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No Ketchup Arts Outreaches!

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I have been thinking about how my theatre can serve our constituencies. Since the assistant theatre manager has been involved in developing curriculum for studies of Filipino history in the state, I thought he might be dealing with the state fine arts content standards and could advise me a little bit about them. He isn’t really, but that is okay because the standards are pretty readily available.

My main thought was to help some of the schools we have relationships with by providing them with a list of the content standards our outreach performances might fulfill. I have seen arts organizations and artists provide this sort of information in study packets for events. I figure it will be easier for the busy teacher to say yes if we provide information to show how the artist can benefit them.

I looked at the state standards today and began to wonder how an assembly program could ever suffice to fulfill the standards. All the requirements involve a fair bit of action by the students. For example, one of the 6-8 grade general music benchmarks (non-orchestra or choral, which have their own standards) is “Improvise a short pattern or melody to be performed with a rhythmic and/or melodic accompaniment.” The sample performance assessment they offer is “The student: Completes the last phrase of a given melody or improvises a short melody to be performed with a selected rhythmic accompaniment.” The most general benchmark I found that might be applied to an assembly program would be to “Evaluate the effectiveness of a musical performance or composition.”

We mostly offer more one on one experiences to schools, master classes and small group programs, so there is an opportunity to provide information to a teacher in advance so he/she can instruct the students to pay attention to certain aspects in preparation for an assignment that will extend the concepts of the activity they will be involved in. It made me wonder if that was why we often had people turn down services we could provide for free in their classroom spaces. In schools where there are so many other testable standards to strive for, it can be difficult to find the time to prepare and implement an additional lesson for an outside activity. We aren’t just taking an hour out of the class. If the teacher wants to exploit the opportunity to meet a standard, the students need to be prepared in advance and then time needs to be taken later to produce some measurable result connected to the outreach experience. In some cases, if the student are up demonstrating what they have learned by the end of the outreach, then perhaps additional time to evaluate won’t be necessary.

Really, while there is a double-edged sword element to having a standard that requires so much work to meet, this is the way we want it. We don’t want a standard that is easily ticked off a list by sitting quietly in a dark room for an hour while something happens. We actually had this conversation today and referenced the fact that at one time ketchup was considered a vegetable when determining if a school lunch provided balanced nutrition. (Though I am afraid it still might be.) We don’t want an arts standard to be met with a ketchup experience!

Many artists have good study guides that provide suggested activities, explanations of technical words, instruments and equipment that will be used in the outreach. The problem is, many artists don’t reinforce what is in the study guide, nor are they often asked to touch on specific subjects that may be pertinent to the activities the teacher has planned. There are a few artists that are sending out study guides created for them by places like the Kennedy Center and Michigan’s University Musical Society. They are nicely put together, but the school performances the artists present often don’t connect back to them in a way that facilitates the student learning. In part it might be due to not having been involved in the study guide’s creation, which admittedly can be a tough thing to coordinate.

The study guides will tell you to “watch for…” but the artists often don’t follow up by referencing those elements in what they are about to play or just played. This is not to say we want artists to look at their study guides and deliver a rote performance that corresponds to the material therein. Looking at the standards, it made me realize that a little more communication can go a long way. Either passing on what the artist has decide to cover to the schools so they can prepare or asking the artists to touch upon topics that are related to what students are learning in school.

Many of the artists we work with seem to be open to that sort of thing and ask if there is anything we want covered. It occurs to me that we haven’t been doing a good job of asking the schools we are working with if there is anything it would be helpful to cover.

End of Multi-venue Cultural Facility Construction?

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The Nonprofiteer reports that the Kresge Foundation has decided to cease providing support for the construction of new theatres.

The Nonprofiteer’s reaction seems to imply those who hadn’t jumped to build when everyone else did are being penalized while those with established facilities will continue to benefit under the new focus.

“Granting funds instead for renovation and repair means the new Kresge posture will benefit the arts groups that got while the getting was good (or, perhaps, have some other basis for grantworthiness, e.g. re-purposing of an historic building). But arts groups which have been thinking about building from scratch are now stuck contemplating Max Bialystock’s mantra: “He who hesitates is poor!”

Yes, inevitably those who received support in their capital campaigns may not find themselves the beneficiary of programmatic and capacity building support. This is a common story as the financial situation changes for everyone from governments to families. Entities who have a need at the right time get resources that others didn’t/won’t. (And Mom loved her best too! *sniffle*) Also, the way Kresge Foundation sees it, the operating environment is shifting in a direction that can not support new construction.

“Kresge was a critical player in the 20-year cultural facility building boom that swept the arts sector.” Carle continues. “But numerous signs suggest that the building boom is over, halted by a combination of the economic recession and the staggering challenges of running capital campaigns and then covering steadily rising fixed costs. Our new grantmaking strategy is designed to assist organizations in successfully making this transition and positioning themselves for long-term sustainability.”

Their focus now will be on “Institutional Capitalization, Artists’ Support Services and Arts and Community Building.” Renovation, repair and generating a building reserve funding can be applied for under the Facility Investments and Building Reserves section of the Institutional Capitalization area. It appears to be the only area one can apply for openly. Unsolicited applications for all other sections of Institutional Capitalization as well as the Artists’ Support Services and Arts and Community Building areas are not accepted.

They do leave the door open slightly to new construction projects: “On occasion, we will entertain applications for new construction associated with exemplary sustainability practices or those that embody key principles of urban and community planning to enhance the quality of life in a place.” So perhaps if you had a project to reclaim a portion of downtown storefronts for arts use as part of a revitalization project focused on creating a walkable neighborhood, you could have a decent shot at funding.

Friday As The New Wednesday? Only On Broadway!

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Ken Davenport at Producer’s Perspective recently reprinted a preference survey conducted by the Telecharge ticketing service. Telecharge set out to discover at what times Broadway audiences would prefer to attend shows. The results were pretty interesting. It wasn’t really surprising to me to learn that people would rather have weekend shows start at 7 pm and that people who go to matinees like to eat after the show and those who go to evening shows want to eat before. But I found it interesting that people would rather have the weekday matinee be on Friday rather than Wednesday.

This raises the question about how well do we really know our audience’s preferences. I know that some people in my audience would prefer an earlier start time on week nights. But others need the extra time to wait for the traffic to clear enough to make it over to the theatre. Still, I am sure there is a lot I don’t know about my audience preferences.

Of course, there are other matters to consider. In the case of the Broadway study, one of the biggest impediments to changing the matinee day to Friday is that bus operators and schools don’t want to have their groups in NYC on a Friday night. Davenport notes that shows that aren’t dependent on these groups for their audience base might try some experimentation. Even if you aren’t on the 8 shows a week schedule Broadway is, there are other practical concerns like not overburdening your cast and crew with back to back performances and other time related stresses to consider.

Anyway, there are some observations made toward the end of the report that may just be interesting for their own sake, but could also drive some conversations in your offices.

Farming The Arts

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A couple weeks ago on the Americans for the Arts blog, Joshua Russell suggested a farm system for arts leadership similar to what professional sports teams use. I got to thinking about that concept in the context of arts organizations in general.

My first thought was that there is already a farm team feeder set up for so many segments of the performing arts, going something like: high school —>college/conservatory —> professional. Depending on the discipline, then you might get into different strata for theatre companies, symphonies, dance companies where performing with one is more prestigious than another.

Farm League Actors?
Then I started thinking about whether some sort of system like this might be possible in theatre since that is the area whose training and performance system I am most familiar. There are, in fact, a number of college/conservatory theatre training programs with very close associations to LORT theatres that provide actors, stage managers and technicians with practical experience (and the theatres with less expensive labor.) But there is a lot of room for expansion. Given a huge infusion of money and a shift in funding structures, could Broadway and the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) create a feeder system? Done right, it could shift the focus away from NYC, Los Angeles and Chicago as the ultimate career goal and strengthen theatre regionally. Of course, it would take about 25-30 years for attitudes to shift sufficiently away from the holy trinity as a career destination.

Toledo Tyrones, Guthrie Triple A Team
There is already a tacit acknowledgment of stature, but I imagine some people, as a matter of ego, and there is plenty of that in the arts, might not like to have their local theatre overtly regarded as substandard to the organizations they feed into. On the other hand, a lot of people find minor league baseball games and the parks that house them to be a lot more fun and family friendly than the majors. Presumably, there would be some sort of investment of funds and resources from up the chain to sustain the system of cultivation. That might improve quality on many fronts for the single A to triple A level theatres.

Setting Down Roots
I think it would also go a long way to solve some of the concerns Scott Walters and Tom Loughlin have about the careers theatre training programs are preparing students for if there were viable career opportunities that allowed people to maintain a long term regional residency. It might not stem the tide of too many people pursuing too few opportunities, but it might keep creative people closer to home where they could apply that skill in ways that would bolster the local economy.

The Wise Farmer Plans Long Term
Ultimately, short of an immense shift in thousands of elements, I don’t anticipate this happening any time soon. At least not on a national scale. I think a single regional theatre could make a commitment to sourcing locally. They could go to a couple of training programs and commit to employing their students with an eye to keeping them around for a long time. Every college program I have been associated with has a pretty good idea what high schools feed them. The colleges and the theatre could go to them and say they look forward to seeing their students on their stages and they hope the schools continue to maintain strong arts programs. The theatre could also go around to other theatres throughout the region looking for up and coming talent.

Then the theatre could employ their board connections directly and indirectly to create a program where artists could secure good rents and mortgages and get other incentives to stay locally. In turn some of those who are attracted/retained to the area can target the feeder schools as teachers and visiting artists to help cultivate that resource–and eventually expand to other schools.

By the way, this is partially how the whole regional theatre system was supposed to work. Instead, they turned to NYC to do most of their casting. This hypothetical theatre would be looking to lure people back or give them an incentive to never go. To some degree, it would actually be healthy for the theatre to have people go away to work with other actors and organizations and then return. While Broadway may always be the gold standard in many respects, it might be best to have people going away to work in places that served regional communities because those are the audiences the theatre wants its people to learn to serve.

Shifting The Conversation
But in terms of a national movement, I think there is a better chance of Walters and Loughlin succeeding in changing the way students are trained and the way their expectations are shaped than having most theatres change how they source their talent.

Sports and Theatre
In that context, my mind turned to a comparison of the athletics and farm system for professional sports. The systems aren’t completely analogous, but there are enough similarities to speculate a little. The problem area that Walters and Loughlin identify is the college/conservatory stage where people choose to major in theatre hoping to make a career of it.

For college sports, a lot of athletes are offered scholarships to play for the school. There is a fair amount of controversy about this because there is a lot of money invested in non-academic pursuits at educational institutions. Victories bring prestige and increased donations from alumni. There is also criticism made of the fact that these students generate a lot of money for the school, but often don’t get a good education out of the deal because of low expectations of them or even lack of time to excel in both sports and academics.

Practical Professional Expectations
But the thing is, despite all the investment into the athletic programs and the players, you pretty much know that not everyone is going to get to play professionally. There are far fewer professional teams than there are college programs that can feed them. There are 32 NFL teams and about 120 college football teams in Division I alone. There are only a select few who can successfully operate at the level required by professional sports.

You occasionally hear about athletes getting short shrift on their education or having irrational expectations of being recruited to play pro right out of high school. But how many people will complain if all of Alabama’s defensive tackles didn’t get drafted to the NFL even though the school finished first in the football standings last year?

Status Enumerated
Statistically, every defensive tackle that graduates each year may have a better chance of going pro than every acting student that graduates, but for all practical purposes, the chances are the same. So what is the difference? Why aren’t more athletes taking temporary jobs, biding their time until their opportunity comes?

Well, for one thing, I think its partially that numbers help define your place in sports. You know how fast you can run, how many times you have completed an action successfully and how many times you didn’t. Personality and passion also contribute to whether someone wants you for their team, but the statistics provide a baseline comparison between you and everyone else and you know what teams value. You may think you weren’t used to your greatest potential, but you probably have few illusions about an athletics career going forward.

What Are Ian McKellen’s Stats?
In the arts, things are much more subjective. Assessment is as much about how you have improved and demonstrated you have started to grasp concepts as it is about your overall talent. Just like there are only a few people who have the ability to hit a 90 mph fastball and solve complicated physics problems, there are only a very few with magnificent acting talent. Except that personality and good looks can be just as important at the end of the day as skill. Trying harder won’t get most of us any closer to hitting that fast ball, but with such subjectivity muddying the evaluative waters, it is easy to believe success is just a matter of patience and trying hard.

In an earlier time, I think those who instructed would have had an easier time trying to disabuse their students of this notion. Now that we can watch people try out for American Idol at the mall and make it to the final rounds based heavily on charisma inspired voting, I think it is harder to convince people that the odds are greatly against them period, much less based on lack of ability.

I Didn’t Go To Class Because I Was Practicing Being A Lizard*
One of the great similarities between theatre students and athletes in Division I colleges is that grades often suffer as a result of their pursuits. (Though there is far more pressure on instructors to grade athletes more leniently.) Because of their great emotional investment in theatre, those students often neglect to complete assignments or even attend classes in favor of theatre related activities.

