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Exodus of the Creative Class

April 21, 2005

by:

Joe Patti

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, has a new book out called The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent . In it he apparently argues that the current socio-political climate in the US is going to start to alienate the creative class and they will move to other countries.

I say apparently because I haven’t read the book, but rather an interview with Florida on the Salon website. I am not sure I totally agree with him, but it might be because I read his entire argument a year ago in an article he did for the Washington Monthly. I have the same reservations I had in an entry a year ago.

While I would love to get a job in Wellington and am not such a model of American consumerism that I couldn’t get along just fine without whatever we got that they don’t, I just don’t see myself moving to New Zealand any time soon. (Of course, I never really saw myself moving to Hawaii either.) Nor do I see too many of the best and brightest I know doing so either.

My feelings were echoed last month by Karrie Jacobs in a Metropolis Magazine article, Why I Don’t Love Richard Florida. Like me, Ms. Jacobs doesn’t actually dislike Richard Florida, just the cult that has sprung up around him. She observes that the group he calls the creative class is the same cohort that was called yuppies in the 80s. Young successful cool people are going to want to live in cool neighborhoods no matter what the era.

Florida doesn’t tell anyone anything new by telling them these are the folks you want to attract. Actually, since he touts tolerance of ethnic and sexual differences as necessarily elements of successful creative communities, he is helping the social and economic mobility of a wider range of people than just rebranding yuppies (who you must admit were mostly caucasian).

I also don’t fault him for writing a book that collects easily observable trends and proposes the shaping of policy based on them. One of the things I have noticed in the last 10-15 years is that things that seem to obvious to mention aren’t necessarily so. People who give voice to these observations tend to get labeled geniuses. It’s happened to me much to my incredulous bemusement. I was just too embarassed to exploit the opportunity.

And who can fault him for letting people give him money to give speeches on the subject. I think what Ms. Jacobs and I have both been aiming at is not to let one person’s vision fill your entire horizon.

Arts in an Age of Technology

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Send Me Your Horror Stories Yearning to Be Free!

April 20, 2005

by:

Joe Patti

I had a topic for today, but decided to take a different tack. I thought I would have a little reader participation.

If you have ever had a performance before a live audience (or even had patrons come to an art gallery or museum) you have some horror story that you just know you want to share to commiserate with other arts folks who can empathize with you.

Here is your chance, send me your tales (or just add them to the entry by clicking the comments link below) and I will feature them here.

To get things started, I will offer up a couple of my own.

I was running the light board for a production of Vaclav Havel’s Faust play, Temptation. The theatre had a flexible seating configuration so the set of the play was on two levels- the stage and then on the floor in front of the proscenium. The director asked that we remove the guard rails along the front of the seating risers so there would be nothing between the first row and the action but a few feet.

In the middle of the show, a gentleman gets up from the front row, walks on to the playing area, touches one of the actors on the shoulder and says “Excuse me, son.” Thinking that there might be a medical emergency, I prepare to bring the lights up and the stage manager starts to alert the backstage crew that they may have to call an ambulance.

The guy turns to the audience and says “I was once an alcoholic and had back problems until I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and I suggest you do the same,” and then walks quickly out of the theatre while everyone sits there stunned for a moment. (Turns out he did that sort of thing all over town and not because Faust and the Devil were on stage.)

The actors were thrown off and couldn’t remember the lines. Because the actors were on the floor 20 feet out in front of the proscenium, there was no way for the stage crew to feed them lines prompted by the stage manager’s frantic hissing over the communications system.

For some reason, the department chair pro-tem’s girlfriend ended up feeding them the correct line from the audience and the show went on.

I have a bunch of these, but here is one more of my favorites.

We were doing a concert at a former workplace with a female vocalist of some renown. A woman and her boyfriend came in the lobby and even from 15 feet away, I could immediately smell the alcohol. The audiences for our shows were really well behaved so all I did was keep an eye on them. The woman was holding a painting that she wanted to give the performer. This is probably what caused me to miss whatever bottle of alcohol they had secreted upon themselves because they weren’t any more sober at the end of the show.

Artists usually come down to the lobby to see their fans shortly after a performance. However, since Sony had offices nearby, representatives of the performer’s label came to meet her and she stayed in her dressing room.

The drunken woman had approached the stage handed the painting up to the performer at the end of the show. However, she wanted a picture of the singer with herself and the painting. She hadn’t really been annoying so a half-hour after the show ended, I sent the security guy home because there were only about 6-10 fans lingering and I figured I could keep an eye on things.

