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.)