A number of theatre departments threaten dire consequences for students who let this happen by commission or omission. But as I have mentioned before, I think Tom Loughlin’s idea that students need to be trained to employ their abilities more widely becomes more apt. If students are going to cut class and neglect studies to do arts related stuff, you might as well have them channeling their passion toward doing something that will develop skills with wide applications.

*I didn’t skip class, but I did spend a lot of time practicing being a lizard for my scene work in Edward Albee’s Seascape

Stuff You Can Use: Free Classes!

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Okay, very short entry today so that no one thinks tl;dnr from just a glance.

Fractured Atlas, which is doing a pretty great job gluing the artistic world together, is offering FREE online classes which you can start, pause and continue at your leisure.

From their blog announcement making the courses free (my emphasis so nothing is overlooked.)

Currently, there are six courses (on marketing, fundraising, professional identity, social media marketing, working with agents, and getting your sh*t together) and two video workshops (on independent contractors vs. employees, and wellness programs for dancers). We will be launching four to six more courses during April and May (on audio description for performances, presentation venues, board development, fundraising letters, financial planning, and producing) and more video workshops are in the works.

You have to sign up to be a member, but the Community Membership is free and that is all you need to access the classes. You may, however, be interested in the insurance and other benefits they offer with a paid membership so it can be beneficial to look around a little.

I just signed up myself after years of reading their blog. While I am pretty sure I have my sh*t together, you just can’t pass up the opportunity to check that out. (And I strongly suspect there may be people I am going to encourage to take the class.)

When All Non-Profits Are Not Equal

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Stuff to think about from Gene Takagi at Non-Profit Law Blog. He links to a piece on The Chronicle of Philanthropy about the increasing scrutiny on charities. (Not that there aren’t people abusing non-profit status, but shouldn’t the hammer really be coming down a little heavier on big bank misdeeds?) A symposium was conducted earlier this month “focused exactly on the issue that is first in the minds of policymakers in Washington who are interested in the tax-exempt sector: whether there is merit to a broader review and consideration of what is a charity. More specifically, should there be an effort to distinguish between types of charities?”

The piece links to articles which examine how many companies with non-profit status seem to be operating as thinly veiled for-profit businesses. In this context, most arts organizations probably wouldn’t worry because there is little chance of anyone accusing them of making massive profits. However, writing about the symposium agenda, the writer asks:

The question for tomorrow is should we move beyond just reforming certain sectors but instead look at broader changes to the subsidies for charities? For example, should there be line drawn that would allow for greater tax subsidies to charities that provide direct support to the poor? What lines should be drawn? What lines can be drawn?

Since governments often tend to think there is a binary choice for funding non-profits- your show or dying orphans, Carnegie Hall or criminals running free and houses burning down– my concern is that creating a scale for subsidies and donation exemptions will present a clear judgment about the value of organizations in the community. How will people’s perceptions change when 100% of their donation to Juvenile Diabetes is deductible, but only 80% of the donation to the opera? True, so much of it is already unspoken or written up in editorials and blog posts, but that might solidify perceptions. I would think there is a very real chance of arts organizations ending up on an uneven footing with other non-profits. It is politically much easier to advocate for better consideration of health and human services than the some times controversial arts.

There hasn’t been a follow up post on the Chronicle of Philanthropy site so I don’t know how the discussion played out. There was a mention of one of the speakers, the chief of staff for the US Senate Finance Committee mentioning that perhaps Congress should create a “for benefit” corporate status. But I haven’t seen anything much more about the meeting.

On a semi-related topic, Takagi also linked to the IRS’ new rules dealing with “Tax on Unrelated Business Income of Exempt Organizations ” Unless you have been wondering how to find these rules and enjoy reading IRS publications, this may not be of great interest to you.

He also linked to a site addressing what to do if you are a for-profit who wants to help raise money for a charity. The answer given isn’t really extensive, but it is a starting place if you are considering partnering to create one of those programs we often hear about where a “portion of the proceeds is donated to…”

Slaves Of The System And Our Expectations

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Well The Guardian beat me to it. I was going to do an entry rounding up the multitude of discussions about arts internships, but the Guardian got there first with many of the links I bookmarked for my entry as well as some I hadn’t. Still, it is probably a sign of a discussion that needs to be had when so many people start to participate. So I take some consolation in the fact the internet is doing its job and bringing us all together.

Read as many of the blog links included in the story as you can to get the fullest picture. One thing I think got lost in the discussion. While it is illegal for for-profit organizations to have unpaid internships, according to the NY Times article cited, they aren’t illegal for non-profits because they are allowed to have volunteer work staff.

Now, whether unpaid internships should be illegal is another question. Scott Walters makes a strong case about how internships and the systems that value them, favor the affluent who have the connections and family support to secure good prestigious internships. I was ready to say it wasn’t so except that he essentially describes my college career arc. I worked to pay my way through high school, college and grad school and slaved away for free in the theatre during those times I wasn’t working or studying. I would say the only benefit I had over the person in Scott’s story is that I had a family that valued education and so I knew enough about basic networking to position myself for a good internship—a paid one at that.

Compare that to the daughter of a colleague who goes to an Ivy League University and recently decided she might want to get into arts administration and got an internship at Lincoln Center. Granted, her parents told her to take advantage of every opportunity offered, do whatever she was asked and not to even think about going to parties instead so she could suck the marrow out of the experience. I really don’t know if I could have gotten that internship as easily even having grown up in NY and having been involved in the theatre for a fair bit of time, but not going to an Ivy.

I am not going to rail as vehemently against the system as Walters does. Saying the affluent gain more advantages than the poor seems as self-evident as saying the public transport system of big cities provide more advantages to their residents than those enjoyed by suburban residents. That isn’t to say that people shouldn’t work to change the situation if they see an opportunity to do so. I have a lot of respect for the effort Scott Walters and Tom Loughlin are putting in to this goal. They started a blog separate from their personal ones, Theatre Arts Curriculum Transformation in which they discuss the current situation and how it might be fixed.

I thought it was very timely on the day we opened a show in my theatre about celebrity, Tom Loughlin had an entry on the seductive quality of fame. While there is some misrepresentation about arts careers by training programs, there is a degree of self-delusion that hasn’t existed in the past. (my emphasis)

“The young person who wrote this email is a very nice and very engaging student. But he is not thinking rationally. He is a victim of what I have come to call the “fame factor” in theatre education. It exists not only in theatre, of course, but across the culture. Created almost entirely by the pervasiveness of mass media, young people no longer pursue success; they pursue fame as well. The writer of this email simply believes he will be famous someday and win the Academy Award, and he needs nothing but the simple fact of his belief in that idea to make it come true for him (except maybe a little more help from me with his acting, as if I could make such a difference – another illusion).

I think theatre educators do not take into account the power of this drive in young people.

[….big snip….]

As educators, we should begin to recognize the part that fame plays in the lives of our students. We should understand that they are growing up in a culture where fame is glorified, and that their motivations for studying theatre are not necessarily the same ones that those of us of a certain age had as theatre students. Do we have anything at all to counter this rush to fame? Can we offer them any options at all for careers more rooted in personal self-worth as determined by their own values? Can we educate them for careers in the arts where they can be rooted in communities of people driven by motives other than profit and notoriety? Sure we can, but we have to have the courage to be the kinds of educators no longer willing to send new victims to be sacrificed to the altar of our adoration. We have to find values other than fame in theatre for them, and sell those values more strongly and convincingly.”

I know that I keep talking about the Creative Economy which is supposed to be the next phase of mass employment. There aren’t many overt signs of this coming to pass in these dismal financial times, unless you count the creativity needed to create all those awful financial instruments that brought this all about. One of the things Tom talks about in this entry is the idea that training programs are responding to fill a perceived need for a very narrow segment of the arts. Perhaps if training programs began to teach students about the alternative ways to employ the skills they are using, it could contribute to the development of the creative economy.

At this point there doesn’t seem much risk to pursuing this course. Is it that much worse to train students for jobs that may not exist in the future or train them for jobs that will employ less than one percent of one percent of them? Instead of chasing the areas “they” say opportunities will be, training programs can drive the creation of those opportunities.

China Bound In May

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I have the opportunity to go back to China this summer. Picked up my visa today so I am all ready for the trip at the end of May/beginning of June. Again, much of my time will be spent outside major cities like Beijing and Shanghai. The centerpiece of the trip is Huangshan -Yellow Mountain.

I will have two days in Shanghai in which to visit Expo 2010. The overall theme seems to be about sustainability, respect and living in harmony with one’s surroundings. I can’t possibly visit even half the pavilions. If anyone hears a buzz about any of the pavilions or exhibitions, let me know.

I promise, this time I will take lots of pictures, especially of any “world of tomorrow” exhibits a la the 1939 New York World’s Fair. I want to know what is supposed to becoming.

Enter The Celebrities!

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This past weekend we finally opened our site specific work, The Celebrity Project, over a year in the making. There were a lot of changes that were made since our original conception. It went from being entirely outside at another location to being closer to the theatre with part of the action occurring indoors. From the amount of effort that went into staging even part of the event outdoors, it was probably a prudent move.

To create some atmosphere, we laid down a red carpet from the foot of the stairs up to the ticket office.

You may notice a lot of wires coming out of the ticket office. The little room also doubled as our control room for sound and lights. It was great because it offered good sightlines to our stages. On the other hand it was pretty cramped with the ticket office, technical staff and stage manager all in there at once.

I observed some strange behavior in connection with the carpet. Many times people would come down the stairs and side step to the concrete on the outside of the stanchions before continuing to the ticket office. In one case, a young woman decided to walk on the carpet while her boyfriend insisted on staying on the outside. I guess people decided the carpet wasn’t for them even though it lead directly to their desired destination.

One of the iconic images employed by the performance company with whom we partnered is “Moira” a woman who sits and knits throughout the whole show. For this show, she appeared to the side of the red carpet apparently knitting since the end of her knitting was attached to the carpet. The umbrella is there to keep her dry in case of a passing shower.

In a break from the usual procedure, when the show began the announcer encouraged everyone to take pictures, twitter and live stream the event if they wanted to. He even encouraged them to take their cell phone calls. This was something of a surprise for me since they had filmed me for the interior portion of the show telling the audience not to do any of these things. That bit didn’t appear in the dress rehearsals so I heard it for the first time opening night.

Surprisingly, even though we had gotten the audience pretty riled up and excited in the first half, no one really broke the no recording/photography rules once they got inside. I think the compliance indoors may have been a result of the smaller than usual audience size. Without as many people performing undesirable actions, fewer people felt comfortable trying.

Because the two outdoor stages were so close to each other and because the masks the performers were wearing inhibited any sort of dialogue, the difference pieces on each stage were performed to the same music. Later when the performers switched to the other stage so the audience would see the entire show, the same music played again to accompany the action. Many audience members thought this was pretty clever.

On the Left Stage...
On the Right Stage...

Then we forced everyone out of their seats to witness a wrestling battle royale! We got the audience to shift to the area in front of the ticket office to watch two masked characters participate in an ever escalating battle of plastic surgery enhancements.

Followed by a revival meeting by the Reverend Wolf who got the audience howling and bearing their claws.

Finally, the glamorous celebrities descended the stairs and lead the audience inside for a more traditional experience.


In the end, it was a lot of work but also a lot of fun. We proved that this type of thing could be done. We have been a little too busy in the aftermath to ask whether we should try to do it again. There are things I would definitely change about some of the arrangements. There were a couple times when we asked ourselves if what we were doing was specific enough to the setting to require it to be done outside– the whole purpose of site specific work. Perhaps there could have been more aspects of the experience that were unique to the space.

Also, moving people from a space that limits attendance to a space that allows twice as many might have been a mistake. The audience went from a very physically intimate experience to one that allowed significant gaps between people. I am sure I could have made a case for the alienation effect of celebrity once you move from ad hoc performance spaces to the big time of formal stages, but the truth is it would have been incidental to the purpose.

However, in terms of engaging the audience, the design was pretty much on the nose. We moved them from passively watching to pressing forward to see– which is what the red carpet experience is all about. We had people howling, whimpering, growling and baring their claws on cue. People had a good time and even returned a second night because they hadn’t brought a camera the first go round. Next time, I will want to encourage more of that to see where we can go with it.

The Hidden Hands And Slow Brains of Creativity

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Rod Dreher had a couple interesting entries about creativity and the unseen entities at performances on his Beliefnet blog last week. The entries aren’t about religion except in the broadest sense in which any communal endeavor in which the final result is due to the efforts of the many in support of a goal.

Although the article about backstage workers Dreher links to does appear in In Character which is subtitled, “A Journal of Everyday Virtues,” so perhaps I shouldn’t discount the efforts of backstage workers as not having an element of religious like devotion. It isn’t new to those of us in the business, but it is gratifying to have it acknowledged by someone from without. I especially appreciated that the writer included the observation by the technical director that he isn’t a frustrated actor just awaiting the opportunity to make a star turn. I guess from the outside, performance is such a defining quality of the arts that many people have no conception that anyone would far prefer to be involved in other capacities.

