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There’s A Rat In The Audience (And It’s Not the Critic)

October 17, 2006

by:

Joe Patti

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (subscription required) may have implications for arts organizations if some lawsuits and other efforts are successful.

Colleges across the country are being faced with students demanding that they be allowed to bring cats, dogs, snakes, rats, ferrets and tarantulas into dorm rooms and classrooms with the idea that they are service animals. Rather than claiming a physical disability, they are saying the animals provide “psychiatric service.” (I wonder though if claiming an animal that causes anxeity in everyone around you can be considered a comfort aide.)

A few students who have had their requests denied have filed suits under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA “defines a service animal as ‘any guide dog, signal dog, or other animal individually trained to do work or perform tasks for an individual with a disability.'”

Some animals are trained to provide comfort and direction to people with agoraphobia and schizophrenia by their very nature and presence. As such, they serve a passive role so it can be argued that the ADA encompasses animals that don’t do specific tasks. Some groups are doing just that asking the Department of Justice to revise regulations to include such activities.

For the most part, courts have ruled with the idea that an animal must provide active service. There is at least one court that has ruled that a person could keep a comfort animal despite the no-pets clause in a rental lease.

The idea of needing animals to help one cope with all situations is spreading. Apparently people have tried to board airplanes claiming goldfish as service animals. (At least they didn’t want to bring snakes on a plane!)

The instances of people needing comfort animals is not isolated either. Rutgers University “received five requests to accommodate a psychiatric-service animal in a single year – three cats, one dog, and a snake.”

This is just something of which to be aware. People may start to appear at your box office wanting to attend a show with an animal that helps them cope with being out in public or even the subject matter of the performance. And it may not be accompanied by a dog in a service cape.

Audience Relations

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Themed Seasons

October 16, 2006

by:

Joe Patti

I was at a meeting a couple weeks ago to learn how the tourism authority was going to promote the arts over the next year. Someone suggested that the arts organization program along a unified theme and use that as something of a hook. The same thing had been suggested at the same meeting last year. Remembering some of the problems with that idea, I was going to speak up but someone effectively removed the idea from the table.

One of the travel writers in attendance told us that the publications that commissioned stories weren’t really interested in stories about themed seasons. She mentioned a number of other ways to pique interest, but said that wasn’t one of them.

If that is true for travel journals, I wonder if it is true for local publications as well. Early on in the planning of our current season, we noticed that a theme of revolving around storytelling ran through it. We started promoting the season with a “What’s Your Story” theme and invited people to submit anecdotes on the website. We got plenty of orders but nothing submitted. (Not terribly surprising or worrisome) But we also got no acknowledgment from any media.

Granted there isn’t a real big compelling hook in the theme. I was wondering if anyone had any recent success with getting recognition for themed seasons. I wouldn’t mind terribly if the media doesn’t care for them. It’s less effort and brainpower on my part if I don’t have to come up with a common thread to bind my season to get attention.

That said, about seven years ago when I was working in Orlando, FL, my theatre was part of a cooperative effort on the part of many arts organizations to present works based around Oscar Wilde. If you put any effort in to it, you can easily arrive at our slogan- Go Wilde! The local papers did cover the effort with a feature story and mentioned the theme whenever a show that was part of the theme was being performed.

I don’t know if it is a matter of different time, different place that is dictating the lack of interest in mentioning the theme. The papers in Orlando might not have been as interested in writing something up if it weren’t for the fact people could get a discount by grabbing a free punchcard and going around to visit the different events.

A theme is one thing, but a theme that motivates people to buy the paper to find out where and when the next discounted performance in the series might be provides a newspaper with a good reason to report on it.

Anyone else out there have any successes or failures at promoting a themed season or series of events in cooperation with others?
Email me or comment below..

Marketing/PR

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That Old Green Eyed Monster

October 11, 2006

by:

Joe Patti

I thought I would bring up the topic of jealousy to no particular end other than the fact it exists but no one really talks about it. I am not sure I have any suggested solutions. I just wanted to throw it out there.

