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Holiday Memes? Bah! Humbug!

December 9, 2009

by:

Joe Patti

So our glorious Inside the Arts leader Drew McManus laid down a challenge of a Holiday Extremes Meme. Now, I think if you are a musician and can only name two of four good holiday concerts and one of the two (of four) worst concerts you name involves YOU performing, it isn’t quite fair to those of us who are non-musicians!

I have been to fewer holiday concerts than Drew, though I do remember the Christmas cantatas of my youth when the Catholic and Presbyterian congregations of my small community would come together so there would be enough people for a decent size choir.

One of my favorite Christmas music memories though was when I lived in Florida. There was a radio station in Tampa at the time which started playing Christmas music for hours on end starting Christmas Eve. There were some really great songs there that I had never heard before. You would go from Bing Crosby to “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” and then back to some choir softly singing.

That was when I heard the Bob Rivers’ classic, “I Am Santa Claus”

I have great memories of driving up to my sister’s house at 5 am Christmas morning listening to the music. Unfortunately, there was a year of new management and they stopped that practice.

However, in the spirit of offering new songs for the season, I wanted to turn people on to one. Don’t be fooled by the band name, Hoots and Hellmouth, or the title, A Song for Solstice, I am not trying to undermine the religious nature of the holiday. It is a nice song for the season without being cloying. The music comes courtesy of public radio station, WXPN’s 2008 12 Days of Christmas where they offered 12 free downloads of holiday music from local artists.

A Song for Solstice was smack in the middle at Day 6. If you want to check out other alternative holiday songs, scroll around on the page. I admit to being a sentimental sucker for #4 Dan May’s “Christmas in My Hometown.”

General Musings

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Volunteering Your Way to #1

December 8, 2009

by:

Joe Patti

I was listening to Andrew Taylor’s interview with Artsjournal.com founder/editor Doug McLennan today. During the interview McLennan mentioned all the ways in which organizations were creating online communities to help them achieve things. One of the ways he mentioned people’s contributions were rewarded was via a ranking system to show who had been most productive.

I started thinking about whether this might be a useful way for arts organizations to motivate volunteers. At one time, I had heard that creating contests and achievement awards for volunteers could be counterproductive in terms of motivating and retaining volunteers. I wondered if the new online rewards environment may have changed this. After some reading and thinking on the matter, I decided a ranking system is probably still not useful in many of the traditional functions of an arts organization.

One of the things I read which confirmed my recollection advising against rankings is that many volunteers are motivated by other factors than rankings. Also, different people have different ranges of ability. If someone is providing assistance because they believe in the organization but is in a situation where recognition is accorded to those who are hustling for first place, they may become disheartened. One suggestion I read was to have people compete against their own old milestones. Online communities have a certain anonymity that can insulate one from emotional investments. This may not be the case when a volunteer is working to benefit people and causes with which they can personally interact and experience.

There is also the issue that online contributions can be made on ones own schedule. Involvement and duration are self selected. Whereas many arts organizations engage volunteers during certain hours and events. There is also often a person acting as a gatekeeper determining who gets to contribute and when. A person striving to be number one may find time constraints and scheduling favoritism shown others inhibits their ambitions.

Scoring people for activities that aren’t constrained too much by time deadlines may be still possible. You can open up archives and newspaper/props storage and just let people go at it cataloging and organizing things on their own schedule. Though physically getting in each other’s way in cramped storage areas is also a problem that online activities don’t face now that most people have fairly speedy bandwidth.

If anyone has any feedback in terms of reward systems that were meaningful and didn’t alienate volunteers, ideas for ways to motivate volunteers given the expectations of the internet age or even tasks you can turn to the internet group mind to accomplish (like designing Drew McManus’ Twitter page) I would love to hear them.

Terms and Ideas

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You Must Be This Naked To Be Appealing

December 7, 2009

by:

Joe Patti

I received a call today from a person who had attended the student final performance on Friday. He was complaining about the content of the pieces the students performed, both the dance and monologue/scene pieces. I had actually delivered a curtain speech before the show warning people about this since there were children in the audience, but he had arrived late and missed the announcement.

When I brought the subject up with the drama instructor, I learned there was actually some content he had overlooked when he informed me which pieces might be offensive. Our conversation transitioned to a recent study by the University of Leeds that found women should bare 40% of their bodies in order to attract a mate. Any less and the attraction goes down, any more suggests a chance of infidelity.

We wondered if there was anything to be derived from this in terms of stage costuming. Is a lack of clothing past a certain point considered lewd on stage? Given that the study was done in a dance club, it may be more applicable to dance given that the ratio of clothing plus gyrations must factor in somewhere. Of course, people go to a club with a level of expectation that is likely different from those of performance attendees.

While it would be nice to have a magic number that we knew would be safe to go up to without too many negative repercussions from audiences, it probably isn’t in the best interests of artistic expression to have an exact formula. The ratings of the MPAA have shifted over time due to changing public standards. If point values are attributed to inches of flesh exposed, then people would forever be running around with measuring tapes and parsing percentages. (Ah ha! She is wearing open toes shoes! If we compute those in to the over all ratio of her body, she is 40.1783% naked!! I become more scandalized by the moment!)

There is also the matter of some shows that frequently have nudity like Equus and deciding you want nudity in your show as part of your artistic vision. So while it might be helpful to know what the general tolerance level of an audience might be, there is probably too much opportunity in having it turned into a metric to suggest pursuing research in this direction.

And there would need to be more research because the methodology used for this study seems a little shaky. On top of that, it measured the responses of men. Most tickets are purchased by women so it would be necessary to discover where their perceptions lay.

Audience Relations

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These Theatres Ain’t Dead Yet

December 3, 2009

by:

Joe Patti

So last week was indeed cause for Thanksgiving and perhaps optimism for the arts as a whole as news came that two shuttered notable theatres, the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami and the Beverly, MA North Shore Music Theatre would be reopened thanks to the efforts of other theater operators.

According to a Boston Globe article, William Hanney, who has a history of buying and quickly reopening businesses, has arranged to purchase the theatre. His intention is to generally preserve the traditional programming of the facility but revamp the staffing structure which he felt was was too top heavy and would need to be evaluated.

Coconut Grove Playhouse will undergo a similar restructuring according the Miami Herald, except the focus will be on the physical plant. They intend to replace the 1100 seat theatre with a 300 seat theatre and a footprint for a 600 seat theatre. Since the Coconut Grove board has a previous agreement with a development company, there is a possibility the new theatres won’t occupy a space within the facade of the old theatre. The new theatres will be operated by Coral Gables based GableStage whose proposal was one of four the Coconut Grove board received.

I don’t know the full story behind the revival. I am assuming the Playhouse owns property beyond the confines of the theatre building if they are able to provide space for up to two theatres outside the facade of the old building. I also haven’t been able to discover if the board had sought proposals from arts organizations to occupy the space or just entertained proposals for a variety of uses and happened to accept one from a group who wanted to bring performances there again. I would like to think that despite the $4 million debt which is likely what prompted their deal with a real estate developer, the board was dedicated to preserving the arts in Coconut Grove and resolved to set aside some of the space for that purpose.

If anyone can fill in the blanks, I would love to know.

What is encouraging to me is that there are people who recognize the value of performances in their communities and are working to bring them back. Of course, in both examples the thing to note is that the plan for success includes streamlining operations rather than restoration of the previous environment.

Update: Thanks to CLJ at South Florida Art Scene for providing more background on the situation in the comments section.

Leadership, State of the Arts

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