And there can be ample psychic income in the commitment to the craft of play-making, from sewing the costumes to hanging the lights, as well as in contributing to an artistic endeavor that may have a lasting impact on the culture.

Still, much of the activity in the beehive of theatrical life goes on without even a minimal sort of public acknowledgment. It’s a strange dichotomy. For an art form so reliant on applause, most of those who work in the theater only hear it as muffled noise from another room. Propping up a star’s halo, the behind-the-scenes folks hardly bask in a sliver of reflected light.

It takes a special kind of humility to devote yourself to being backstage for the creation of a play, to knowing from the outset that you will receive little of the credit. There is, of course, a certain safety, too, in being out of the line of fire. But we are a culture that more and more seems to define success as the aggregation of renown, as the cachet of a boldface name, as the catalyst for a gazillion clicks of a mouse and qualifying for a sizable personal entry on Wikipedia.

So toiling anonymously in a public profession such as the theater translates for me into something rather noble. You know from the outset that there will be no fanfare for you, that the satisfactions will on some level always be vicarious. The good of the whole is what matters. Absorbing this reality requires an acceptance of modest status — a true spirit of deference.

The second article Dreher linked to was immensely interesting to me–the hypothesis that creativity might be a slow neurological process. We also think of high achievement being related to speed of thought. Solve a complex problem quickly, ring your buzzer and beat the other guy. However, as one of the scientists quotes in the piece points out, speed is not generally seen as a component of creative work.

The results are surprising, given that high white-matter integrity is normally considered a good thing, says Paul Thompson at the University of California in Los Angeles. He acknowledges that speedy information transfer may not be vital for creative thought. “Sheer mental speed might be good for playing chess or doing a Rubik’s cube, but you don’t necessarily think of writing novels or creating art as being something that requires sheer mental speed,” he says.

After performing MRI scans on people whose creativity had already been tested, Dr. Rex Jung at the University of New Mexico found:

Jung found that the most creative people had lower white-matter integrity in a region connecting the prefrontal cortex to a deeper structure called the thalamus, compared with their less creative peers.

Jung suggests that slower communication between some areas may actually make people more creative. “This might allow for the linkage of more disparate ideas, more novelty, and more creativity,” he says.

Unfortunately, lower white-matter integrity is also associated with mental illness. “So the result also strengthens the link between creativity and mental illness. One of the triggers for Jung’s study was the finding that when white matter begins to break down in people with dementia, they often become more creative.”

I remember about a year ago I blogger was complaining that the depressive/mentally ill artist was a stereotype that needed to be broken. But if what Jung gains more evidence for what he has found thus far, it may be more of a physical reality than we would like.

Intelligence and creativity aren’t mutually exclusive though-

“Each appears to be controlled by white matter in a different region. So theoretically, there’s no reason why someone might not have high integrity in the cortex, producing intelligence, but low integrity between the cortex and deeper brain regions, leading to creative thinking. “They appear to function relatively independently,” he says.”

Which makes me realize I know less about the brain than I thought because I initially assumed the integrity would be generally uniform throughout. Though if I thought about it a bit longer, it does make sense. Overall, some things to ponder.

Leadership Training and Discussion Moves Forward

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If you have seen Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser on his Arts in Crisis tour or read any of his writings on the matter of arts leadership training, you will know that he feels not enough is being done to teach people about how to do the job well. On occasion, I have also opined that arts leaders don’t talk to each other enough about the challenges we face and the processes we employ in pursuit of our jobs and goals.

It seems like that is starting to change now. In addition to the Emerging Leadership Institute program Arts Presenters runs, they have decided to partner with Research Center for Leadership in Action (RCLA) at NYU on a program for mid-career arts professionals with an eye toward grooming them for senior leadership positions. The Leadership Development Institute is accepting applications right now in fact. The deadline is April 19. The pilot phase of the program will employ “two series of collaborative inquiry sessions, virtual webinars, online resources and one-day action-learning seminars.”

Over at Americans for the Arts’ ARTSblog some interesting perspectives on leadership in the arts are emerging from the various contributors. Just today there was a post by Joanna Chin listing all the general arguments for the value of the arts that she could think of: “Arts = Arts; Arts = Humanity; Arts = Health/Quality of Life; Arts = Civic Engagement and Social Change; Arts = Economic Vitality; Arts = Creativity/Innovation = Growth/Vitality; Arts = Cultural Tourism = Economic Vitality; Arts = Jobs & Industry; Arts = Shared Benefit.” She expands briefly on each of these areas and wonders if this is an exhaustive list. If you can think of others, visit the entry and contribute your thoughts.

Marc Vogl offered a clever analogy of “What a Seder Can Teach Us about Arts Leadership”

“Those in leadership positions especially carry the burden of executing the plan of record which, as many E.D.s will attest, means putting out the fire that’s blazing now or shifting the pots on the stove around so that none boils over today.

So, who is responsible for periodically stepping in and asking the elemental but critical questions?

Perhaps it should be those on top of the organizational structure – whether administratively or in governance positions at the board level – but frequently those are the people who must answer the questions.

In the Seder it’s the kids who sing out to the elders: why are we doing things the way we’re doing things?

And it is for everyone around the table to respond, and hopefully, to reflect for a moment on the history that informs that response, to consider the present circumstances and how times have changed, and maybe even to look ahead and determine what we can do going forward so that we don’t spend another year going through rote motions and taking important things (like freedom in the case of Passover, or making art that has meaning for those of us in this field) for granted.”

Shannon Daut who is Deputy Director at the Western States Arts Federation and has a broad perspective on how the arts are developing regionally and I would imagine nationally, talks about the lack of leadership opportunities for younger administrators because those on the executive level continue to circulate between the available positions.

“I recently had a conversation with WESTAF’s director, Anthony Radich, and asked him what his resume looked like when he was my age—35. He rattled off a list of ED positions at various arts organizations. I think his experience is pretty typical. Because the arts field was so young, experienced arts administrators were not available to fill open positions. They made it up as they went along and were entrusted with great organizational responsibilities at early stages in their careers.

For the most part, today’s emerging (and mid-career) administrators have not been able to benefit from an environment that would take risks on “unproven” job candidates. “

Finally, Letitia Fernandez Ivins, addresses the all important issue of balancing work and personal life in an industry where it has always been expected that one suffers for ones art. Her entry primarily deals with the impact of pregnancy on a career in the arts. However, the general topic is clearly an important one. There are many comments on the entry already. One woman expresses her relief upon learning so many other people are facing the same choices.

Actually, I shouldn’t say finally regarding Letitia’s post. There have been more than 20 entries on the subject of leadership since Monday. These are just the handful that resonated with me most today. I should mention that Americans for the Arts have their own Emerging Leader Network from which I assume the drew many of these contributions. I am pleased to see such great movement in leadership training and discussion happening right now. It wasn’t that long ago that I was mentioning the lack of such activity. I didn’t think this much progress would be made in a few short years.

Stuff You Can Use: Ticketing Software

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David Dombrosky, Executive Director at the Center for Arts Management and Technology posted a link to the results of a Ticketing Software Satisfaction Survey they conducted last year.

They broke down the results by small, medium, large and very large organizations as defined by budget. They looked at what software, services and features people were using at each level to serve their audiences. I will reiterate the report–the respondents were self-selected so the results should not be construed as representing the market share of each ticketing option.

I didn’t scrutinize the report much and what I was looking for was assuredly defined by my own criteria for a ticketing system. The thing I was interested to find as a low priority feature was barcode scanning. It makes sense that small organizations wouldn’t need it but even the very large organizations didn’t see it as a top feature. I wonder how many of those who have the ability to process bar codes actually use it.

I guess I am somewhat sensitive to the issue because our events are listed on a site that sells athletic tickets with the option of printing a pass a home. Occasionally someone asks us about that option. For us the cost is far too prohibitive and too few people order in advance to actually use the print at home option. Had we more seating capacity, it might make sense to scan the bar codes on the tickets to expedite the processing of all the at gate ticket buyers.

Even if you aren’t interested in reading about all this, the end of the report can be helpful if you are looking for new ticketing services. There are three pages of questions to ask and things to look for when evaluating ticket systems for your organization.

Reflections On Many Recent Arts Experiences

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I know that my season is starting to wind down when I actually have time to get out and see other people’s performances. We who work in the arts are frequently told that if we want to stay at the peak of our powers, we should always being seeing things. When you are in the middle of your season, you tend to think that you see lots of performances because you are watching a lot of different things.

The problem is, the frame of mind you are in when you watch your own show isn’t the same as when you watch someone else’s. You are thinking about arrangements that still need to be made. You are noticing things the ushers should be doing better and trying to commit that list to memory so you can attend to it during a break. You are generally less free and open to the experience. Some times you just need to go somewhere else and have the experience free of this baggage so you can progress in your own skills and abilities.

Two Fridays ago I went to see a show that contained two pieces from a work being developed to premiere on our stage this coming October. It was a nice time and I chatted with some potential donors. Granted, it wasn’t entirely free of associations with work, but not paying for any part of the production or reception certainly frees the mind of some concerns. A sentiment that one of my colleagues from another arts organization also expressed to me.

This past Friday I went to the First Friday art walk to watch excerpts for the Celebrity Project show that is opening this coming weekend. We were trying to drum up interest in the show but also gauge what did and didn’t work. I sidling up to eavesdrop on people talking about the pieces. Pretty much all our spies overheard comments on the same issues and a revamp is in the works on a couple sections.

Saturday I went to see a Fijian group that had been brought in by the East-West Center arts program as part of the celebration of their 50th Anniversary. Before the show we were told that what we were about to see was the real deal and not something that had been altered to be more palatable for tourists.

This became apparent when the group finished their first song and then went up stage and sat down in a semi-circular huddle and continued to sing–backs turned to the audience–for another five minutes. The audience seemed mostly bemused to be ignored by the performers for that period.

During this, I had a quick cascade of thoughts:

-Hmm, maybe something like this would constitute a new approach to performances.

-No, wait, this is the opposite of the current thinking. Not only is it framed in the proscenium, it moves away from interactivity and getting the audience more invested in the performance. In fact, it is actually more alienating.

-Hey, isn’t that sort of synchronous? They are performing on platforms being built for a show by the father of alienation, Berthold Brecht. Hmm, now that I think about it, someone has probably already staged a show that makes no concessions to the needs of the audience at all, ignoring and alienating them.

-Actually, this sort of activity is probably very interactive and communal in Fiji which is why they are gathered together in a circle.  Since it isn’t designed to appease tourists, we are probably just in the wrong setting to experience it in the correct manner.

Anyway, after about five minutes the men got up and started dancing and the show went on from there. Different groups would get up to dance while those that finished moved back to the circle.

The singing never stopped continuing through the transitions between dancing groups. There would be a momentary pause as they shifted between songs. But the pauses were so brief that when combined with the split second tableaux the dancers would freeze into, the audience was generally uncertain when to clap.

I began to understand why attendees of classical music get so irked by applause at the wrong times. Breaks between movements are about 20 times longer than the minuscule pauses the Fijians took to pose and continue the same dance. Yet someone had to leap in and start clapping. By the third time I was muttering under my breath for people to wait a couple more beats by which time it would be clear if it was the end of the piece or just a designated pose point.

I have to give the Fijians a lot of props for their stamina and breath control. They sang continuously for 90 minutes without amplification. The only time a person didn’t sing was when they were dancing energetically around the stage. But then they sat back down and started singing again never appearing winded by their recent exertion.

The final interesting artistic encounter came today. The lobby of my building has a gorgeous 104′ x 23′ fresco mural by Jean Charlot. It is one of the last pieces he did before he died. Today his son came by to show the piece a muralist from Barcelona. I am very proud of the mural and I want to know everything I can about it so I brought my lunch to the lobby to see if I could learn anything new from Charlot’s son. There were some new revelations. Included were some fairly obvious motifs staring me right in the face I hadn’t recognized.

What I really appreciated was how passionately and eloquently the muralist from Barcelona spoke (either that or the translator was good at embellishing). He spoke of murals being the most primitive form of art dating back to cave walls. He talked about murals being the precursor of movies. He spoke of how in days when literacy was less widespread, murals told stories with sequences of images. However, unlike movies in which the sequence of event is set down by someone else, with a mural you can create your own story by choosing which image you will view next.

It occurred to me later that this activity is already in practice with people creating mash ups of other people’s work. As processing speeds increase in our various electronic devices, perhaps it will become even more prevalent. The problem today is that the person who created the original can become angry if people re-mix their work and share it with others. With a mural, the experience is much more personal within your own head or limited to whatever group you can gather around you to listen as you point out how you have re-imagined the sequence of events.

Development Is Everyone’s Job Too

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The assistant theatre manager and I had a meeting with our development officer today. I haven’t had a lot of faith in the foundation people since I took this job but today’s meeting gave me cause for optimism.

In the past, my interactions with the foundation people have mostly consisted of them telling me not to do things. I wasn’t to try contacting people, except on a very limited basis or write appeal letters, but rather give them a list of our needs and depend on the phone bank for the annual appeal. In the last six years we have had five development officers and no consistency or follow through from one to another. I have hosted four receptions in cooperation with them where there was no ask for donations. That would be fine, but there was also no follow up with the invitees to help them develop a greater investment in the theatre.