Boy, was I wrong.

About five minutes later, the drunken couple tries to sneak around the stage door. I send them back the front of the theatre. The rest of the evening is spent with her edging toward the stage door while I am distracted and me glaring/chasing her back.

Finally, I warn the road manager that there might be a stalking situation arising. He pooh-poohs me saying that the singer’s music touches people in such a way that they feel they have an intimate personal connection with her. I don’t chase them away as I had planned.

The drunken couple finally loudly declares that they have waited long enough and walk away down the sidewalk. I suspiciously watch them until they get around the corner. Then I take care of a few things and go back outside to breath in the lovely fresh autumn night air.

It is at this point I hear the drunken shuffling through the leaves made by the couple trying to sneak around the far side of the theatre. I head around to the backstage by the faster route and get there just in time to see the woman jump out from behind a car and scream BOO! at the drummer.

It is at this point the road manager begins to reconsider his pooh-poohing. However, the beneficent performer chose that moment to descend and agree to a photo while I gave a smoldering glare at the couple. Other well-behaved fans came out of the lobby to shower praise on the performance and all ended well.

But the story doesn’t end there!

A year or so after, I just happen to be the one who picks up the phone. The drunken woman has lost the photo and wants us to give her the performer’s address so she can get another one taken of the two of them with her painting.

Good Lord!

So again—lemme share your favorite stories from the trenches.

General Musings

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Rousing Passion

April 19, 2005

by:

Joe Patti

There is a really great speech that Neill Archer Roan made to the American Symphony Orchestra League about dealing with controversy.

The point of contention was a decision by the Oregon Bach Festival to perform Bach’s St. John’s Passion in a season themed “War, Reconciliation and Peace.” A local paper asked “How can reconciliation and peace be represented by a musical work whose text has been an incitement to genocide?”

The problem, according to Neill, was that Passion Plays were performed in Nazi Germany to incite anger against Jews and even before that, the worst pogroms always coincided with Easter. (The time during which the plays were historically performed.)

Even worse, the local temple was vandalized by skinheads who shot up the place with guns and spray painted hate filled slogans not nine months before the performance of the piece.

To compound things, the temple’s rabbi was on the Bach Festival’s audience development steering committee. In addition to the Passion piece, they had wanted to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the end of World War II by exploring the works of Jewish artists who had been interred in concentration camps. The rabbi’s guidance about how to handle it with sensitivity was fairly key.

As people learned more about the controversy surrounding the Bach piece, the rabbi and Neill had long conversations about it. The rabbi eventually removed his involvement with the festival because of their resolution to perform it.

What Neill says next really caught my attention because I think it something every arts person embroiled in controversy needs to remember (emphasis is mine):

Any person or organization whose artistic work engages in raising issues which engross our minds, hearts, and polity must expect-even bless-the exercise of conscience, even when that exercise takes the form of withholding support, fierce and active opposition, or even condemnation. As artistic organizations, we may own the work, but we do not own the issues. We may hold the match, but nobody holds a conflagration. We should not be surprised that someone we view as principled enough to be invited to serve on a Board or Steering Committee might also be principled enough to withhold the imprimatur of their good name in affairs that they cannot, in good conscience, support.

What the Festival decided to do though was engage the community in a discussion/debate about the work, “about the dynamics and origins of bigotry, even when that bigotry seemed to spring from the dominant culture’s holiest of stories.”

“By opening up the matter to the community at large and inviting their reflection on the matter, a situation that could have seriously damaged our organization wound up strengthening it. During these times, when people are becoming increasingly disenchanted with institutions, there is no better lesson from my experience that I can offer you today than to trust your public if you want them to trust” you

Much to Neill’s surprise, the local Christian clergy were very open about admitting the anti-Semitic history of their faith and lent immeasurable support to the discussion effort. This support was sorely needed because everyone, including Festival donors, long time patrons and board members were angry, frustrated and confused by the controversy. It was only through continued discussion that people finally began to understand the entire situation. In Neill’s mind, short efficient statements are too abrupt and alienating to be effective solutions in a controversy.

The churches got on board and condemned anti-Semitism from the pulpit the Sunday before the piece was performed and again the night before at a Reconciliation.

The night of the performance a rabbi and his wife handed out flyers asking people to stand and turn their backs on offensive passages. People stayed away and donors withdrew their support.

