Recently I have been seeing more stories about shared use of public buildings. In Bremen, Germany, the city philharmonic is sharing space with students in a local school building. In Cleveland, music students from the Cleveland Institute of Music live in a retirement community.
But during the early phases of planning, as his team met with officials, they realized that the needs of the town’s elderly overlapped quite neatly with those of its teenagers. At the time, the senior center was using a small Victorian house that fell far short of accessibility standards.
The senior center had a strong dance program, Poinelli recalls learning. “We said, ‘Well, we have a dance room in the high school.’ In the winter, they took seniors in a bus to a local shopping center to walk—I said, ‘Well, we have this huge field house, you could use that.’ There was so much overlap, and it just seemed to make sense.”
[…]
Members of a knitting circle taught several students to knit, for example, and high-school sports teams give presentations to the senior men’s group, sharing their strategy for the upcoming season. Kids in need of community-service hours help serve lunch at the senior center, and veterans have been asked to talk to students about their service. The senior center gets 25 free tickets to every high-school performing arts event, and last year, the seniors’ dance team performed at the high-school talent show.
I was immediately struck by how this arrangement helps keep arts in the schools. It increases the demand for, and use of, arts facilities which helps justify their expense.
Even more importantly, it connects the interests and political clout of the largest generation as they retire to those of public education.
There is likely to be less grumbling about property taxes and not having any kids in school if people have an emotional connection to the students. They may also be more likely to advocate on behalf of the students. If retirees are using the same facilities as students, I suspect they will be better maintained.
If there is frequent contact between students and retirees, there may be subtle positive impacts on behavior and attendance thanks to the socialization.
The first segment of this week’s This American Life episode offers proof that marketing departments everywhere run up against the same challenges, regardless of whether they are in the for or not-for profit world, whether they are selling art and culture experiences or hamburgers.
How many times have you said, this is a really great product/experience, but I don’t think there is a market for it?
That is what the marketing team for Hardee’s says about a mashed potato, gravy and chicken sandwich they are sampling from the company’s test kitchen. The taste and texture are really great, they think anyone who bought it would really like it, but they don’t think there are enough people who will make that initial decision to buy a sandwich with mash potatoes on it.
This is exact conversation that occurs when many arts events and performances are first conceived or proposed. It’s great. Anyone who experienced it would like it. Is there enough to it to impel people to that choice?
Really folks confess, how many of you have made a sandwich that included mashed potatoes at some point during the holidays? It was good wasn’t it? You might not want to order it in public though.
My guess is the arts run into the same issue to some degree. People are curious or have experimented creating something similar themselves, but are reluctant to be seen publicly participating.
What correspondent Zoe Chace says the Hardee’s team has to do is figure out the story they are going to tell that makes all the weirdness make sense.
They offer some interesting insight into customer psyche, at least in terms of food. The Hardee’s marketing team says that a macaroni and cheese burger is an easier sell than the chicken sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy because it only adds one unfamiliar element-macaroni. People are used to cheese on their burgers. Their gut tells them that Mashed Potatoes AND Gravy on a chicken sandwich may be too far a leap. (That said, from what I can find it appears they market tested the mashed potato sandwich but not the macaroni and cheese burger.)
I am not sure if that offers anything that can be applied to the arts, but it might bear paying attention to how many variations from an expected norm an event that sells well has versus one that that doesn’t sell well.
Another thing the Hardee’s team talks about is the importance of naming to the image you are trying to project. They discuss how they tried selling a burger with pulled pork on it three times. It wasn’t until they included the term “Memphis Barbeque” that it started selling well, they assume it’s thanks to the cachet Memphis has as a source of good barbeque.
I can completely relate to that. Once I presented a performance that was extremely high quality. The challenge was that it was a collaboration of artists from different disciplines, in a format that was unfamiliar to audiences. This made the show difficult to quickly explain and the title of the event didn’t help matters.