Despite all the promises and plans that were made, not only am I no closer to the endowment they keep telling me they want us to develop, but my annual contributions have been flagging every year, even before the recession. So I pointed all this out, noting that this was the fifth time I have pretty much had this meeting and asked what would be different.

The development officer acknowledged the foundation hadn’t really done well by us and then proceeded to talk about how the focus of the donor cultivation would move from her to us. We would take more ownership of the process so that if she was hit by a car tomorrow, the effort would still move forward. We aren’t going to depend heavily on gala events and chasing corporate money. We are going to clearly define giving opportunities and the case for giving to the theatre. Then we are going to start cultivating people on an informal basis.

I was glad to hear this because I figure I am already ahead in the game. I started actively cultivating relationships with people about a year ago. I was talking to a person I had specifically targeted as a prospect just last Friday. After a number of years of discussion, I am finalizing the arrangements for the donation of new carpeting for the lobby and seating areas. I had also started sending out targeted solicitation letters on the theory people give to people they know, not anonymous phone banks representing institutions. I decided if there was a foundation person to take umbrage, there was a good chance they wouldn’t be here in a year to prevent me from doing it again anyway. Yes, it might be a cynical outlook, but it has doubled my donor base. (Admitted, not a hard thing to do at this point.)

Since I regularly echo the idea that marketing is everyone’s responsibility, I am certainly on board with the idea that development requires everyone’s investment as well. When the topic of creating a case for what makes us worthy of donations came up, it was quickly decided we needed to include the technical director in some of the encounters with potential donors. He has been with the theatre for over 30 years. He has a great institutional memory and is probably the best qualified to talk about what has made us special over the years. I took it as a positive sign that the foundation was ready to give up some control when everyone quickly saw the value of having the guy with sawdust in his mustache talk to potential donors.

My suspicion is that the impetus for ceding some control and involvement is a result of the economic downturn. With staffs being shrunk, it probably became clear that the foundation couldn’t sustain the level of engagement with donors they needed to with those who remained. (The “small staff” motif was frequently mentioned by the development officer.)

I don’t know if they will be promoting the same sort of dynamic with everyone in the system. I’ll be the first to admit, not everyone is suited to advocate on behalf of their program. There are situations that really are best to defer to the professionals. The chancellor knows I have been chafing under the restrictions imposed on us and may have had a hand in getting the reins loosened a little. It may have helped that the theatre staff and I worked together to gain the donation of the new carpeting and some lighting instruments independent of the foundation.

So we will see how things unfold. The assistant theatre manager is pretty energized. Partially I think, because he hasn’t sat through this same meeting multiple times before. I am obvious still a little cautious and skeptical about the whole thing. I didn’t lay all my cards on the table in terms of possibilities I have been pursuing and after this meeting, there is less of a need to do so until the time is right.

The Space Is The Thing

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So if you have been following my infrequent postings about the site specific work we are developing, The Celebrity Project, you know that I have reveled in the role of telling people to think big rather than to limit their vision and mused on the wisdom of having a set performance space rather than moving audiences around.

Now we are 10 day out from the performance and plans really need to bow to practicality over idealism. One of the biggest changes since last I posted on the subject in January is that we have really consolidated our performance spaces. Because we are getting rain more frequently now than we did even a month ago, we have moved performances to a more sheltered central area. Most of the show is still outside, but out of necessity, the audiences won’t move between performances spaces because there is less room to maneuver around.

We are still going to split the audience between different stages, but instead of the audience moving to a new stage, the actors will flip between them. There will be some activities they will witness in common in the area between them and a final piece in the theatre. It will certainly be great fun, but the change had us scrambling a little in the administration office.

Our original concept was to have the program book be a large fold out “map to the stars” that people would use to get from stage to stage (though mostly cued by ushers and performance guides). Now that people aren’t moving from stage to stage, the design has to be changed a little.

The other problem is that our press release played up on the star map concept promising people that they would get one but warning that there would be guards present to make sure they didn’t wander off in search of a star’s possessions to sell on Ebay. It was all sort of fun and tongue in cheek. Unfortunately, the release went out before anyone told me that part of the show had been scrapped. I made a slight retraction when I sent out a little update note letting people know they could attend the show without concern about the rain.

Because the action is now in a more confined space, albeit still outdoors, I had to ponder some of the same concerns about traffic flow and crowd control. In our tech meeting today, I asked that alterations be made in the staging of one piece to draw people away from a potential choke point rather than congregating there. I also asked that the cast members guiding people in pivoting to another performance area not wear masks. They can be a little disconcerting and we want to avoid people pausing as they approached the cast member while those behind moved forward to see what was happening.

Now that things are becoming finalized the assistant theatre manager and I will start attending some dress rehearsals to figure out our front of house procedures and evaluate any other problem areas. I will have to remember to get some pictures to post here before it is over.

Dance Baby, Dance

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While there has been increasing doubts raised about the benefits to intelligence and development from exposing children to Mozart and other classical music in the womb and as infants, a new study suggests that humans may be predisposed to dancing. In the experiments conducted, infants started moving spontaneously to the beat of different musical genres. (Beat rather than melody seemed to be most important.) The babies smiles more often when they were able to synchronize their movements with the music.

I guess the kids on American Bandstand instinctively knew what mattered when they declared a song had a great beat and they could dance to it.

This study just confirmed what I already suspected. Both my nephews jiggled and wiggled to music since before they could crawl and bounced and bopped around as soon as they could get to their feet. A friend’s son went to Chinese New Year celebration in February. While he was frightened by the Lion Dancers, he was apparently entranced by the dance itself because he kept watching YouTube videos. Then he would stand out on the porch and bounce up and down and simulate the drum beat with his voice. His father bought him a little lion costume and drum. Now whenever I am over, he grabs the costume and drum and does a dance for us. Actually, judging from the state of the poor costume, he dances more frequently than when I am around.

What I would really love is if someone does a study which finds out if kids who continue spontaneous dance type movements throughout their first five years end up with better coordination and lower body strength. Actually, I imagine there might be benefits to discerning spatial relationships and cognition as well that could be studied.

My ulterior motive is to motivate parents to no only have their kids listen to music, but also provide them freedom and encouragement to get up and move. I figure an environment that gives kids permission to even informally participate in another form of creative expression is good for the arts in the long run.

I’m Banging The Drum For You

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Last Friday, Kenny Endo’s agent told me that she had been contacted by a number of organizations that wanted to have him perform based entirely upon my entry about his performance.

I really appreciate the confidence you have shown in my recommendation of his skill and the overall quality of the show.

The agent also said the inquiries were for the specific performance I had with Kenny Endo and Kiyohiko Semba. I don’t blame you, of course. But apparently they hadn’t made any plans to get back together in the next year.

I took advantage of an email from Kenny’s wife today to include a pitch to get the band back together in my reply. No guarantees, but I figure the more people ask, the better a chance they will organize a tour in the next few years. In the meantime, as I said at the end of my entry, Kenny’s shows easily stand on their own and he is adept at collaborating with diverse performers.

Who’s Auditing The Auditors?

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Credit where it is due, Peter Hansen of NJPAC posted a link on the Performing Arts Administrator’s group on LinkedIn about the £2.3 million judgment entered against former London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) General Manager Cameron Poole for financially defrauding that organization.

Even though it was supposed to take 4 people to issue a check, Poole was able to take advantage of operational distractions to perform all the required functions himself, included forging countersignatures. The executive director, Tim Walker, admits some negligence on his part, but is amazed that not only did he and the board not catch it, but the auditors from Deloitte missed it on three separate audits. LPO is currently pursuing a negligence suit against Deloitte.

It raises the question of whether you can really be certain you have proper controls and diligence in place. Deloitte missed, or at least didn’t comment on something that became apparent to Poole’s successor in a couple weeks. Four of the biggest accounting firms in the country never made a sound about the suspicious nature manner in which Bernie Madoff financial reports were generated. (An entirely separate issue from the strangely superior returns his fund was generating.)

One would think that after Arthur Andersen’s accounting arm lost credibility following the Enron scandal, reducing the Big Five accounting firms to the Big Four, greater attention would be paid. But I think people may attribute more competence and honesty to organizations of great size and prestige than is warranted. Even on the non-profit front, I was aware of a number of scandals in the United Way, but I had no idea that there has been large scale mismanagement and embezzlement at four or five locations and alleged smaller scale fraud at over 20 others. One of the Spanish members of the LinkedIn group cited a case similar to LPO’s at Barcelona’s Orfeó-Palau de la Musica Catalana where the general manager embezzled millions of euros (some stories I have seen claim 23 million in over 30 years).

The piece I linked to above about the United Way claims “The nonprofit world has accepted that multi-million embezzlements are a cost of doing business.” As much as I am dismayed by the idea that making great efforts at due diligence may not guarantee security, I would hope no one hiring me would do so assuming there was a good chance I will make off with some of the money.

There is a price for lack of scrutiny when people begin to lose faith in you. About a year ago, there was a piece in the Washington Post about 21 Washington DC area non-profits withdrawing from the local United Way, which had been the subject of one of the larger scandals, in favor of another emerging charitable organization.

I am encouraged by the news that it didn’t take long for Poole’s replacement at the LPO to notice something was strange. It means that misappropriations can be spotted with a little healthy scrutiny that makes no personal judgments about the individual holding the books when you ask to see the raw data rather than the summary reports.

Still, most of us don’t have three weeks to pour over ledgers sorting through it all. So the real question becomes, how do you know you can trust your auditor to be meticulous enough on your behalf? I am sure I could find editorials about how the big firms are so big and so motivated to process as many audits in a year as possible, companies aren’t getting the competence and effort they deserve. I am also pretty sure that laziness and incompetence afflicts the small operations as well as the big ones.

There was an argument back during the Enron scandal that rotating accounting firms would help avoid the conflicts of interest that develop over a long term relationship and cause auditors to look the other way. That was countered by the idea that is wastes a lot of time and money when you have to get a new auditor up to speed about the way your business runs.

I am pretty much on the side of rotating. I don’t think most arts organizations and non-profits in general are so big that it will take too much longer to explain their operations to a new group every few years. That way you avoid any conflicts of interest and lack of rigor.

Leadership By Eyebrow

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Apropos my Inside the Arts co-denizen Bill Eddins post about what it takes to be a good conductor, is the TED video with Itay Talgam talking about the conducting styles of six great 20th century conductors.

Talgam approaches the leadership styles of different conductors from the apparently stifling style of Riccardo Muti to the comparatively free flowing style of Herbert von Karajan. According to Talgam, Muti was asked to resign from his position at La Scala because he wasn’t allowing the musicians any room in the performance. Karajan was apparently quoted as saying the worst thing he can do is give his musicians specific direction. Both approaches put a lot of pressure on the musicians to perform well.

Talgam contrasts that with the way Carlos Kleiber (in some very humorous clips) and Leonard Bernstein (conducting only with his head) balance exerting control with loosing the reins and giving the musicians their head, providing only minimal feedback.

Obviously, there is a lesson in all this about balance in organizational leadership. It would be the great arts administrator indeed who could run his/her organization just by wiggling their eyebrows like Bernstein.

The Developing Audience Member

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Over the last year, I have written about masterful performances that really affected me: the taiko performance a week ago, the kathak/tap dancing of Chitresh Das and Jason Samuels Smith last year and Bela Fleck, Zakir Hussain and Edgar Meyer’s performance last September. There have been a couple times I have brought up the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to master your craft.

It occurred to me recently that if it takes that long to become a master, it likely takes a fairly significant fraction of that to develop appreciation and discernment of arts and culture. This isn’t something that really gets discussed enough I think. In fact, with all the studies that have done been, I don’t think anyone has ever studied how long it takes for a person to develop an understanding and appreciation for art. I am sure the subject has been studied tangentially in relation to learning and meta-cognition. But has anyone sat down and approached it head on how much time people need to process and internalize experiences?

What I am really getting at is the oft espoused idea that once someone is exposed to some form of art, they will fall in love with it forever after. The fact is, once may not be enough and it is pretty unfair and unrealistic that we expect it to be. We give performers hundreds and thousands of hours to gain proficiency and yet we expect our audiences to absorb just how sublime our work is after just two hours.

Yes, we have a need to have them fall in love quickly because the opportunities for exposure are so few and audience members becoming fewer. We are doing a disservice to our audiences to expect so much from them. We want them to realize what a great experience we are offering, but don’t really know how to guide them to that place and how long it might take.

If you are involved in the arts, then your discernment and appreciation were probably developing roughly in parallel with your mastery of whatever you were pursuing. Even if you stopped, your critical skills may have continued to improve as you processed new experiences through the filter of your knowledge. You likely did not notice it happening and so assume you always had pretty good aesthetic sense. But I bet you can look back and grimace at all the crap you used to like and produce–some of it was probably pretentious crap too. (Of course, it was still better by half than the stuff kids are listening to today!)