Says Neill:

Personally, I felt buoyed. In a society where the arts are often thought of as the “toy department of life,” at least on that evening we were no longer on the periphery of community life. We performed the St. John Passion, but in a new context. A deep and principled discussion of meaning, history, and accountability had occurred. We had not only talked about reconciliation, but lived its possibilities.

I am sure the experience was nerve wracking at the time and not something one would wish on oneself ever. I think it is a mark of a good artist though to not only recognize when one is in the presence of great art, but to also acknowledge that it has provided an opportunity for growth and transformation. (Granted, those of us who have gone through puberty can attest that growth and transformation is more exciting in the abstract than in reality.)

Audience Relations

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One Size Does Not Fit All

April 18, 2005

by:

Joe Patti

When we speak about the value of the arts and how they need support, we usually group all the arts together. Doing so is good since the Ben Franklin quote that “We must all hang together, or we shall surely all hang separately,” can certainly apply in regard to the government funding each might receive if they don’t.

In some respect though, this practice does blur the fact that each branch does things in its own way and the answers for one are not viable for another. But perhaps some are…

I was reading a recent Adaptistration entry about job satisfaction in orchestras. There is a link to an article at the bottom of the entry that was really eye opening for me in terms of the perceptions musicians have about their relationship with the conductor, the rules governing their lives and their place in the orchestra ensemble.

Coming from a theatre background, there were things that were familiar to me such as union defined limits on rehearsal times. Other things like the deference shown to the conductor and the timid manner in which comments and questions were couched was amazing to me.

Certainly there are domineering directors in the theatre who try to keep actors cowed. But that is an individual working on a particular production at a specific theatre rather than the systematic situation Robert and Seymour Levine describe.

This brought to mind conversations I had with a friend in ballet administration. To my mind, ballet dancers have it worst since they have no union protection at all. (Not that I am a big union person. I have had mixed encounters with them. But with a union there is at least a standard of treatment a non-union person can point to.) According to my friend, in addition to weak protections against being overworked, getting the rights to choreography can be a humiliating experience. (And if it is different, please correct me if I am wrong. It seems rather bizarre to me. Perhaps this is only true for a small segment of regional ballet companies with which my friend is associated.)

Unlike music and theatre where securing performance rights is based on fairly objective criteria, ballet is apparently very subjective. The rights are often in the hands of a person (often a ballerina who danced the principal role) who reviews the skill of the ballet company applying for the rights by attending a performance or via a video recording. From what I have been told, there tends to be a lot of criticism of the female dancers’ technique and body weight (especially if they show any sign of having a bust). The male dancers are generally spared as much scrutiny.

I had attended a black tie affair for my friend’s ballet company and was told that the petite, absolutely gorgeous dancer who had charmed me that night might have to leave the company because her “weight” was judged unseemly. (I think the chair I was sitting on probably outweighed the woman.)

I mention these elements to illustrate some fundamental differences in the assumptions three branches of the performing arts have about how things should be done. I could certainly go on for a week analyzing the flaws in the way live theatres do business. In some respect, I wonder if it might be better if different branches didn’t get to know each other better. It is probably easier for an orchestra official to advocate for more arts funding if he isn’t thinking about the barbaric theatres who might only employ actors for six weeks before sending them back to waiting on tables while his musicians are guaranteed an income all year round.

On the other hand, even though their disciplines are grouped together as “the arts.” Managers in each area rarely talk to each other on substantive topics. Who knows if there are efficient solutions to common problems if no one really shares that information. One of the most common expectation of attendees of the National Performing Arts Convention held last June in Pittsburgh was that they were attending a forum for an exchange of ideas with people from other disciplines. This according to the surveys administered by the IDOC project. But according to the final IDOC report (found at the above link) and The Artful Manager’s own observations of his attendance, people gravitated toward their own kind.

Granted, the IDOC effort found that some of the scheduling was not conducive to mingling. I don’t know when the next National Performing Arts Convention will be held, but perhaps an effort will be made to replicate the efforts of every junior high school dance committee and force the boys and girls together in the center of the room. (Leave some room for the Holy Spirit though as the nuns used to say.)

Since the general public is hanging us all together under “The Arts”. It would probably be good to take up residence together under that roof and talk a little. Perhaps we can see the way to better relationships with our actors/musicians/dancers.

State of the Arts

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