About a year later, I saw the show advertised elsewhere with a title that was much more representative of the content. I contacted the manager and asked if it was the same show with the same principal artists. I assumed one of them had left and so the show couldn’t be advertised in the same way.
It turned out it was the same exact show and they hadn’t been particularly invested in the title they had been using. They were happy to call it whatever helped sell it best.
Ninety-five percent of productions, the title is an immutable part of the brand identity. At least once a year since learning a performer was flexible about the event name, I have been able to negotiate some minor alterations on the name or description of a show to make it sound more appealing and accessible specifically to my local audience. It never hurts to ask.
In the third segment of the podcast, This American Life asks advertising agencies how Volkswagen can extract themselves from their current difficulties. While many say VW is in trouble because it broke faith with its customers, everyone they asked had sentimental feelings for VW based on the company’s past ad campaigns.
There is something to be said for generating good will.
One company suggested a documentary style self-examination. Another suggested VW appeal directly to the consumer, saying their focus was on what they thought over any governmental or industry investigation–essentially throwing themselves at the mercy of the Internet.
A third suggested building a plant in Detroit to bolster jobs there and have Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton do a TV ad in the style of their Broadway show (mixing hip hop and Constitutional themes). It is a little strange to listen to the audio of their sample ad as they transition from lyrics drawn from the Constitution to mentioning the importance of environmental stewardship.
The thought that annoyed me though, and this has nothing directly to do with the podcast, is that the arts are dismissed as a viable career path—until it comes time to rally goodwill around a billion dollar international company or some other tragedy.
This isn’t a direct criticism of VW or ad agencies, both of which know the value of creative artists. I just feel like I need to call attention to these situations as a bit of counter messaging.
It caught my attention because that is the prison in which I learned to play chess.
Yeah, I let that hang there a minute, but it is absolutely true that when I was around 9 or 10 years old, an inmate named Fat Cal with three life sentences for murder taught me to play chess. My parents took us to visit prisoners from the time I was 8 until the time I was about 17. Later, my mother ended up teaching in prisons.
To be honest, my siblings and I thought it was pretty boring because there wasn’t a lot for us to do while our parents talked to the inmates. I can’t say the experience made a deep enough impression on us to keep us out of trouble, but it did prepare us for the hassle of current airport security.
I have written about arts in prisons before. In fact, my last post involved the guard union at Eastern Correctional Facility blocking a theater performance at their prison.
After reading the recent articles about how successful the prison debate team was, it occurred to me that prisons are a good venue for arts organizations that seek to make an impact in a receptive community. As the Wall Street Journal article notes, inmates live a life where few distractions are permitted. As a result, they invest a lot of focus in whatever interests them.
In my previous entry, there were people quoted as saying the inmates should be focusing on developing trade and technical skills which will serve them upon their release. However, a Salon piece discussing the success of the inmate’s debate team notes,
In an oddly backhanded way, the success of these programs reveals the importance of the humanities—those “useless” subjects such as literature, philosophy, and history–which educate the whole person instead of training a worker. For some inmates, Sax writes, their situation may compel them “to think about things more intensely than most people. A crisis like going to prison can move people to question everything in their lives.” As for providing a liberal arts education to inmates, he posits the question: “Are we doing it for the prisoners or for society? Both, but helping the prisoners is a more tangible and immediate goal.”
As for the value of this type of education, the Salon article also notes that the in Bard College program which coached and developed the inmate debate team,
Out of 300 men who graduated from Bard’s program, fewer than 2 percent returned to custody within three years; and Hudson Link’s rates are at 3 percent. Without education, 40 percent of prisoners end up incarcerated again.
What is really interesting to me is that both time and education were cited as key factors in arts participation by the study I cited in Monday’s entry. The researchers in that study hypothesized that highly educated people who were not highly wealthy had higher rates of participation because they had the time to do so, much as the inmates’ success is partially attributed to having the time to devote an undivided focus on their arguments.