So the more I think about it, the more I believe that becoming the audience member we all want is as gradual a process as becoming the master we want them to applaud. As I referenced producing awful stuff when we were younger in the preceding paragraph, I was envisioning my dismal acting skills in college vs. what, in my foolishness, I perceived my acting skills to be. One of the things I clearly remember from that time was a friend telling me he was really getting into Indian raga. I immediately laughed because it seemed absurd to me that anyone who wasn’t of that culture would listen to raga, (I think that was my classic rock phase), and I suspected he was saying that to get women. But he said he was serious.

But today I have cited the excellence of three events, two of which were heavily infused with Indian music and instruments and the last that included taiko drumming. At the time I was making fun of my friend about ragas, I had no concept taiko existed. Now I am encouraging people to see these performances and it is difficult to imagine people not enjoying them.

So while we don’t know how long it make take to bring someone into a receptive outlook about the arts, what we do know is that Generation X is not experiencing the upward bump in classical music attendance as they move into their 40s as previous generations did. Alex Ross doesn’t think it is too late to reverse that trend by increasing exposure through a lot of hard work.

I will openly admit that at this juncture, my thoughts on this matter are completely at a preliminary stage. This idea is only a day and a half old in my mind. But as I think about it, it seems to me that people don’t necessarily need direct experience in a situation to gradually develop the ability to confidently approach it. You may not necessarily need constant exposure to classical music and sculpture to acquire critical evaluation skills in these areas.

This winter I went to a number of contemporary art museums and I think that I gained the confidence to do so from having built and lit sets for the theatre. Even though I haven’t done so for awhile, all the times I have watched a show and evaluated these elements since then has improved my ability to recognize how certain effects have been accomplished. That in turn gave me the confidence to walk into an art museum and understand a great deal about what I was looking at. Granted, it might not be what the artist and the critics intend me to understand and perhaps that will come later. For now I am deriving enjoyment when I visit.

I had a similar experience with sumo wrestling. I really don’t watch a lot of sports at all. I have seen a little baseball, football, hockey, soccer, wrestling and martial arts in my time. I went to a sumo event a few years ago knowing nothing and was soon enjoying myself. I think the little bits of experience from these other sports provided a context for the sumo bouts. Though admittedly, sumo is pretty easy to understand. None of my past sports experience is likely to be much help with cricket.

I will concede there is a great theatricality in the sumo ritual and my experience in that area probably helped as well. I have tried to watch bouts online since and find those videos which edit out a lot of the ritual unsatisfying.

Anyway, my point is– the skills/tools/abilities needed to appreciate an arts experience isn’t necessarily cultivated solely by exposure to the arts. While one exposure may not be enough, devising a way to nail people’s feet to the floor en masse so they can’t leave won’t be necessary either. There are myriad situations which are improving people’s capacity to understand and enjoy occurring all the time. The trick is to identify these situations and make people aware of the connections. I felt confident walking into a museum because I knew my comprehension of the use of light and shadow in a performance could translate to visual art because I was aware of their use in that discipline.

Goin’ Mobile With The Orchestra

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I was driving home a week ago when I heard an interview on the radio with a couple talking about founding the Orchestra of the Hawaiian Islands. (MP3 download) Now given that the Honolulu Symphony has just declared bankruptcy after years of financial struggles, this elicited a “say what?” moment for me.

It turns out this is a program of American Music Festivals, a once Chicago and now I guess Hawaii based organization. The organization was founded in Chicago and created project based ensembles to perform cultural exchange concerts in Russia and Eastern Europe in addition to the Chicago area. Apparently this was accomplished by contracting freelance Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians.

American Music Festivals is run by a husband and wife, artistic director and executive director team. When she was offered a job at a school on the Big Island of Hawaii, they moved their operations to that state. Their intention is to utilize Honolulu Symphony musicians to increase the size of their projects from their current 12 piece string ensemble up to full symphony size.

They aren’t looking to replace the Honolulu Symphony at all. If the symphony is revitalized, they envision themselves complementing its outreach efforts. Much of their interest is in local and international outreach. Their plan is to institute cultural exchanges with Japan and perhaps other Asian countries. They hope to bring Hawaiian music to Japan and add the music to their existing exchanges in Eastern Europe.

What interested me about the interview was the concept of how technology, transportation and communications allows endeavors like this to be so mobile. Where they live seems to have little bearing on whether they can accomplish their goals.

Of course, part of this is due to the fact their organization has no fixed orchestra. When asked whether he might one day want to establish an orchestra with regular salaried members, Artistic Director Philip Simmons said, “Why would I want to do that though? Why would I want to create all those problems for myself?” The organization focuses on project driven events which provides them with the flexibility to do different things with a variety of groups locally and worldwide.

Simmons suggests that maybe the old models and formulas for a concert experience aren’t working anymore. He doesn’t say his structure is necessarily the new way, but offers it as an alternative.

Given that the Honolulu Symphony has talked about operating with a much reduced ensemble, perhaps a collaboration between them and the Orchestra of the Hawaiian Islands (OHI) can bring enough funding together to assemble the numbers the Honolulu Symphony had performing for them in the past. They wouldn’t necessarily be competing for the same funding pot. The OHI is serving an area of the state the Honolulu Symphony once did but really hasn’t had the funding to do so in recent past. OHI may be able to gain funding from people interested in supporting local performances.

The History of (Not) Clapping

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The Guardian reprinted an excerpt from a talk Alex Ross recently gave at the Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS). Full text can be found on the RPS website. The subject of Ross’ talk was the history of applause suppression in classical music.

There are some amusing anecdotes like Wagner being hissed at for applauding his Parsifal. But for the most part it is a tale of the gradual socialization of people away from their impulses and how this conflicted state manifests. Ross notes the very week an interview appeared in which Arthur Rubenstein said “It’s barbaric to tell people it is uncivilized to applaud something you like,” Rubenstein hushed an audience who started clapping after the first movements of Mozart concertos.

The history of how these attitudes developed over time is actually really interesting. I was intrigued by Ross’ citation of how “the entry for “applause” in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910-11) observes: “The reverential spirit which abolished applause in church has tended to spread to the theatre and the concert-room, largely under the influence of the quasi-religious atmosphere of the Wagner performances at Baireuth.” Perhaps this is another reason religion and theater have so many similarities.

Ultimately, I would prefer to be in that place one often is when reading history where you wonder at the strange practices of your forebearers, rather than wondering how the practice has endured so long. Though Ross says there has always been resistance:

“In 1927, a letter to the New York Times mocked the practice: “See, I not only have my big orchestra well in hand, but I can also, by a mere gesture, control a manifold larger audience!” The composer and commentator Daniel Gregory Mason sardonically wrote, “After the Funeral March of the Eroica, someone suggested, Mr. Stokowski might at least have pressed a button to inform the audience by (noiseless) illuminated sign: ‘You may now cross the other leg.’”

Of course, Ross acknowledges that absence of sound is as important to some musical compositions as the music is. He notes Beethoven’s Ninth needs silence prior to beginning to create the required atmosphere. But early on in his speech, he submits that not all compositions have the same needs. Some works hint at and even demand applause of the audience.

“Indeed, in my view, the chief limitation of the classical ritual is its prescriptive quality; it supposes that all great works of music are essentially the same, that they can be placed upon a pedestal of a certain shape. What I would like to see is a more flexible approach, so that the nature of the work itself dictates the nature of the presentation—and, by extension, the nature of the response.”

Ross offers many suggestions about what is to be done, but it is his last paragraph that really caught me (my emphasis)

“I dream of the concert hall becoming a more vital, unpredictable environment, fully in thrall to the composers who mapped our musical landscapes and the performers who populate them. The great paradox of modern musical life, whether in the classical or pop arena, is that we both worship our idols and, in a way, straitjacket them. We consign them to cruelly specific roles: a certain rock band is expected to loosen us up, a certain composer is expected to ennoble us. Ah, Mozart; yeah, rock and roll. But what if a rock band wants to make us think and a composer wants to make us dance? Music should be a place where our expectations are shattered.”

When I read this last week, I intended to make this my Monday entry. However, upon seeing the Kenny Endo performance I described yesterday, I knew I had to talk about that experience as a prelude to this entry.

I thought about all the 10,000+ hours of practice rule that Endo and Semba had adhered to in order to attain their current level of mastery. I was thinking that Semba’s kabuki debut at 10 years old really wasn’t too much different than the route many symphony musicians have taken. They start working on their instruments as children and have thousands of hours under their belts by adulthood. And their reward is being straitjacketed into the role that Ross describes here.

Perhaps it is just a stereotype of Japanese culture that I am operating under. But I imagine Semba’s father might have been very concerned about his son possibly abandoning or at least not living up to the quality expected of the family that founded a famous music school when he began to seriously pursue playing Western music. Obviously, the son earned his master’s license, (Semba is his name achieved upon mastery, his real name is Takahashi), but part of me wonders if the father was always as accepting as the son says he was. Regardless, he is having a ball exhibiting his mastery in both classical and contemporary musical forms on two different sets of percussion instruments.

I have, however, been around enough to know that musicians are bound by expectations as strong as those I am, perhaps incorrectly, attributing to Semba’s family. I have heard stories of guys who would play with an orchestra then walk out the back door and do a club gig. How many bass students today are advised to spend the summers playing jazz or blues so that they build a deep base of alternative techniques and how to improvise over the years? And how many of them are told if they don’t practice or attend a summer conservatory they will never be good enough to get a spot playing music that even Presidents of the United States need to have clapping coaches to attend?

My experience this weekend got me thinking. If we are going to start kids on the 10,000 step path to mastery, they should be able to wow people in the broadest spectrum of music possible. Part of this is selfish on my part because I really think a lot of the pop music today stinks to high heaven. There are only so many orchestra slots available and I have read that the margin of difference between the person who gets in and those that don’t is pretty slim. I figure if those that don’t make it can play other genres of music, they will supplant a good portion of the flash in the pan acts we got these days and even the music for the lowest common denominator won’t be half bad.

Yes, Quality Will Definitely Out

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More and more the whole idea that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill seems to be bearing out. Last year I wrote about the astonishing excellence exhibited by Chitresh Das and Jason Samuels Smith in the India Jazz Suite. (And I guess I did a good job because that entry is now part of their official promotional package.)

I had a similar experience this past weekend with a taiko drumming show we were presenting. Except this time, I really had not anticipated the quality of the performance and was completely taken aback by the experience.

Kenny Endo was the first non-Japanese national to be granted a natori, or master’s name and license in classical Japanese drumming. A visit that was intended to be about a year turned into a 10 year pursuit of master status. In about a month he will be having his 35th anniversary as a taiko performer.

He was performing a retrospective of his masterworks elsewhere in the state under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Arts’ American Masterpieces initiative. Since a lot of effort was going into bringing this event together, I was asked if we wanted to present it as well. We have been trying to arrange for Kenny to perform for awhile but could never find the right time. I was pleased then that we did have an opening for an event in which his infrequently seen works would be performed.

Kenny Endo is really a very influential person in the taiko in the U.S. and well regarded internationally. When I was searching YouTube for video of his work, I often came across people who were performing his compositions. What I didn’t know was much about the other people he was bringing with him. His NYC based bamboo flautist, Kaoru Watanabe, I had seen in many videos with him, but that was about it. The drummer he was bringing over from Japan, Kiyohiko Semba and his violinist wife were a complete mystery to me.

I guess I should have gotten a clue from the fact Kenny continually referred to Semba as if he were a partner in the show that he was something special.

Let me take a little detour to talk about the interesting symmetry between Endo and Semba. Endo grew up always interested in percussion and studied classical drumming and jazz-fusion traps before becoming enamored of taiko and ending up in Japan. Semba came from a family that founded a famous school of Japanese music. He started studying tsuzumi and taiko drumming at age three and made his kabuki stage debut at 10. In high school, he became entranced by bossa nova rhythms and began studying western drums. He noted in an interview that given his family’s strong traditions, he had to balance his practice of western music with familial respect and the study of classical Japanese music.

So we were doing this show with a Japanese-American playing taiko drums and a Japanese national playing a Western drum kit. As you might imagine, the show wasn’t entirely comprised traditional taiko compositions. There were percussion influences from all around the world including Brazilian and Hawaiian, woven in with classical and contemporary Japanese.

Let me tell you, Semba was incredible. You have this little quiet unassuming guy walking around and you have no clue what genius lurks beneath. I employ no hyperbole when I say a lot of rock and roll drummers are lucky he isn’t auditioning for rock bands because he would leave them in the dust. That might be embarrassing because Semba is probably in his late 60s or early 70s. For a time there I forgot I wasn’t watching a rock show because he was going full throttle so much of the time.

He also had an impish sense of humor. The second part of Endo’s “Symmetrical Soundscapes” has two drummers center stage improvising on a set of drums. There is video of it on YouTube—except they don’t include Semba and he brings an entirely new flavor to the work. Semba and Endo moved down to the set that had been wheeled out center stage and Semba suddenly reclines on the floor stage right and begins matching Endo’s patterns on a hand held drum. He gets up and moves center stage and they play on the set—but then Semba grabs the frame supporting the drums and starts moving around the stage forcing Endo to chase after him. They then engage in pulling and pushing the drum set toward and away from each other, spinning it back and forth, until Semba finally pushes it off stage.