The jealousy I am talking about is the type felt by the staff and supporters of the lesser arts organizations toward the local or regional darling. Unless you have worked for the top dog all your life, you know what I am talking about.

Sometimes the envy is just over the choices audiences make-Why do people go to see that shallow tripe rather than attending our shows where we deal with real issues?

Other times it has to do with perception that funding is going to the wrong place–The community rallying around the financially mismanaged behemoth, securing emergency donations from the state, banks and individuals, eliminating the usual annual gifts to you.

The upshot is, you essentially develop an inferiority complex despite all your protestations about how much better your own performances are. It may keep you running lean and mean to stay competitive and thus avoids burdening the community with another mismanaged organization. On the other hand, by constantly defining yourself in relation to another organization, you can place yourself in a box of your own building and ignore opportunities for growth.

I have worked for both the top dog and the underdog. I have even worked for the mismanaged behemoth that was sucking the money out of the community. Even though I didn’t have anything to do with the mismanagement and was working 14-18 hours days to make up for the staff shortage, I felt guilty about the diversion of funding from other orgs.

It is great to be the organization with the most goodwill. It is easier to rebuild goodwill having lost it than it is to generate it from the start. Individuals may defect, but a community on the whole is fairly forgiving.

A lot of it has to do with the physical and social environment the organization is in. About a year ago I cited an Urban Institute study that said there were two factors that would immediately cause a person to decide not to return to your organization again- “not liking the venue and not having an enjoyable social occasion.”

A case in point- There is a newly renovated facility in town. It has new equipment, gold leaf, new marquee…the works. It is essentially a rental house and doesn’t program a balanced season like I do. Since people are pretty much making their entertainment choices at the last minute, the distinction isn’t apparent or important to them.

Everybody likes that place best even though there are a lot of one way streets to navigate and no free parking (and the garage next door fills up quick.) Once you get inside, the surrounding allow you to feel like you are attending an event of note. If you don’t, they have a liquor license so you at least numb yourself to the lack of that feeling.

It is hard not to feel a little jealous or inferior. We once had patrons go there for one of our shows despite the fact we had mailed them tickets two weeks before that clearly had our venue name on them. If the show is any good, it must be happening there is apparently the general feeling.

What really drove the popular sentiment about that theatre home to us was an article written a month ago about the world premiere show we did this past weekend. Two days in a row, in the Thursday newspaper and in the Friday Fall Arts Review, a columnist wrote that the show would premiere at my theatre in rough form and then a refined, more formal performance would be at this other theatre.

What lead him to write that? Well the company performing the show was thinking about renting this other theatre to do school outreach performances. They asked the facility to hold the date. The facility put it up on their website calendar, but because it was tentative, there was no time or prices listed and the description actually listed outreach activities. The company ultimately decided not to do the performance, canceled the date and the web listing came down 7-10 days after it went up.

The artistic director of the dance company theorized that people couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to premiere a show in my venue and rationalized the details from the scant evidence available.

In the end, since I sold out, the stories had no negative impact on me. There may be some who decided they would wait for the show to appear at the other theater who are going to be disappointed or confused when they show up since someone else has rented that date.

I really don’t think I am so much in competition with shows at the theatre as I am with the general perception and aura of prestige that surrounds it. Little by little I am trying to create an identity for us and carve out our little niche. While there are a lot of people who think the 8 mile drive to my place is WAAAAY out in the hinterlands, there are people who live even further out who think the 8 mile drive to my general neighborhood is civilization. There are fewer of them, but they deserve to be served too.

Mostly, I want to concentrate on keeping nimble and out of a box of my own construction. I don’t have a lot of advice about constructively dealing with envy to offer, but avoiding self-constraint seems like some small wisdom.

Featured

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Little Horn Tooting

October 10, 2006

by:

Joe Patti

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.

General Musings

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