From the “why hasn’t this existed before” file is an article about staging intimacy with the same care employed with fight choreography.

The fact I came across this mention on economist Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution blog rather than a performing arts industry aligned publication somewhat compounded my curiosity about the lack of conversation the topic.

The article in the Louisville Eccentric Observer discusses the need for clear rules when employing any type of intimacy onstage. Whether it is a kiss, nudity, simulated consensual intercourse or staging emotionally and physically intense depictions of sexual violence, abuse and unwelcomed physical contact, performers shouldn’t be left on their own to negotiate the interaction.

Those interviewed discuss the need to have someone act as third party providing an element of control and clarity for each situation. In some cases, they take a page from fight choreography practice and place the recipient of an action in control. (For those who aren’t familiar, in situations where a person is grappled, thrown, choked, pulled around by their hair, the person being attacked rather than the attacker is generally in control.)

Even if you could be guaranteed that everyone would be well behaved and well intention and no one would take advantage of the opportunity afforded by the way a show is staged to take liberties for their own gratification, being asked to engage in an unfamiliar action with an unfamiliar person is difficult for people.

Having someone who works toward assuring a environment of safety and comfort for all parties when it comes to intimate acts just as they do with stage combat seems like it should have been a standard practice for years. Reading the article I wouldn’t doubt that many groups may already approach these interactions with the same care they would have approached fight choreography and never thought they were doing anything special.

I do want to suggest a different term for the role be created. I have a sense that being asked to work with the “Intimacy Director” might make people as uncomfortable as being told to just improvise the scene because the director didn’t have any ideas about how it should be staged.

The article suggests that while every theater company may not have the means to hire an intimacy director, they can use existing guidelines to make things safer and more comfortable.

Among those guidelines and suggestions are the following:

They are practitioners who use concrete guidelines and techniques, such as the “four pillars” of intimacy direction, according to Alicia Rodis, a member of Intimacy Directors International.

Consent: Get the performers’ permission — including concrete boundaries and out of bounds body parts, and do it before you start.

Communication: Keep talking throughout the process. What’s working, what’s not, who’s touching who and how and do they feel safe.

Choreography: Performers wouldn’t spontaneously add an extra pirouette to a dance number or an extra kick to a fight scene. Don’t add an ass grab or extra kissing.

Context: Just because you kiss someone in one scene doesn’t mean you can kiss them in another scene without communicating about adjusting the choreography and seeking consent to do so. Just because someone is topless with you on stage, it doesn’t mean they won’t mind being topless around you offstage, or in another scene onstage.

Hat tip to Artsjournal for linking to an American Theatre article about the inequities in arts funding citing a Helicon Collaborative study which found “..58 percent of arts funding goes to 2 percent of big-budget arts organizations.”

Those of us who have worked for smaller arts organizations are probably familiar with the sting of seeing the dominant large arts organizations in the community consistently garner a large portion of funding.  The opening of the American Theatre piece relates a particularly sharp sting adding insult to injury for an organization which saw another group get funding to present the programming they specialized in.

….St. Paul’s much bigger Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, which received $86,039 to present Notes From Asia, “a series of performances, films, conversations, and an exhibit that will highlight arts and culture of Eastern Asian communities for East Asian, Asian American, and broader audiences.”

Reyes felt this as a blow, since that description isn’t far off from the kind of programming Mu does. Why give the grant to a larger, non-culturally specific theatre? Said Reyes, “There are these assumptions that they can do this culturally specific programming because they’re the Ordway, and we somehow don’t have that capacity to work with a community that we have been working with for 25 years.”

The statistics cited from the study that were most unexpected were the large number of organizations serving communities of color:

More specifically, the study found that organizations focused on communities of color make up 25 percent of all arts nonprofits but receive just 4 percent of all foundation giving.

The study notes that these funding disparities are out of sync with a nation in which 37 percent of the population are people of color and 50 percent are low-income.

I think the common idea of many conversations is that there are no organizations doing work that resonates with communities of color so it falls upon more mainstream arts orgs to provide the programming.

That 25% is out of 41,000 organizations by the way. That is a lot more than I would have guessed. I would suspect that they don’t have large budgets or capacity, but that doesn’t disqualify them for support.

In fact, wonder if the term “underserved community” isn’t more a reflection of funding directed to a community than number of extant entities providing services.