Semba moves back across the stage bent over wearily tapping out some half hearted rhythms on the floor and you are thinking this guy must have worn himself out. Then he springs up on the drum riser and just starts going at it all over again.

And you realize all that playfulness wasn’t a lot of spectacle to spice up an uninteresting show or to divert attention from a lack of talent, but rather proof of Endo and Semba’s skill to go through an unrehearsed bit, (that didn’t happen in rehearsals), without missing a literal beat. As I said last year when I talked about the India Jazz Suites, it was an exhibition of joyful exuberance by two masters who took great pleasure in their mutual friendship.

There are a lot of people out there who are seeking the quick path to fame and many who make a lot of money at it. Endo and Semba may not be as financially successful, but the gulf between their ability and that of those who haven’t pursued mastery is quickly apparent.

With all this talk of the principals, I am not doing justice to the other performers like Semba’s wife, Kaori Takahashi, who is really a excellent violinist and shares a bit of her husband’s whimsical nature. And Kaoru Watanabe, who is a superb bamboo flautist himself. Watanabe actually set out on the long road to mastery and apprenticed with the drumming group Kodo, for the traditionally arduous apprentice experience so he is no slouch on the drums either. I spoke with him after the performance and he commented that he usually injects a bit of humor into his shows, but as with many things, Semba eclipses him.

It is really a pity that more venues didn’t get a chance to take advantage of this collaboration. But with that in mind, since the group has so recently practiced and Kenny said he hoped it wouldn’t be too many more years before he got to perform the works again, I am making a rare appeal for people to contact them and book the performance. You won’t be disappointed with the quality of the show, I assure you. If you are looking for some outreach/educational services, Kenny is really top notch at these things. He also has a lot of experience integrating other performance groups into his concerts (or himself into theirs, as the case may be.)

Calling All Men

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I came across a pretty interesting piece on the Chronicle of Higher Education about motivating men to volunteer. If you are having difficulty getting men to volunteer or want to do a better job of inspiring men in their work, you may want to take a look at this.

As you might imagine from the source, the article is about motivating college men to volunteer more frequently and is a result of a $600,000 grant to study the issue on 14 campuses. However, one of scholars quoted near the end of the piece suggests, as with so many things, that the root behaviors and attitudes about involving oneself in service learning activities were developed as young boys. I am sure there are similarities for the way men react to a call for aid in post-collegiate life too.

Among the tactics the different participants identified as useful were enlisting peer leaders to promote opportunities and have people extend personal invitations. On the whole, they found that male students were externally motivated and would become involved when it was a requirement or a project of a group with which they were associated.

Language use also appeared important. The article notes that when an instructor shifted to more action oriented language- “‘Social Justice: A Service-Based Exploration” to “Working Toward Social Justice.”

‘She saw a pretty spontaneous increase in the number of men enrolled,’ Mr. Chesbrough said. ‘That plays to gender stereotypes, but those words were more likely to catch men’s attention.'”

This piece is too short to be making decisions that will reshape your volunteer recruitment and training. The book talking about the study is due out this summer if you really feel you need to make an effort to involve more men in your organization. There are also a few other books on the subject.

My only caveat is to be skeptical about some of the generalizations about gender you may come across. I have seen enough debunkings of methodology on similar studies to have a cautious approach. I don’t deny people are motivated to volunteer for different reasons. In my experience there just isn’t any straightforward consistency in them.

Just the same, I have never really thought that we might be attracting or losing male volunteers based on the way we structured the appeal and volunteering experience so the concept is something to consider.

Arts Administrator Residencies-Is There A Need?

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I am not quite sure what drew my eye to it but Fractured Atlas did an interview with the founders of the Philadelphia Art Hotel this January. I don’t know why, but the project just looks and sounds a like a cool idea.

Personally, if I were a visual artist, I would probably tend toward the residencies in rural settings which is where a lot of them are located. Ready access to the Philadelphia art scene is not to be undervalued though.

I would probably sell my children into slavery to participate in the Arts/Industry program at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

It is probably fortunate then that I am not a visual artist. And I don’t have kids either. That is probably better since they have a performing arts program and I would still love to work there for the washrooms alone!

I don’t really talk about artist residencies too much. Perhaps because there aren’t too many for arts administrators. If you check the residency search tool at the Alliance of Artistic Communities website, administration is not even a search option. The only place I am aware of that offers one is The Studios of Key West which I wrote about 18 months ago.

I start to think that people like Michael Kaiser are correct when he talks about how few training opportunities there are to make people good arts administrators. There aren’t many opportunities for them to take a retreat and do research. Though to be fair, residencies for arts managers isn’t really part of the ethos. Arts administrators don’t get granted long periods of time to hone their skills. I don’t know if there is a market for offering residencies to them. How many administrators would ask for the opportunity? Most would say they don’t have the time. Kaiser talks about starting his day at 4 am which pretty much reflects the trend for many arts administrators.

One might say the Kennedy Center’s Art Management Fellowships are a sort of residency for arts managers. It combines practical work experience around the Kennedy Center with classes on relevant topics. And I believe they provide a $20,000 stipend to support yourself which is really pretty decent compared to what I was paid to intern. Though since the fellowships are for mid-career administrators,they would be bringing much more to the table than an intern would.

In any case, I would imagine the days there are just as long and involved as the position the arts manager left to become a fellow. That doesn’t give a lot of time for reflection and thinking about what the future of the arts might be and how one can restructure their organization to move forward to acknowledge these changes.

This summer I waswoolgathering a little about taking advantage of low real estate prices in Detroit to help grow an arts community there. I wonder if I was being too narrow in my vision and should have been thinking of including opportunities for arts managers to cultivate their skills too since there are so few opportunities.

Green Papers-Not What I Thought They Were About

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Due to the imminent failure of my refrigerator’s compressor, I don’t have as much time to devote to the old blog as I had hoped.

With that in mind, I wanted to direct people’s attention to Americans for the Arts’ efforts at creating a conversation around green papers on topics of importance in the arts. Given the whole push for environmentally friendly activities, I initially thought a green paper was essentially an attempt to issue a white paper on good conservation practices.

It turns out, a green paper is actually a policy document similar to a white paper, only less binding. Who knew? I mean, there are ribbons of every color for every cause, I thought this was a similar attempt.

In any case, Americans for the Arts’ are making a big effort to have substantive conversations on many topics across the next year. In their definition:

“Green Papers are short, easy to read, visions of the future meant to inspire a nationwide dialogue on the future of the arts. As a way to celebrate the successes of the past 50 years in the arts field, Americans for the Arts has collected Green Papers from a variety of national arts service organizations and peer groups representing different perspectives and disciplines.”

Currently their topics include:

The Future of…

* Art Therapy
* Artists’ and Arts Organizations’ Preparedness and Emergency Response
* Artists’ Residency Programs
* Arts and Disability
* Arts Education
* Arts in Healthcare
* Arts Learning for Children/Youth
* Community Arts Education
* Cultural Democracy
* Dance Education
* Leadership for the Arts
* Jazz
* Preservation
* Private Sector Support for the Arts
* Public Art
* Public Voice in Arts Advocacy
* State Arts Agencies
* Strings
* Symphony Music
* Digital Infrastructure for the Creative Economy
* Theatre
* Urban Municipal Arts Agencies

They want people to get involved and contribute to the conversation. I wonder if they also need people to lead the conversations. You can’t tell from the list here, but there are no links to pages for Art Therapy, Arts and Disability, Jazz, State Arts Agencies, Symphony Music and Theatre. I don’t see a call for leaders, though I certainly may have missed it. Most of the Green Papers were rolled out on February 16, perhaps the leaders for the unactivated sections weren’t immediately available to discuss those areas.

I also am curious to know why there is someone leading Strings but not Symphony Music and why there is a Dance Education category, but no Dance. Guess I have to stick around, read and ask these questions.

Oh yeah, and where is the paper on environmental sustainability in the arts! 😉

Info You Can Use: Employee or Independent Contractor

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As usual, the folks at the Non-Profit Law Blog provide some useful links. I will quickly point out a short piece about the Senate has recently passing a jobs bill that will provide incentives to hire and keep employees.

The measure would exempt private employers, including nonprofit groups, from paying their share of Social Security taxes for employees they hire through the end of 2010. The new hires must have been out of work for at least 60 days.

They would get an additional $1,000 bonus if they kept the employee on the payroll for a full year

I had heard about this a few weeks ago, but it never occurred to me that this would be a real boon for the non-profit world where a little savings can go a long way. I wish I could remember where I heard it, but I was listening to a radio show where one of the panelists said he wished the money going to public works was directed to non-profits because you could create hundreds of non-profit jobs for every construction job created.

The main of what I wanted to discuss is examining the employment status of people who work for your organization. According to Jessica R. Lubar, a lawyer at Venable LLP, the IRS is undertaking a study of employment tax compliance. They will be focusing on three areas: worker classification, fringe benefits and officer compensation.

What I wanted to point out specifically was the issue of worker classification. I know of a number of organizations that call those who work for them independent contractors so that they don’t have to attend to any of the tax withholding details. However, if the IRS doesn’t call them the same thing you do, there could be a lot of trouble.

“A worker is considered an employee if the employer exercises the requisite amount of control over the employee under common-law principles. Over the years, the courts and the IRS have articulated certain factors that are considered in making that determination. The IRS organized the factors that are considered into three categories: (1) Behavioral Control – whether the business has a right to direct and control how the worker does the task for which the worker is hired; (2) Financial Control – whether the business has a right to control the business aspects of the worker’s job; and (3) Type of Relationship.”

If you have made a mistake in classifying an employee as an independent contractor, there is an opportunity to rectify that situation and obtain relief from the penalties of that mistake. Lubar outlines these in the entry. You would obviously want to consult a lawyer because I am already confused by the first of the three requisite criteria–not treating a person like an employee. That seems to me to imply you have been treating the person like an independent contractor which means you are in the clear.

Perhaps the distinction is in whether you contractually had the right to behavioral and financial control but never enforced it thereby treating someone as if they were an independent contractor when technically they were not.

Guess that is what the lawyers get paid to tell us.

Trash Talkin’ About The Arts

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First it was Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art wagering paintings on the outcome of the Super Bowl. Now I hear Dallas and Ft. Worth are talking smack about which of them has better cultural assets.

Please people, art is only demeaned by using it as a prop in a bet or a gauge of greatness. Oh. Well, actually I guess that is where a great deal of it obtains its value from.

I think a lot of us would be pleased to have our communities talking about how much better the arts and culture are here than in the next place over. There are sports rivalries from high school to professional levels and the fear/pride of someone else getting there first got us to the moon. Without evoking the old “if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we…” trope, cultural rivalries may be something to inspire locally.

You wouldn’t want to compare yourself to New York City, because as evidenced by the end of the Dallas-Ft. Worth piece, you can’t compete with them for culture or condescension. But it could be mutually beneficial to get into a friendly rivalry with a similar municipality/county/town across the state or across state lines. Something that drives both locations to make progress against the other–but also celebrate the other’s successes, perhaps begrudgingly.

In the best of worlds, both locations might advocate for funding for the other, writing letters on their behalf. Because of course, the other guys may be more uncouth, but they are still a sight better than places X, Y and Z. If they were distant enough from each other not to overlap their audiences, some of the organizations could block book the same artists and then quiz the artists about whose theatre was nicer, whose audiences were more enthusiastic, etc. Done good naturedly, it could make artists excited to visit the other location. If the story about Philadelphia area theatres sharing the same production is any indication of the future, attempts at oneupmanship may just add to the fun.

My technical director does a version of this with the technical director at a partner organization. They send the company members to do strange things to the other one. He even has me holding up groups’ departures until he can instruct them in proper execution.

Everybody wins if both communities invest themselves in the rivalry. In addition to getting people excited about what might be coming and how they might top the other guys at their own game, it also gets people looking around for something of value to boast about in their community. Soon you get around to boasting about the quilts in all the bed and breakfasts having been created by a local artist whose quilts appeared in a show at the Smithsonian. Then you start to realize just how great it is to live where you do and how many extraordinarily talented people you never knew you had has neighbors.

Turning Waves Of Crisis Into Minor Ripples

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You ever tried to get a large group of performers to the airport to catch their flight in the face of an impending tsunami?

Well, I have.

It is actually not as bad as you might think. Given the alternatives of a hurricane, earthquake or volcanic eruption, with the opportunity that either of the latter two will spawn a tsunami about which you will get at most 15 minutes warning, a half day’s notice is a luxury. Which is what I told the performer who remarked how calm I was in the face of it all.

It helped that the departure and arrival airports were both still open and the streets between the hotel and airport were virtually abandoned. Really the only complication we had was discovering the rental car return was directly under the civil defense siren when it blared its hourly warning.

I know I have mentioned it before, but one of the key characteristics of good management is staying cool in the face of adversity. This is especially valuable in the performing arts where you are not just providing a good example for your employees, but also creating a calm environment for artists to perform in. One of the principles a former supervisor ingrained in me was to try to make a traveling artist as comfortable as possible. His philosophy was that while our facility wasn’t home, we might be stop 15 in a 25 city tour and could contribute to getting the best performance of the person by reducing as much anxiety possible and providing the most hospitality we could.

