepts perform. If anyone was at Wolf Trap this past weekend to see Halau o Kekuhi, you can probably attest to this fact.

The set will be very contemporary with flowing fabrics and projected images creating time and place to make the set easily tourable.

If you are interested in learning more you can check out our website which includes set sketches. Wait about a day and we will have an informational guide available for download about the Hawaiian cultural elements present in the show.

Via Salon today is a review of a book by Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music. It is an interesting sounding book about how music is essentially hard wired into humans.

Among the interesting observations Levitin makes is that:

“When a song begins, Levitin says, the cerebellum, which keeps time in the brain, “synchronizes” itself to the beat. Part of the pleasure we find in music is the result of something like a guessing game that the brain then plays with itself as the beat continues. The cerebellum attempts to predict where beats will occur. Music sounds exciting when our brains guess the right beat, but a song becomes really interesting when it violates the expectation in some surprising way.”

But the part that may be most interesting to arts folks in the music field deals with the vogue trend of getting kids to listen to Mozart in the womb. The music is actually recognized, though it doesn’t make the child smarter. The impulse to have kids listen to music if you want to imprint an appreciation for a certain type throughout their lives isn’t far off the mark.

“Studies suggest that we start listening to and remembering music in the womb…Humans prefer music of their own culture when they’re toddlers, but it’s in our teens that we choose the specific sort of music that we’ll love forever. These years, Levitin explains, are emotional times, “and we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdala and neurotransmitters act in concert to ‘tag’ the memories as something important.”… Consequently it’s in our teens that we’re most receptive to new kinds of music (in much the same way it’s easier to learn a new language when you’re young than when you’re old).”

So there you have it. Symphony outreach programs should be structured to allow teenagers to make out to classical music or engage in some other activity rife with emotional opportunities and they will be well disposed toward the music for life. Though if we have learned anything from A Clockwork Orange, it is that a teen’s love of classical music doesn’t guarantee a well-adjusted member of society.

While I don’t expect symphonies would ever sanction “Make Out to Mahler” sessions, having outreaches in a comfortable environment might go some distance toward engendering positive feelings for classical music. Unfortunately, this probably rules out school auditoria and intimidating symphony halls. The concert hall lobby next to the coffee bar might be nice though.

I vaguely remember hearing about this program some time ago, but thanks to NYFA’s Current news letter, I have been reminded about the artist reality show, ArtStar. NYFA features an article by one of the contestants of the show which never got picked up by any network. So unless you had the Voom satellite service, you probably never saw it.

The article implies the episodes might be web and podcast so I figured I would promote it a little in the hopes of generating some inertia in that direction. From what I have read, there have been a number of blogs who have covered the show. But if you are like me, you haven’t read those blogs so I figure I am helping reach a larger audience. Despite some criticism about the show, I would imagine it would still be interesting to watch and perhaps use as inspiration for bigger and better programs in the some vein.

What makes the show worthy of being view rather than the multitude of other reality shows out there? Well for one thing, the show apparently takes the novel approach of not generating conflict and tossing people off each week. Although the original intent was apparently to identify a single artist who would have a solo show, Zachary Drucker writes in the Current article that the entire group was granted a show.

A review of the show I found on Slate felt that the lack of competition and in many instances, lack of clear goals for each task, tended to make the show muddled and a little boring. A Wikipedia entry on the show mentions that some feel the show “should have been billed instead (and produced) as an art documentary.”

I guess the show doesn’t exactly qualify as a reality show anyway since the artists don’t have to compete tooth and nail with each other as they do in real life. But to my mind, the whole project is a worthy one, whether it was ever filmed or not, because it provided artists with an opportunity to work collaboratively and receive critiques from established artists without the anxieties the real world entails.

Recently I have come across a situation which really underscores why it is so important to be sensitive about how the way you talk about your art is perceived by people who are not familiar with it.

For the first time in a long time, a couple sections of the Acting I courses are really under enrolled. One theory attributes it to the extremely low unemployment in the state. In an attempt to attract more students to the classes, the drama department put signs up all over the campus, some of them saying “Give Your Brain a Break, Take Acting.”

Now I understand the point of the posters. The class has you getting up and moving around. One of the key steps to acting well is not to over analyze or allow your ego to edit what you do. On the other hand, preparation involves a lot of hard work. There are so many intangibles involved, studying harder doesn’t necessarily improve you.

What the students see on the poster is–easy class. I know this is already the case thanks to an online professor rating site which had comments about the course being too hard for fine arts elective.

I am glad that the course does have rigor. I have stated my concern though that while the students who do enroll will be disabused of the notion that the class is easy, the students who don’t enroll but see the flyers will have a false impression about acting.