As a couple of the articles point out, despite lack of wealth remaining a factor for most inmates upon release, an earned education appears to be diminishing recidivism. Even though there is a lot of debate about the costs and value of higher education, providing a good education appears to contribute to the general good of society.
It isn’t really appropriate to make facile conclusions about the contributions liberal arts can make to criminal reformation, but clearly it can have an important impact. Nor do I want to make statements about education, rather than wealth or a lack thereof, being a key factor in deterring crime. It is pretty clear wealth and class strongly influence whether you will be incarcerated.
Efforts at introducing arts and education to at-risk communities can certainly also assist in preventing people from ending up in prison. Unfortunately, there are myriad environmental factors which may distract people from achieving the necessary focus that is subsequently forced upon them in prison.
For those who long to make an impact in their community and society, it may be worth considering how well working with inmates might help you achieve your goals.
I am sure there is a lesson in all this about how excellence requires more time and focus than we allow ourselves.
Back in July I came across a blog post titled, “When the Audience Phones It In,” which bemoaned all the recent incidents of audience members using phones and other electronic devices at performances employing the recurring phrase, “Why Are You Here?”
Every time I see the post title in my bookmarks, I keep thinking it applies to a different article from the Wall Street Journal about the problem of performers, directors and conductors using cell phones during auditions, rehearsals and backstage during performances.
Given that the phrase “phoning it in” is often used to refer to performers and the phrase “why are you here” could just as easily be applied to people who purport to be passionate and dedicated to what they are doing, that first blog post wouldn’t need many changes in order to address the issues raised in the WSJ article.
It is a little disingenuous to get indignant at audiences without acknowledging the issue exists backstage as well. Just because there isn’t a perfect silence and twilight ambiance of a performance for the errant glow or ringtone to disturb doesn’t mean artists shouldn’t be held to a similar, if not higher standard, as audiences.
The dynamics of a performing ensemble are as important to the success of a performance as establishing a rapport with the audience.
In musical theater, filling downtime on a device instead of watching co-workers rehearse can limit the cohesiveness of an ensemble, said Broadway choreographer Josh Rhodes, most recently of “It Shoulda Been You,” who has banned phones and starts rehearsals with a speech.
“I tell the actors I would rather have to stop them from talking, laughing and bonding, than from texting. I would rather they annoy each other, talk about me behind my back, fix the show in private,” he said. “Anything that links them together is better than checking Facebook during rehearsal.”
Theater director and Shakespeare expert Michael Sexton agrees. “Whenever there is a 10-minute break, everyone retreats to their phone,” he said. “There is this silent room as opposed to gossip and getting to know each other.”
The change can limit professional and social bonds, said Mr. Sexton: “In theater, you are often in rooms with people you don’t really know and the only time the details of peoples’ lives come out is in breaks.”
I hate to be the crotchety old guy muttering “in my day…,” but I think it says something when a director expresses a tolerance for public disturbances, fomenting discord and insubordination if it helps the ensemble bond and keeps them from retreating to their cellphones.
WSJ acknowledges the constructive uses of cellphones and other devices in preparing for a role and helping to promote the show on social media. There is still a certain element to all this that requires one to get one’s own house in order before criticizing others.
Offenses by audience members are highly visible, clearly apparent and violate established social rules so they are easy to deride.
Backstage/rehearsal use is less visible and the rules are more varied and vague. Not to mention there can be power dynamics that inhibit comment when conductors and directors are the primary offenders.
The WSJ article doesn’t even get into the impact of allowing yourself to be distracted during a performance. There are the obvious things like missed cues. Having a fight with a significant other before heading to a performance can have an adverse effect on one’s performance. Having a fight via text/Facetime three minutes before going on stage ratchets things up quite a bit more.
"Though while the author wishes they could buy it in Walmart..." Who is "they"? The kids? The author? Something else?…