Easy to say, tough to do though.

By the time I started working there, I already pretty much understood this to be the case. However, there was a time I wasn’t as empathetic. Between growing up in an environment that emphasized self-sufficiency and working in a few environments that were not terribly sympathetic to the needs of the regular employees, much less the performers, there was an incident I am somewhat embarrassed about that sticks out in my memory.

I was working for an organization that actually was very sympathetic and attentive to the needs of everyone working for them. You were expected to work hard, but an effort was made to find some equitable time off in return. Not being used to this, I was needlessly always waiting for the other shoe to drop and was prepared to defend myself when it came.

Not a very good outlook to have when one’s duties include company management. One of the actors twisted her ankle so I drove her to the doctor. It turned out she needed to go back for a follow up at some point and wanted me to drive her again. At the time, we were very busy and I told her I didn’t that we could drive her again later in the day.

This may sound innocuous to read and it really wasn’t a terrible or nasty thing to say. After all this build up, you may have been expecting something a little more horrific.

However… What I was thinking wasn’t so nice. I pretty much figured she was being a prima donna and like most actors was over dramatizing the whole situation into something just short of requiring amputation. I thought she needed to calm down and take a reality check. My job would have been so much easier if I didn’t have to deal with the actors.

Of course, I was talking as if I was being terribly set upon in the first place so I guess there was a little acting going on both sides. She proved to be the better actor because I got in trouble for my performance when she went to the managing director.

What I later realized I failed to understand was how distressing it is for performers to have any part of their instrument damaged. If you are not fully able to provide what you were hired to do for any significant length of time, you face the prospect of your career coming to an end. We hear about performers insuring the body parts which provide their iconic status and wonder at it all. But I would bet more people would do it if it were financially viable. This woman was at the point in her life when she wasn’t healing as quickly as she once did and this injury was likely a reminder of the precarious position she inhabited.

So now I work to anticipate any potential sources of anxiety and approach similar situations a little more seriously. Which is not to say I still don’t occasionally inwardly roll my eyes at some of the situations I run into. But as with many things, forewarned is forearmed, making real crises easier to handle.

Though it is also gratifying not to have the crisis be as great as predicted.

Who Will Fight For It?

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Well my post on Tuesday on the changes in wireless microphone rules garnered the most hits in one day that I have ever received. I am actually not sure exactly where all the visitors heard about the entry. The old tracking software isn’t giving me the detailed clues I thought it would. Anyhow, if you are a returning visitor, no matter why or what the source, welcome.

Earlier this month, the Clyde Fitch report linked to my entry on the continued marginalization of arts education in the class room asking, “but who will fight for it?”

That question has been echoing in my mind for the two weeks since. The reverberations reinforced by incidents like this story highlighted by Richard Kessler over at Dewey21C on the practice of schools dropping certified arts teachers in favor of outsourcing the task to actors. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for actors getting paid to ply their craft. There is just no mystery about the long term implications of accepting ever decreasing arts exposure and experiences in education.

The other situation that has kept the question of who will fight for arts education going through my mind is that my state now has the fewest instructional days in the country due to budget cuts that furlough teachers 17 days out of the year. Last week we had 200+ students drop out of a free performance at the last minute because the furlough days had put them so far behind, they couldn’t afford the time for a field trip. For most of these students there wasn’t even the factor of having to pay for a bus because the school is so close, it regularly uses our parking lot as an assembly point for disaster drills.

Over the next month or so, the instructor of a music class for those studying to teach K-12 is going to be on our stage getting the students up and moving putting together a project. I was standing in the wings today brimming with pride for the instructor who is doing a fantastic job on this first day of getting the students to move. The thing he has them working on combines history and literature with dance and music–and that is what I saw in just this first day. There could be a lot more wrapped up in this thing before they are done.

But as I stood there thinking I have to tell the instructor’s divisional dean that they need to get him in a tenure track position and never let him go, another part of me is wondering if there is any use in having all these students work so hard if there is an ever narrowing chance of putting what they are learning into practice.

Of course, there are many schools bucking this trend and they aren’t all in the higher tax base districts. I recently nominated a local school arts program for recognition for fighting the good fight using the arts to give students an outlet for the problems they face.

I don’t want to position the arts as prescriptive only, but the truth is in the aftermath of the earthquake, a lot of Haitians came together in song. The arts are the basic factors which tie us together. So when arts teachers and artists are derided for being paid to teach and produce what is fun, it is because music does soothe the savage beast. Arts and cultural experiences answer fundamental needs.

I think people may confuse the primal emotional satisfaction they experience with the fulfillment of need they gain from disposable products. Plastic forks and paper plates allow you to continue enjoying a picnic or party rather than spending the time dealing with dirty dishes while everyone else has fun. Hearing a song/seeing a show/looking at a painting quickly puts you at ease and because you can’t identify exactly why, you equate it with the same feeling you get using disposable conveniences.

It wasn’t really until this moment that I begin to understand why people like Scott Walters often bring up the idea of slow food in relation to the arts. Just as fast food can create a disconnect and lack of appreciation for what is really invested in a well prepared meal, so too can being removed from the methods of arts production. It isn’t just a matter of lack of exposure means people don’t have an opportunity to enjoy and understand the arts, it is also a matter of not being cognizant of what has been invested in its creation.

Familiarity breeds contempt. At one time high wire circus acts were the main attraction. But as people became more familiar with the experience, there became a greater need to up the ante for the act to hold peoples’ interest. It wasn’t enough to just walk across forward and backward with and without a net. But have you ever tried to walk a rope suspended only a couple feet off the ground? I tell you, you gain a new respect for even the simple stuff.

I am not saying anything new here, of course. Studies have shown that people who have hands on creative experiences are more likely to participate in the arts later on in life.

Who will fight for the arts? Well, we all have to, even if it is in small increments every day. Certainly, the big crusaders need to be there too, but they can’t be seeking success in spite of the inaction of everyone else. If you succumb to the despair of the direction of things and give up creating opportunities to learn and experience, then there will be no one trained to teach art when someone comes looking.

Info You Can Use: Will You Have To Get Rid Of Your Wireless Mics?

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You may or may not be aware that after June 12, 2010, you will no longer be able to use wireless microphones that operate in the 700 MHz range. Arts Presenters has been following this issue very closely and has put together a good resource page on the subject. The page contains information on the ruling and has a link to help you figure out if your wireless mics operate in that range. If they don’t, you can keep using them. Some microphones can be re-tuned to operate outside that range which may also be good news.

I say may because APAP also hosted a conference call on the subject. The transcript may be found here. According to one of the speakers, Matthew Nodine, chief of staff for the FCC wireless bureau, the FCC has made room in the UHF band for all those displaced by this ruling. The question is whether you can stay there or will have to move again. From my reading the experts answering the questions don’t give any concrete assurances that wireless microphones can operate in that area over the long term. They even mention there are a number of other interests who wish to operate in the same area of the white space on an unlicensed basis.

“You have competing interest in the white spaces proceeding which has to be resolved for the commission to decide exactly what rule is going forward that should apply to wireless microphones, should apply to other users, should apply to the licensees and the other licensees in the band.”

There seems to be potential for being bumped from where you are operating at a later time if the FCC decides that space should be used for WiFi or cell phone internet operations. (Just as an example. I have no idea if operating in this span of bandwidth is viable for these functions.)

On a more positive note, it sounds like theatres could actually secure some frequencies by becoming licensed to use them. (my emphasis)

“The FCC is basically setting up a licensing opportunity as one of the possible destinations for operations on a permanent basis in the TV core spectrum. The value of licensing as you may have guessed is that you have enhanced interference protection as against white space devices. You are permitted, and I will just leave it there. You also have interference protections as against all unlicensed operations. You have flexibility to conduct two-way wireless mic related operations. Queuing is permitted for licensed operations for production personnel. It also permits certain types of uses of wireless devices to key stage hands, so sort of backstage uses which are related to performance. All are encompassed under the authority which licensed operators to which they are entitled.”

If you do employ a lot of two way communications, getting licensed may be a necessity. (again, my emphasis)

On the unlicensed side, if you chose not to be licensed, it seems like first of all the only sort of interference protection that you would enjoy would be to operate on certain set aside channels in the TV core where white space devices are not allowed to operate. I think this is a proposal in the commission’s order, but it says that such operations will be limited to 50 millowatts, 5-0 millowatts max power and would probably be limited to one-way only operations. …. it seems as if the queuing and the backstage kind of radio access, the two-way capabilities are very much a part of the performance experience and part of the production values which have been built into certainly into any sort of serious professional production. It looks to us for this particular community of users, that licensed use has a lot of the characteristics which really are the bedrock of any sort of quality performance.

What happens if you keep operating your 700 MHz devices after June 12, 2010? According to FCC wireless chief of staff Nodine,

“There are penalties that are going to be associated with wireless microphone system user who is using their wireless microphone system in the 700 megahertz range after June 12th. We don’t know – we can comment on what we believe those are going to be. And that’s probably going to be a, a fairly wide range of both civil and potentially criminal penalties. And it will be looked at on a case by case basis.”

Carl Sagan Sings About The Universe

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Hat tip to Artsjournal.com which had the video below as the video of the day last week. I normally don’t watch the videos there but something inspired me to and I am glad it did.

The video is a remix of Carl Sagan from the Cosmos television series with a little Stephen Hawking from the series Stephen Hawking’s Universe. The remix is an effort by Symphony of Science which creator John Boswell says “is to bring scientific knowledge and philosophy to the masses, in a novel way, through the medium of music. Science and music are two passions of mine that I aim to combine in a way that is intended to bring a meaningful message to listeners, while simultaneously providing an enjoyable musical experience.”

Right now there are four videos on the site. As is the case with so many musical groups, my favorite so far is their “early work;” their first video seen above. Symphony of Science remixes the footage from Cosmos and other science shows using auto-tune to make the speakers “sing.”

Given my recent post about interdisciplinary use of arts in education, I was pleased to see an example of someone doing just that. While the videos weren’t designed for classroom use, they could easily be used as part of instruction. The videos also reminded me of the TED video featuring Mallika Sarabhai I wrote about last month. Specifically about the quote so many people seemed to love – “You have treated the arts as the cherry on the cake. It needs to be the yeast.” I seemed to me that video editing and music helped an thirty year old science series bloom a little.

I had other concerns on my mind than watching a science show back in 1980. I never realized just how beautiful the imagery was that Sagan conjured during the series both visually and descriptively in the narration. It belies the common notion of science being dry and sterile and Symphony of Science gives it another interesting twist. I see that all 13 episodes are available on Hulu. I may have to take a look at them.

Info You Can Use: Cell Phone Donations

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If you have been excited by the prospect of using cell phones as a mode of donation after hearing of the success in raising funds for Haiti, you may want to do some research and calculations. The cell phone and credit card companies have gone out of their way to make it easy to donate for Haiti relief and waived most of the ancillary costs.

You on the other hand, probably won’t be so lucky.

Hawaii Public Radio had a short piece covering a meeting sponsored by a local foundation on the subject of cell phone donations this week. (link downloads mp3 file. This link if first doesn’t work. Look for raising funds..social media) A representative from a cell phone company talked about the costs to set something like this up- $500 set up fee, $400 monthly fee and a a .35 per transaction fee.

With costs like that, it would likely only be worth your while if you had a large group of people already giving that you wanted to provide an alternative mode for donating.

Now that said, I can easily see the costs coming down as those for whom it makes sense use the service. Once all those involved with the transactions create more efficient processes, the service may become more affordable. Someone is likely to invent an app for the iPhone or Facebook which will facilitate the whole exchange and two years from now it will be a $2 billion business in $25 average increments.

Another observation that is made in the story related to social media was in regard to who one puts in charge of coordinating it. One speaker cautioned against putting the youngest person in the office in charge of social media just because they understand the software the best of anyone. “They know the tools, but they don’t understand the sophistication of your message and they don’t always understand the intangible qualities…of how you actually communicate with people out there.”

I have a suspicion this is something a lot of people have already thought to themselves but were afraid to say it for fear of showing just how out of touch with social media and its great power they are. It just takes a visit to sites like Failbooking.com to see some pretty poor choices when using Facebook. Though to be fair, I sort of question the wisdom of this water safety ad by Royal Life Saving Society Australia.

Edmonton Symphony Orchestra To Audition Jug Players

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According to his letter to NPR’s All Things Considered in response to a recent story, Bill Eddins, the musical director of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, said he wanted his orchestra sound like the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a string band out of North Carolina. Well, actually he said “this is what I want my orchestra to do” (his comment is read at 1:30).

I can only assume there will be some auditions for jug and banjo players opening up soon so I thought I would get a jump on it.

Even though Bill and I both write for Inside the Arts, I have never met or spoken to him. But when I hear him say things like this, talk about his experience touring with Renee Fleming in South Africa with such verve and get in trouble for wiggling his butt while conducting, I get excited.