Of course, a lot of people have an incomplete idea about the arts anyway. Acting, you just get up and pretend something, right? Yell when you are saying something important. Dance you just do like you see on MTV, right? Doing old style painting is tough. Can’t do a Michaelangelo. Jackson Pollack’s style is simple though!

Part of the problem is, if you are good at your art, you make it look effortless. Other part of the problem is that familiarity breeds contempt, as it were. Used to be circuses could sell themselves on the thrill of high wire and trapeze acts alone. These days it takes no less skill and discipline than it did to swing around 70 feet off the ground, but people are blase and want something more.

Most times when I talk about learning to speak to the uninitiated about ones art, I refer to language that might alienate. I suppose being too simplistic and lowering expectations is just as bad in the course of arts advocacy.

Appropos to yesterday’s entry I came across this article in Arts Presenter’s Inside Arts Magazine today. (minor registration of email address required)

Steven Tepper discusses the Creative Campus trend which includes the type of activities my campus has been involved with in the past and was trying to encourage more faculty to become involved with in the future. (While I mentioned that none of the faculty approached me yesterday, I should note that I had already gotten the ball rolling with faculty on 3-4 projects last spring and over the summer.)

University leaders are also beginning to recognize that fostering a lively creative campus is essential to attract and retain the best students and to prepare those students to thrive in an economy increasingly reliant on intellectual property and creative content. Moreover, there is evidence that students are looking for more “creative experiences,” opportunities to explore their own expressive capacities….

“…Today’s students are no longer content to experience education and culture in a top-down, passive way. Instead, growing up with a “do-it-yourself” ethos, students want to create their own culture, whether through blogs, writing and recording songs, amateur films, podcasts and other forms of art, entertainment and media.”

There is actually some money out there in support of these efforts. Arts Presenters with the Doris Duke Foundation is going to be funding a handful of programs with an eye to using the results as a template for other campuses across the country to emulate. My school actually applied for one of the grants. We had already started down the road to expanding past efforts so I was quite pleased to see there was some money in support of these types of things.

As Tepper (and Richard Florida in his books) points out, the creativity does not necessarily equal fine arts.

“It is also entrepreneurship and innovation in science, business and media. Within the arts, it includes the activity of architects, campus radio stations, multi-media designers and filmmakers. A lively artistic scene is critical to creative work in these other domains. But we must pay attention to how the arts connect to other areas of campus and to the broader conditions for stimulating creativity across the curriculum in multiple domains.”

I daresay, there is nothing to say that these efforts can only occur on campuses with fine art programs. Similar programs with local arts organizations, while more difficult to achieve than with on campus departments, can only serve to strengthen the perceived value of both entities in the community.

I took advantage of the college convocation scheduled in the theatre today to address the professors and suggest ways in which performances in the theatre might be used as anchors for classroom instruction and other activities. My unit is not organized under any academic division so I don’t get a lot of group interaction with faculty. But there they were all gathered in my lair. What more could I ask for?

Last year I worked with two literature professors on a series of events connected to the 400th anniversary of the performance of MacBeth. We presented MacHomer, a really fun show where one man channels the voices and personalities of the Simpsons performing the Shakespeare play. Then we followed with screenings of Orson Welles’ MacBeth and Akira Kurasawa’s Throne of Blood. Finally, we had an evening where student presented projects in the courtyard and students and faculty performed scenes from MacBeth and music from Elizabethean times.

I made suggestions of similar connections with shows this season. Some of the performances have clear associations with botany, astronomy, literature, language arts, music, cultural heritage so it was fairly easy to suggest. I reinforced the point that instruction topic and the performance don’t necessarily have to coincide but that the faculty could use it as an anchor for discussion throughout the semester.

Alas, no one approached me with any ideas for connections during the breaks. I did get to do some additional evangelizing about some other arts organizations during those periods though. I promised to send some additional information out with pictures to the campus faculty email list so they haven’t escaped me yet!!!

One of the other things I specifically mentioned (and do so again here so you can go out and make the same point) was that theatres are essentially big illustrations of practical applications of physics. We deal in properties of light, additive and subtractive color, focal lengths of lenses, calculation of wattage on circuits, rigging of pulleys and counterweights.

If ever a student asked, what will I ever need this for. It is easy enough to point out that even if you never have ambitions to work in theatre, film/tv and dance clubs where theatrical equipment is used, there is always careers such as commercial electricians, engineers, construction et. al. where the skills learned in physics and performance tech classes can be employed.

In the course of allowing people to rent our facility, my staff and I come across groups who have varying concepts of what successfully producing their event will entail. We have meetings with all our renters a month or so out from their event to assess their needs and often make suggestions even before the meeting about having a stage manager and production designer.