As I was reading about these particular stats, I remembered Ronia Holmes’ post “Your organization sucks at “community” and let me tell you why“, that I wrote about last Fall.

Disinvested communities are not devoid of arts and culture. In America particularly, communities who historically have been excluded from the table have responded by building their own tables, using whatever resources could be scraped together. Marginalized communities have established organizations that don’t treat them or their cultural output as deviations from the norm to be celebrated for diversity, but as fundamental components of society. The organizations they created, and continue to create, are replete with artists, leaders, decision-makers, and workers who look like and are part of the community they serve, who share similar lived experiences, and have a deep understanding of what programming will truly resonate.

I encourage you to read Holmes’ full piece because I think she is quite incisive on the matter- critical of current practice, but sympathetic about what motivates that practice.

When I originally read Holmes’ essay, I didn’t imagine that there were as many organizations out there as the Helicon Collaborative says there are. My first impulse is to advocate for greater funding to help them gain greater visibility and potentially have greater impact in their communities.

However, I am also mindful of what Holmes wrote about larger established arts organizations making overtures to welcome disinvested communities:

“And they fail to hear this critical question: “Why should we abandon our own table for a small chair at yours?””

Enabling the underfunded 25% to achieve greater impact and visibility is all good, it just can’t come with expectations that they abandon or reconstitute the tables they have constructed for themselves.

I don’t necessarily want to see places like the Ordway lose funding. Except that it seems non-profit funding is often a zero sum game. I have heard people of color speak enthusiastically about the Ordway’s programming and partnering with their communities.

If you think about it though, if more mainstream arts and culture organizations are given funding to break down barriers with underserved communities that don’t frequent their programs, shouldn’t the organizations that have developed in those communities considered underserved be provided reciprocal funding to break down barriers with audiences that frequent mainstream arts and cultural organizations?

Pacific Standard had an interesting piece about the misconceptions music teachers and students studying to be music teachers have about the neurological benefits of music and music education.  The study was conducted in Germany so the author the article suggests that perhaps neurologists in the US do a better job of communicating the truth about music education better than their German counterparts, but I suspect that isn’t the case.

In the study, both music teachers and students were roughly equally adept (or bad) at separating myth from truth.

“Teachers and students correctly rejected 60 and 59 percent of the seven neuromyths,” the researchers report. Proven statements were correctly seen as true by 76 percent of music teachers and 78 percent of students.

That means there were a whole lot of wrong answers…

“The three most-trusted neuromyths included neuroscientific terminology, such as ‘brain hemisphere’ or ‘cognitive abilities,'” the researchers note. This suggests music teachers, like the rest of us, can be fooled into thinking an assertion is true if it is stated using neuro-jargon.

The researchers warn that this tendency may lead teachers to assign their pupils worthless or counterproductive homework. For example, 44 percent of teachers, and nearly 40.1 percent of aspiring instructors, believed this unproven statement: “The ability to improvise on the piano is controlled by the right hemisphere; special exercises can enhance the performance of the hemisphere.” In fact, such “exercises” would be a waste of time.

You can read the full study on the Frontiers in Psychology website.

The following chart from the study shows which of the myths and which of the proven statements the study participants correctly identified.  As you can see in the myths category, among some of the biggest misapprehensions were associated with music improving calculus ability; relationship between dominant hand and speech and music processing; and the impact of music education cognitive ability.

Among the substantiated theses, answers started to get a little iffy on the subject of the conditions which contributed to the positive influence of passive listening.

As the article suggests, the language used in some of these statements can be a little difficult to unravel and may influence participants’ perceptions. (At least in English, I am not sure if German terminology is clearer.) Questions 7M and 8S deal with similar concepts and probably appeared in sequence with each other.

Given that the survey was administered to music teachers and educators in training, I am sure they struggled with 1M that suggests musicians are smarter than everyone else. The fact that 75-80% answered it correctly can probably be attributed to a suspicion it was a trick question.

Being aware of what claims of benefits of arts and culture participation have been substantiated and which haven’t can be important for advocacy efforts. You don’t want to get caught citing debunked data.

Back in December, I called attention to Createquity project to survey all the available studies and evaluate the strength of the findings: Everything We Know About Whether and How the Arts Improve Lives. That page is a good place to start if you want to get a sense of whether the claims you are making are borne out by research and how strong the results are.