We very specifically qualify what we mean by these terms. More often than not, even people who claim to have produced events for nigh on two decades don’t seem to understand how important organization is to the success of their event. Today at a staff meeting we were discussing a recent event where a guy was introduced to us as the production stage manager at the advance meeting, asked the questions a person in that position would ask, showed up on the load-in day and provided some direction as to how items should be assembled.

The day of the event he came in to prepare things—then left to do his regular Saturday night gig somewhere else and another gentleman we had never met before was suddenly running things. Though honestly, I think he just thought he was advising people of what would happen next. People were making what he said should occur take place when they thought it looked dramatic.

I tell this story not to belittle the folks who rent from me but to illustrate how valuable it can be to teach people the skillsets related to live events. I had suggested to my technical director that we look into occasionally offering seminars in live event planning. He opined that those we would most like to throttle would probably not avail themselves of the opportunity because they thought they knew it all already. I pointed out that if some likely candidates took our classes, we would at least be in the position of suggesting qualified people for our renters to hire.

The larger picture I wanted to touch upon was that there is a group of folks out there who would appreciate the opportunity to learn how to produce events well. It might behoove an arts organization with the resources to show additional value to the community by periodically conducting classes and seminars.

I have talked about theatres providing inservice opportunities to high school teachers who have been appointed drama advisor but don’t know the first thing about putting on a production. Since so many schools have eliminated drama programs, it is almost a moral imperiative for arts organizations to ensure the programs that remain get all the support they can handle.

In addition to teachers, other folks who might be interested are those organizing street fairs, festivals, beauty pageants, churches and dance schools with annual recitals. Even smaller performing arts organizations that subsist on volunteer help might be interested. Their lighting designer might a commerical electrician by day and got the job because he is least likely to trip the breakers but has little idea how to avoid making everyone look sallow.

Sure there are plenty of books out there they can pick up that cover the theory well. It can’t replace the expertise of those who design lights, organize and order the execution of cues, construct inexpensive illusions and know how to get everyone and everything (from audiences, to sets to performers) moving to where they need to be quickly and accurately.

In some cases, as the instructor can learn something new yourself. We just taught some fundementals to a guy who knew nothing about lighting design. Essentially, we gave him a series of looks that could be achieved with the house plot we set up. He then spent two night writing up nearly 600 cues which we programmed into our lighting board. Since he was doing all the music playback from his computer, he set up flags in the audio design software he was using to alert him to call warnings and executes for those light cues. Prior to this, the group would employ the less accurate method of calling cues based on the progress of the digital counter on the CD player.

We had never even thought of using sound design software in this manner. Now we are suggesting that other groups do the same with their audio design software. In some ways, technology is making it easier for novices to organize their own events but it has yet to substitute for experience.

So next time you hear someone say they are putting together a real simple show with 20 people, perhaps take them aside, ask them to tell you more and intone some good advice in the voice of experience.

I was perusing over at SmArts & Culture blog and read an entry Mary Ann posted about a well-intentioned, but not entirely successful attempt to “introduce young professionals…to arts patronage.”

It reminded me of another group of young professionals who have successfully raised money to send kids from NYC to arts and music summer camp. Giving Opportunities to Others (GOTO) raises money by essentially having a lot of great parties to support their commitment to send kids to arts camp for at least 3 years. They started in 2001 and not only have expanded the number of kids they send each year, but have also apparently expanded to Boston so they can send kids from that city to camp. (Judging from some of the costumes, it is probably best that the Boston people have their own parties. 😉 )

The organization is entirely volunteer run. That’s pretty impressive given the size and complexity of the events they are organizing. The other thing I thought was interesting is that while some of the GOTO members went to summer camp when they were younger, none of the NYC group went to the camp they picked to send the NYC campers to.

Bit of disclosure, I worked at the organization that ran the camp when GOTO started sending kids there. It is pretty hard for me to feel guilty about promoting a group that sends kids to arts camp by throwing fun parties. And while the organization acknowledges that many people are motivated to volunteer by the networking opportunities, there many more ways to establish a network without similar time commitments. Even if someone is entirely motivated to participate by a desire to land new business, I will bet that at least some of them having never thought to volunteer their time before will end up doing so for more altruistic reasons throughout their lives.

Drew McManus, the brains behind the Take A Friend To the Orchestra project, has compiled the contributions, (including yours truly’s) for the 2006 version into a book.

To purchase it, click on the button below:

I will be adding the button to the sidebar of my blog soon.

On a related note, as long time readers may know I have been occasionally checking in on the Honolulu Symphony since attending a concert as part of my participation in Take A Friend to the Orchestra Month. I am happy to say they have noted the new executive director hire as well as the new board membership on their web page. I have been somewhat critical of them on this blog before so it is only fair that I recognize positive steps as well.

I often read about how restrictive copyright law is stifling creativity, but recently I have begun wondering if people are stifling themselves. We have all heard or read the arguments against Top 40 music artists who sample the work of predecessors and about how Broadway and Hollywood are reviving, remaking or adapting works.

In a way you can understand how these people are slaves to whatever will have wide appeal so they can make money. Lately though, I have been seeing a similar trend in shows that don’t have that concern because the primary audience is family and friends and will show up and pay any price no matter what the quality. There is almost free license to trump predecessors with ones originality. Instead, they are borrowing heavily from them.

The trend is starting to worry me because it is beginning to look something akin to everyone expressing their individuality by getting a tattoo. (In many cases, employing the same motif they were impressed by inked on someone else.)

In the past year, we have had three beauty pagaents by three different organizations. Two of them serve as qualifiers for the same national pagaent so you would think there might be some competition between them to be viewed as the more prestigious or attracting women who go on to earn the most titles.

Instead the organizer of the second one (who has been in the business 14 years) asked the organizer of the first one for help which included all the choreography. The third organizer (also a long time in the field) asked us to keep the entire set and props from the second pagaent. Except for different draping fabrics, it will look pretty much the same as pagaent number two.

It is the same situation with a hip-hop dance group coming in soon. We had a taiko drum group use our orchestra lift to make a grand entrance emerging from the pit during a closed recital six weeks ago. This dance group is doing the exact same thing. The fact they are using the same taiko group is something of a mixed blessing in my eyes. They might be copying someone else’s idea, but at least the originator is getting credit for the performance.

In the month after this dance group performs, two of their rivals will be renting my theatre. In the past they have often asked or expected the same things their rivals had. (Including moving light effects which the rival groups rent since we have none in stock.) This is rather ironic since one of the groups splintered off from one of the others. There are some hard feelings, but not so much that they can’t be derivative.

I have been considering booking some touring hip-hop dance groups in because I know there is definite interest in the genre and I would get a good turn out. In one part of my mind, I am pretty sure I will also be influencing the next wave of choreographic choices being made by bringing fresh ideas in despite the available material on cable, internet, etc.

I just wonder what the base cause of this trend might be. Are people so afraid of failure, even in the face of a guaranteed sell out audience that they feel it necessary to mine another’s ideas? If anyone has some insight I would certainly love an explanation.

I am just finishing up Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. As we all know, he should pretty much be a patron saint to non-profit organizations for his lessons in frugality and thrift in Poor Richard’s Almanack.

One thing you may not be aware of is that after founding what was to become the University of Pennsylvania in 1751, he decided it was important to build a hospital. Since he was having trouble raising money, according to Isaacson he “got the [PA] Assembly to agree that if ‘2,000 could be raised privately, it would be matched by ‘2,000 from the public purse.”

According to Isaacson, he was the person who introduced the concept of matching grants to what was to become the United States. (Which by the way is one of the situations the studies I mentioned two days ago noted males are likely to be more generous.)

Why you ask, with a gentleman with such standing and influence in the policy as to have a hand in the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution and the peace accord with Britain, supporting the idea of matching grants did it take nearly 200 years for organizations like the Ford Foundation to employ it as a funding scheme?

Well for one, political opponents felt the move was too conniving. I suppose it was because they didn’t believe he could raise the money and had tricked the Assembly. Franklin noted that knowing that their money would essentially doubled, they gave more.

Franklin himself referred to his innovative idea as a political maneuver so he might have felt a little uneasy about it himself. The success of his plan eased any troubled thoughts he might have had. “…after thinking about it I more easily excused myself for having made use of cunning.”

Like so many of the institutions, inventions and concepts Franklin had a hand in creating or developing, we regard the matching grant arrangement as a common tool for accomplishing our work. It is hard to conceive of it as being controversial.

I was frankly quite surprised as I drove around this past Sunday to hear a radio program on the business end of the arts. The program is a pretty new one for the local public radio station.

Called, appropriately enough, The Business of the Arts, the show’s goal is to shed a little light on the concerns organizations face that are mostly invisible to the public until there is trouble.

Financing of the arts is a mystery to most people. People complain that the cost of tickets keeps going up, whether it’s for the Opera, the Symphony, or the Academy of Arts. But if you tell someone that the cost of that ticket does not come close to paying for the event or exhibition, they are surprised.

Host Bob Sandla talks to representatives of arts organizations on Oahu that are attempting to be fiscally prudent and responsible while providing high quality services to their audiences. Bob and his guests discuss individual companies to pinpoint their specific challenges and achievements and explore the misunderstandings and difficulties they face.

I don’t know what the listenership is on Sundays at 6 pm, but I figure they may not be educating their largest audience segment. Still, it is really gratifying to see the program is on at all and their episodes are available online.

In the segment I heard, the host made sure the guest discussed where every percentage of the budget went, what things were and were not covered, what the goals of the organization were, how things were planned, what the dream situation for the organization would be.

I found it interesting. But then I am in the business, am familiar with the terminology and wasn’t really thinking critically about the effectiveness of the format and presentation because I was so grateful to have the subject tackled at all.

So if you think it is a good idea, go bug your local public radio station. If they are smart, they can turn it into a case for supporting the station as well. In an intro to the program I was listening to the station’s president talked about how the challenges the organization being interviewed faced were the same ones the station dealt with.

It has long been a custom to have music accompany fireworks displays. The 1812 Overture is probably the song most often pressed into this service.

However, I came across this bit on Slate noting that famed fireworks expert Takeo Shimizu used musical notation to plan his luminous displays.

The pyrotechnics expert Takeo Shimizu used a musical score to represent his designs: Each stave corresponded to a different firing location, and each note represented a particular kind of shell fired at a particular time.

A symphony of sight and sound indeed!

I set out to answer the comment made to my last entry with a comment of my own. But as I am wont to do, a short response morphed into bloviation and by the third or fourth paragraph I decided it was better as an entry.

If you haven’t already catch up with the preceding entry and join me in my answer to Heidi. (I promise, there is some wheat to sift from the chaff.)

Heidi-
Interesting comment and probably one that would take multiple entries to answer. The main concern I had when I wrote the entry you prove somewhat by being a UH Theatre grad living on the mainland. UH graduates students and they have no option to ply their craft but to leave or find a job in another industry and rehearse for Diamond Head and Manoa Valley at night.

That might be why the quality is so good–a large pool of well trained actors who didn’t leave when they graduated. I just feel bad that there isn’t even one company in the state with which dancers and actors can aspire to perform and be forced to go elsewhere because it is so difficult to break in to the company. Classically trained musicians at least have the symphony to gaze longingly at.

As for combating local perceptions. I think the solution differs from community to community. For example, what is the real scale by which shows are measured in Hawaii?– Las Vegas. For those who have always wondered where people in paradise go on vacation, it is Vegas. Before the recent inter-island airfare wars, it was often cheaper to vacation in Vegas than on a Neighbor Island. So many Hawaiians visit and live there that local cable shows are rebroadcast in Las Vegas.

Las Vegas definitely sets a standard much the same as Broadway sets the standard in other places. One of the tourist focused shows in Waikiki is Cirque Hawaii unabashedly modeled after Cirque de Soleil. I neglected to mention it in my post because honestly, I didn’t know it was an on going concern. I thought it was just an event that happened this past winter because I have heard no mention if it since. (I am guessing they focusing marketing on tourists.) On Maui there is a Cirque inspired show as well, ‘Ulalena. It has more of a local feel though because it employs Hawaiian dress and chant. (Don’t know if you were around when it started.)

But getting back to the question of how does one combat local perceptions that such fine work is par for the course. Ultimately, I am not sure you can or if is imperative to do so. If people are lucky enough to get good quality stuff cheaply and the volunteers are willing to invest the time and energy to maintain the high quality over the years, then the folks in that community are damned lucky. That is the power of the arts made manifest right there.

While I have certainly seen better than what Diamond Head, Manoa Valley and Army Community Theatre have produced, I don’t necessarily think there needs to be an Equity acting company or full time professional dance company (other than the hula hālau) for the sole purpose of bringing a higher quality product to the state. I am just really surprised that nothing has sprung up given the available opportunities. Though, as I mentioned I think the lack means the state exports creative minds and provides no incentive for such people to migrate in.

Ultimately I think it comes down to the value a community places on the experience. One of two episodes of Little House on the Prairie I remember from when I was a kid featured Pa making furniture by hand for the shop in town. The problem was, the shop owner could sell factory made furniture cheaper and the factory could make them fast enough to keep up with demand. He acknowledged that Pa’s chairs were much better than the factory ones but customers found the factory ones suitable for their needs and didn’t need such well-made chairs.

If people find the community theatre performances suitable to their needs because they lack the experience to discern between the quality of that performance and one at the local regional theatre, (or don’t think the disparity is great enough to pay more for the difference if they do perceive it), then the only option is to appeal to them with other criteria than performance quality.

In some respects, we should be happy that people are attending and participating in community theatre at all. My Little House example could as easily be applied to community theatre vs. DVD/Internet/movie/cable. This is not to say we should content ourselves with the successes of community theatres and count our blessings. We should always be raising the bar of expectations in every endeavor be it entertainment or education, (and if I may wax a little political, fuel efficiency and energy production.)

So I was sort of hedging my bets when I made the vague statement a couple days ago that the Honolulu Symphony was the largest professional performing arts organization in the state. Turns out my suspicions were correct and the symphony is, with a minor exception, the only professional performing arts organization in the state in terms of paid artists.

The one exception is Honolulu Theatre for Youth whose small company of actors heroicly stagger along supplementing little pay with night jobs. (Since most of the performances are school matinees.)

As poorly paid as the symphony musicians are, it is even worse for actors and dancers. In truth, it may be easier to make a living wage as a non-classical musician, visual artist (depending on medium), or luau performer than any other type of artist.

It may come as a suprise to people to think that Hawaii which has enjoyed record numbers of tourists (7.6 million last year, 7.5 year before) doesn’t have a strong entertainment industry. People can’t spend ALL their time on the beach and shopping after all, right?

It is true though. In terms of theatres you have the university based student theatres and amateur groups. A couple theatres have full time administration and production staffs but I don’t even know if there are any guest artists even performing under Actors Equity letters of agreement. (There has been a spate of news personalities performing in lead roles lately though.) The actors getting the most work are the ones on Lost and most of the regulars aren’t local performers.

The operas and ballets are the same. They bring in paid guest artists, but the chorus and corps are comprised of volunteers or students. A couple modern dance companies pay dancers a token on a show by show basis to acknowledge their talent and contribution but don’t maintain any sort of paid company.

There are a handful of presenting houses and bar/club venues of note and that is about it for live performance in the state.

There are certainly a fair number of things to do for people to be sure. But now that I have started to settle in to my position and have an opportunity to assess my surroundings, I have begun to wonder why there are no other professional performance entities other than the luaus organized to take advantage of the tourism and employing local performers full time.

The IATSE unions employ a fair number of people in some of the presenting houses (and on the Lost series) and there seems to be money to pay us evil administrators. Why aren’t the performers getting their due I wonder.

I am going to have to look into this a bit while I am not terribly busy this summer.

I am going on vacation for a bit in order to shower my nephew with adulation.

Those who wish to ponder my occasional brilliance can seek it in the blog archives.

With nearly 350 entries to peruse you can survey the changes in my thinking and writing style from the very beginning!

I will be checking my blog on occasion to thin out the spam of advertising in the comments section.
If you are moved to make observations they will appear on the blog within a few days when I have time to approve them and perhaps say something in return.

Starting a performance company/gallery of ones own seems to be a common dream of most students in the arts. Since it is graduation time I thought I would offer up this article on keeping the proper perspective from the May issue of Inc.

I enjoy reading Norm Brodsky’s column in the magazine because he is adept at employing interesting ancedotes to illustrate his point. He often offers advice to people seeking to start their own business. In this particular column he cautions against being so overly ambitious that you make your core desire unattainable.

One aspect of Brodsky’s article that interested me was his suggested conditions under which refusing to consider partnering was unwise versus those conditions when having a partner could restrict your success.

This is a subject I ponder upon often because I often see situations where people are letting their egos and desire for acclaim for their way of doing things limit their success by not partnering. So they labor hard while trying to leverage their limited resources and meet with limited results.

Some times this is a good thing because some concepts don’t warrant widespread recognition. Also, competition can keep people on their toes and striving harder. Sometimes it is just dumb.

Over the long weekend I watched the extended movie versions of the second and third Lord of the Ringsmovies. I also watched the “Making of” DVDs for the first movie which was actually twice as long as the first movie itself. Plenty of other folks have talked about the value of making of videos for the performing arts so that isn’t my purpose today–At least not directly. I am sure I will circuitously make the case for doing so somewhere along the way.

The thing that was most on my mind as I watched the “Making of” DVDs (other than the fact I want to move to New Zealand) was how speculative making a movie is. As I watched the producers, directors and designers discuss all the concept art, storyboarding, computer rendering, writing, modeling making, location excavation and manufacturing that went on for years before shooting even began all I could think about was the money that was being spent without any income being generated.

Not long afterward, I decided the movie could now probably single-handedly fund the arts in New Zealand by donating half the sketches and cast off paraphenalia to charity auctions and finance a new movie by selling the other half on E-Bay.

Coming from a world where making slightly more than you spend constitutes a successful season, it is difficult to empathize with an industry that measures their success as making three times as much as they spent. When you think that some of the money is going to finance movies like The Lord of the Rings years before the movie has a chance to make money, it is easiers to sympathize. (When drug companies make the same argument about developing medications to support why I am paying so much for a pill, I am pretty much unmoved though.)

Which is not to say that the chances movie studios take are bigger than performing arts institutions. In some regard it is a matter of scale. A $100,000 loss to a small theatre can be as devastating as a $100,000,000 loss to a movie studio. In a small organization the stakes can seem even larger because you have a more intimate relationship with the people you have to fire if you screw up.

If anything, for all their money and personnel analyzing costs, movie studios are just as apt at making stupendously poor decisions as an arts organization run by someone who has had no experience in the field. Miramax was going to produce the LoTR project originally and wanted it all in one movie. That would certainly have flopped in a HUGE way. Peter Jackson, the director, planned on doing it in two movies but fortunately some sainted man at New Line insisted it be done in three.

So yeah, if you haven’t surmised by now, I am a big fan of the books. I don’t usually watch the “Making of” portions of DVDs, nor do I in fact own too many DVDs. I don’t have much basis for comparison but one of the things that made it easy to like the production segment of the DVD was the fact that Weta Workshop where so many elements of the movie were created ran things economically. Two guys created all the chainmail for the movie linking and soldering something like 12 million links one at a time.

Obviously coming from a performance background I have a frame of reference that accords me a level of appreciation for the hours that were invested in creating items that appeared for 15 seconds on the making of the movie video and was unobtrusive in the movie proper. In some respects it is almost foolish for an arts organization to try to make a behind the scenes video to compete with the splendor of those connected with movies like the LoTR trilogy. (Although a 45 minute piece done by a theatre is probably going to be watched more often than the 5+ hours for the Fellowship of the Ring.)

The other thing I was thinking as I watched the movies is that if the trend of declining attendance at movies continues, within my lifetime I may be seeing campaigns advocating attendance of performing arts events that include movies. I’ll bet that just as people today argue that in Shakespeare and Mozart’s time live events were raucous affairs, people will point out that a similar environment existed in movie theatres in the early part of the 21st century and that the strictly regimented dress and behavior are unnatural and people should be able to wear whatever they want. (Granted, not a complete parallel with the current situation since many of the first movies in the 20th century had uniformed ushers handing out program books.)

Over a year ago I did an entry on recruited vs. elected board of directors profiling the interesting way Amazing Things Arts Center was approaching the governance of their organization.

I went back to their website to see how things were going and it looks promising. They have a good number of activities and a few classes going on. They have continued with their commitment to transparency by placing an application of a potential director in the governance section of their site.

One of the things I really appeciated when I visited this time was that they wrote to their membership about the possibility of moving in to a local firehouse as a new home. (I believe they are currently working out of a storefront.) I was impressed that they addressed the tough questions of safety in the downtown area. They followed by addressing the fact that the firehouse is in another community while the community they are currently in showed a lot of support in helping them renovate their location over the last year or so. The letter seemed pretty honest and devoid of much spinning of circumstances to conceal unpleasant facts.

At this point the only thing I would fault them on is not listing the names of the board members or administration online. It would help bolster the whole transparency goal if they did. Other than that, I will be coming back periodically to see how things are playing out.

As I drove around last evening pondering my entry on Cool As Hell Theatre podcast’s rules for actors, I began to see connections and implications associated with an article I recently read. Salon.com reporter Andrew O’Hehir did a book review of Hello, I’m Special by Hal Niedzviecki. (You have to either subscriber or watch a short ad to read the article.) The book essentially posits that there is a rising expectation by individuals that they are deserving and able to achieve far more than 15 minutes of fame.

“That’s his argument in a nutshell: Those of us who grew up in the post-industrial, pop-culture-saturated West (and a whole lot of people who didn’t) have been raised to believe that we are unique individuals with special destinies…

Stuffed with half-baked philosophies of self-actualization and self-fulfillment, we also believe that we are ourselves primarily or even solely responsible for reaching that destiny…”

Quoting auditioners at a Canadian Idol cattle-call:

“Anyone can become what they want to be,” says 16-year-old Brooke. “If you really want to make it there’s always a way,” says Billy, a 20-year-old house painter.

Even the 7,000 or so aspirants who don’t make the first cut refuse to act daunted. “This isn’t the last of me,” one rejected girl tells Niedzviecki. “I know I’m going to be a star. The only person who can make your dreams not come true is yourself.” To stop believing in your own specialness, no matter what the evidence, would be to violate the creed of the new conformism. Furthermore, if you fail to realize your dreams — the same “shared, colonized, implanted” dreams millions of other people are chasing — the fault must be yours…

The end product of the “new-conformist society steeped in pop,” he writes, is a solitary “citizen consumer” who is “passive, focused on the self, willing to work hard to buy the stuff that will make him stand out.” If his specialness continues to elude the rest of the world, he “blames himself and turns inward to therapy, image adjustment, altar consultation, yoga” and so on.

I actually read the exact same thing in regard to blaming oneself for not becoming famous in Time back in January in connection with the start of American Idol’s 5th season. (Subscription required)

The Salon review points out that people have worried about the issues Niedzviecki writes about for centuries already. I wonder what the impact the preception of easy fame might have on the performing arts and their associated training programs. I bet seeing a relatively untrained person go from audition to finals in the course of a few months has already seen a rise in people getting off the bus in NYC and LA with stars in their eyes.

There have always been a lot of people entering training programs with unrealistic expectations about their careers to follow. I imagine that there might be even more people entering programs thinking they are playing it smart getting trained. After all if the untrained can gain the support and adulation of the nation by making it into the top ten, imagine how much easier it will be for you when you plunk down $50,000 to get the best teaching, training and coaching.

I would be interested to know if anyone associated with a training program or even a performing arts organization has seen a rise in either numbers of students/auditioners/applicants, etc with completely unrealistic conception of how easily success will come to them. (I know educators on all levels have a variation of this problem with students and parents who believe unique specialness warrants everyone in class getting the same grade.)

I would extend the same question in regard to attitude/perception. Perhaps there aren’t significantly more people appearing on your door, but do the ones you are interacting with believe their route will be shorter with less dues to pay/shorter time performing for peanuts than they had in the past?

I wonder if high expectations and low tolerance for disappointment is going to rob the arts of some real great talent that doesn’t give itself time to develop and come into its own. On the other hand, if training programs can tap into the whole idea that failure is personal responsibility, they might be able to get people to apply themselves.

Though as the article implies, if they don’t succeed swiftly enough, they are apt to jump from remedy to remedy in an attempt to gain what seems to come so easily to the Everyman on television.

Just a bit of news for presenters if you have missed it. A few news items Association of Performing Arts Presenters has been involved in.

The first is the testimony that Yo-Yo Ma and APAP President Sandra Gibson have given to the U.S. House of Representatives Government Reform Committee about the deleterious effect visa restrictions have had on the efforts of U.S. presenters to bring international performers to the country.

The APAP site has copies of both speakers’ testimony as well as a Powerpoint presentation Gibson made and 14 pages of media coverage of their testimony.

There is some good news/bad news about visa processing on the APAP site as well. The good news is that as of April 1 all O and P visas for performers will be processed at the Vermont Citizenship and Immigration office. This is good news because Vermont has the reputation of being the quickest processing office–or did before all the applications got dumped on them.

It is important that you send your applications directly there because sending them to any of the other three offices means they will have to be forwarded on to Vermont which will only delay your processing. The Vermont station address is on the APAP site.

The bad news is that Vermont has been instructed to send part of their load to the California office which has the reputation of being the slowest office. Because you must send your application to Vermont, if you live in Los Angeles, there is a good chance your paperwork will be coming back for a visit quite soon.

It only add insult to injury if you lived in L.A. and mailed it to the California office only to have them mail it to Vermont who then turn around and send it back to California for processing.

The entire visa situation is a real big deal for APAP. (And for full disclosure, I had to cancel a show myself because of visa complications. So I am making a big deal about it, too.) They are actively soliciting feedback about any problems people have with visa processing asking people to email Jim Doumas, Government Affairs Director at jdoumas@artspresenters.org

As a counterpoint to my entry yesterday, I offer this article from the Gotham Gazette.It was suggested to the editor Artsjournal.com by a reader. While the article is about being an artist in NYC, it obviously has lessons for any place in the country.

What really caught my eye was #7

7. Be Perfect
A composer who teaches on the faculty of the Juilliard School observed in a television documentary marking its centennial celebration that an average graduate of law school or medical school can still have a decent career. But it is not possible, he said, for a successful artist to be only average.

Here I am saying you shouldn’t be afraid to be flawed and I come across this article which I have to agree with that says only the perfect and sublime can ever expect to make enough to eat.

Going back to the Power of Flaws entry I cited yesterday, I wonder if it is the fault of the people who promote visual and performing arts (movies included). As Andrew Taylor says-

…read through most arts marketing materials or grant applications and what will you find? Perfection, triumph, success, and positive spin. Their performances are always exceptional. Their audiences are always ecstatic. Their reviews are always resounding (or mysteriously missing from the packet). Their communities are always connected and enthralled. In short, they are superhuman, disconnected, and insincere.

Is it any wonder then that people expect perfection from artists?

It is a viscious circle. You have to say you are wonderful because people expect you to be wonderful because you have been telling them how uniquely wonderful everything you do is.

The last two days I have been reading some of the most inspiring works of genius I have ever seen outside of my own website. You should really take a look.

Monday I read this and was astounded.

And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, today brought even more delight.

I hear the writer is single. With a mind like that, I can’t imagine how that could be.

Regular readers of this blog will understand what I mean immediately.

I apologize to everyone else.

Edit: Drew McManus points out this comment on MyAuditions.com. Apparently, as good as I am, he is brilliant. Damn Him!