I have never been a big attendee of orchestra or even chamber music concerts but I really am convinced that if anyone can help me come to enjoy the music and the experience by sheer force of personality and enthusiasm it is Bill. (His co-writer Ron Spigelman’s efforts at outreach and lowering the intimidation factor would probably convince me to attend in the first place.) Of course, the fact that Bill’s family is from Buffalo, NY just like mine is already gave him points with me. I hope the folks in Edmonton realize what an asset they have.

BoardChemistry.com

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Boards seem to be a real hot topic recently. Thanks to a massive blogroll listing on the Clyde Fitch Report, I became aware of a ArtPride NJ blog post pondering why Gen X/Y is not well represented on non-profit boards. Leonard Jacobs of the Clyde Fitch report also weighed in on the subject of boards yesterday. (Busy day over at CFR, one hopes they didn’t spend all their time with the blog on Valentine’s Day.)

Hat Tip to Nonprofit Law Blog for pointing out a tweet to a Fast Company article about how for profit companies looking to provide their employees with a positive experience serving on non-profit boards can start a coaching/match making service.

I like the idea of taking the time to perform a diligent examination of your options, expectations of membership, mission and other details to assure your interest in the cause. I don’t see too many companies investing the resources to create such an office, especially in these economic times. I am wondering if this might be a task better suited to chambers of commerce or local chapters of the United Way. A centralized resource like this would be a benefit to a wider range of people and organizations than one limited to a few companies who are able to support the activities. And perhaps the central office could make an effort in concert with its members to encourage the Gen X/Y set to explore joining boards.

And if that works, maybe someone will work up a questionnaire and algorithm and make it an online service. Maybe I should go off and register BoardChemistry.com right now!

Bonus Link- Hat Tip again to Non-Profit Law blog who linked to the document the IRS uses to evaluate your non-profit during an audit.

Guest Poster: Kim Witman

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Kim Witman of the Wolf Trap Opera Company is celebrating today’s announcement of the WTOC 2010 season by doing guest blog posts and interviews in a few places across the blogosphere. I was intrigued by the idea of a virtual season announcement across the blogosphere so I agreed to host one of her articles.

Each participating blog will have a piece on a different subject so you will have to “collect them all” to get the full picture of the Wolftrap Opera Company season.  Check  Kim’s blog at www.wolftrapopera.blogspot.com for a complete list – all of the links should be active by midday on Tuesday, February 9.

You Decide How it Ends

We’re always looking for hooks, aren’t we?  Flashy, attention-grabbing ways to get folks’ attention.  So I know you won’t believe me when I say that the original motivation for this summer’s Zaide production was not marketing-based.

You see, Mozart didn’t finish Zaide.  He wasn’t writing it on commission, and he started it on his own when he was in between jobs.  A real commission with a paycheck was offered (for Idomeneo), and he had to go where the money was.  So Zaide was put aside, and he never got back to it.  To complicate matters, the point at which he broke off writing it gives no clear indication of what the ending might be.

The setup is pretty simple.  The hero (Gomatz) and heroine (Zaide) are prisoners who fall in love.  The other characters are the Sultan who’s holding them captive (and who has his sights on the beautiful Zaide), and two guards (Osmin, who is essentially evil; and Allazim, who takes pity on the young couple).   Gomatz and Zaide escape, with the help of the sympathetic guard.  They are recaptured by the other guard, and the Sultan condemns them to death.  And that’s where Mozart stopped.

The source material for the story is from an older libretto titled Das Serail, itself probably derived from Voltaire’s play Zaïre.  And here’s how Das Serail ends:  The Sultan discovers that 1) the kindly guard once saved his life, and that 2) Allazim is the father of… you guessed it… Gomatz and Zaide, who are brother and sister.

Well, this is a century before the opera world took on Siegmund and Sieglinde.  And although there’s plenty of precedent in mythology and literature for addressing incest, the fact that Mozart quit at this point is a bit of a conundrum.  Probably coincidental, possibly not.

Zaide is a Singspiel, an informal entertainment which doesn’t aspire to be “high opera.”  It isn’t a comedy, but there’s every reason to believe that it would have aspired to a happy ending.  (Witness what happened to Don Giovanni a few years later, where a happy ending was essentially grafted on.)  Would Mozart have gone on to make his dictator benevolent?  Would the Sultan’s actions be a prototype for Tito’s clemency?  And if so, would the impetus for his forgiveness have included a discovery that encompassed the specter of incest?

We’ve talked about doing this opera literally for decades.  Director James Marvel feels that the best way to present it would be to allow uncertainty to take a place at the table.  We will prepare at least two endings (maybe three), and during the intermission of each performance, the audience will vote on how they would like the opera to end.

When we came to that solution, I didn’t hesitate to embrace it on other levels.  As a producer, I am eager for our audience to have an investment in the performance, to interact with the opera in a different way.  The choose-your-own-ending aspect of our production will make its way into our web and printed materials, and if it engages some folks who might otherwise not be interested, I shall not complain.  But what I’m happiest about is that the device first emerged from our approach to the challenges of this beautiful yet problematic opera.

(Zaide will be performed on June 11, 13, 15 & 19, 2010)

Honolulu Symphony No Longer Stands Apart

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There is an oft expressed sentiment in Hawaii that the state is about 10 years behind the current trends. The Honolulu Symphony administration, however, seems to be right in step with the current approach symphony management nationwide takes while in negotiations with their musicians.

In an interview that aired last Friday on Hawaii Public Radio, Honolulu Symphony Executive Director Majken Mechling echos the usual arguments about musicians only working part time, being overpaid for their services and being obstructionist. My heart sunk when I heard this during my morning drive to work last Friday. These arguments sound so similar to those espoused by other symphony organizations across the nation, I wondered if Mechling, who was recently executive director at the local chapter American Diabetes Association, had researched those symphony negotiations in preparation for the symphony job. Intentional or just coincidence, I believe it was a mistake to follow this approach in terms of public and musicians relations.

The symphony administration has gone from the exemplar of civil relations with musicians I cited about a year and a half ago and Ron Spigelman praised about a year ago, to just like most every other symphony.

The Honolulu Symphony musicians’ pay was about 12 weeks behind by the time a large donation late last year caught them up. They had been continuing to play for about a year even though the gap in how far behind their pay was continually increased.

Last April I had observed that the moral victory the musicians achieved by their dedication to their organization in spite of not having been paid didn’t put food on their table or pay their mortgages. I will likewise acknowledge that dedication, commendable as it might be, doesn’t pay off the symphony’s debts today.

But I can’t imagine that the decision to donate $2.13 million to the symphony last September wasn’t in part influenced by the dogged loyalty the musicians showed to the organization. I am sure the musicians’ gesture impressed a number of people enough to make less publicly recognized donations.

Now about three months after the symphony filed for bankruptcy protection, to hear the musicians disparaged as if they hadn’t provided such a significant sign of their investment disturbs me. Frankly, even if they are being obstructionist, it is hard to blame them after enduring such a long period of uncertainty and making concessions only to have things fall apart on them anyway. Even if the musicians aren’t as cordial in private as they were before, where is the benefit in employing antagonistic language?

I certainly don’t condone any threats Mechling may have received from musicians or their supporters. But after a long period where the relations between the administration and the orchestra were at least publicly polite, there doesn’t seem to be anything to gain by being critical of the musicians. The organization still retains a halo of goodwill. What is the cost of being complimentary of the musicians or saying nothing? The situation may unavoidably end with the number of musicians being severely cut. It would be better that the narrative continually be that the orchestra has always valued its musicians, always honored their loyalty and is heartsick to have reduced their numbers. That would be the sort of thing that convinces donors the orchestra is still worth supporting, even in it’s diminishes capacity.

The thing I disliked the most was Mechling’s comparison of the dealings with the musicians union to that of the state and its union employees. I believe she was trying to tap into the popular sentiment expressed on online comment forums that was recently running against the state employees while they were making obligatory noises resisting pay cuts and furloughs. (Disclosure: I am represented by one of the union bargaining units which did settle and take pay cuts and furloughs.) I believe her attempts were misplaced and unnecessary. For one thing, the state employees would have been striking and making all sorts of noise if their pay was just a couple weeks in arrears. The musicians barely made the slightest critical statement publicly against the symphony. Even now Steven Dinion’s comments in the interview that they have been frustrated by the process and don’t understand the administration’s agenda are about the strongest public statements that have been made by the musicians on the situation.

I understand and empathize with the frustration Mechling may be feeling having taken the helm of an organization that seemed to have cause for hope only to have bankruptcy declared a short time later. The time she was provided to feel any sort of elation was quickly curtailed and now she is faced with overseeing the (hopefully) partial dismantling of a long storied institution. This includes being faced with making decisions about the futures of 80 some individuals. That can’t be easy. Artists, administrators and technicians grousing about each other in turn is a national past time in the performing arts. Limiting the timing and the forum in which these are done, however, is critical.

Engaging Production Blog

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Over the last few months, I have been following Don Hall’s An Angry White Guy In Chicago blog as he discusses the process behind the show he is directing, The (edward) Hopper Project..

Hall directed a play based on Edward Hopper‘s iconic Nighthawks painting. He was inspired by a retrospective of the artist at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper via Wikipedia.org

What has kept me coming back on a consistent basis is the fact that he does such a great job talking about his process and holding my interest when so many production blogs fail to do so.

So I thought I would direct a little attention his way (though he certainly doesn’t need my help) and point out some of the entries that caught my attention most:

-His discussion of how to make a play written by a group work. He acknowledges writing by committee generally isn’t going to yield anything of quality and talks about working through the conflicts he had with people who didn’t agree with his cuts. (And here is a reposting of Time Out Chicago preview piece he inserts into his blog later in which his process is described less charitably. To his glee, it seems.)

-Post about the start of rehearsal

One of the interesting things he does is reposts all the reviews of the work, starting on January 19 (if you followed the link to all the Hopper entries, just scroll up and start reading upward from the review by Joe Stead.) He then reflects, pretty fair and honestly for the guy who directed it, about the review, further discussing what his aims had been.

He acknowledges why some people may find the show difficult or dislike the style in which the show was presented. He says as much in response to one of the first reviews

“I’d be lying if I didn’t feel a sigh of relief that someone appreciated the fractured narrative structure and found it “consistent with the mystique evoked by Hopper.”

His review of reviews illuminates in one place the truth that you shouldn’t attempt to gear your show toward pleasing critics. What each seemed to think he lacked contradicted at least one other reviewer.

-One of the entries I loved the most since I have never heard of anyone else even trying to experience their show in this manner is the entry where he listens to his show being described for the blind. He laughs so hard that he approaches the point of sabotaging his own show.

However, Don does suffer some repercussions for his practice of reprinting reviews whole cloth and receives a cease and desist letter in response. The Chicago Tribune Theatre Editor pre-emptively reminds him of the limits of fair use when he provides Don with the link to the review which appeared in that paper. (I assume he does that with all the blogs and not in reaction to the desist letter.)

While I don’t wish legal action on anyone, I appreciate the reminder about the intellectual property issues and concerns one must be cognizant of when creating art. From what I understand, the cease letter was sent in reaction to reprinting a review from a web only publication. Since he fully credits and links to the original review, the only motivation I can think of for hiring a lawyer is that the advertising revenue lost by not having people visit the site. I am not sure Don was even asked to take the post down prior to receiving the letter. As more newspapers move to web only presences, I wonder if this sort of thing will become more prevalent.

Making Spitballs In Art Class

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Last week, over at Dewey21C blog, Richard Kessler linked to the Arts cover story in American Teacher magazine (starts on page 10). The magazine is published by The American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers unions in the country so this is going out to a lot of people.

I know we have heard it before, but it really got my hackles up to read about the arts being viewed as a fun subject or a “frill designed to provide students with a break from their regular classroom routine.” So learning isn’t supposed to be fun, eh? Well I am glad educators finally came out and admitted what I suspected in elementary and high school. I hadn’t realized enjoyment was such an impediment to one’s ability to learn.

The thing is, an arts teacher has to great crowd control skills. Because students view it as a relaxed, enjoyable experience, arts classes engender the energy of gym class without the opportunity to expend it with physical activity. Teachers need to be adept at channeling that energy into creative outlets rather than goofing around. Classes can often require the materials supervision of a science lab so teachers need to make sure students don’t leave the room with substances embedded in their clothes that weren’t there when they arrived.

Besides, anyone who says learning about the arts is fun clearly hasn’t had a conductor lecture about a piece ad infinitum prior to a concert.

I am only half kidding about when I make that comment. There is plenty of serious scholarly work that has been done on the arts that can be taught. The fact arts can be fun and be the subject of significant study should be to its credit. I will admit that the arts haven’t done a good job showing its connection to other disciplines.

We talk about the arts’ inherent power to raise test scores but art is not created in a vacuum entirely independent of any other discipline. Maybe that fact needs to be explored and exploited more often. An artist often needs to be a historian and researcher. They need to know about the properties of materials and how they interact. (The number of times I have heard about ceramics being ruined when a person uses low fire clay in a high fire kiln is proof enough of this.) The artist needs to know about physics and mathematics. (Fibonacci progression in music, anyone?)

Paper making alone can be used in conjunction with history (Silk Road, preservation of knowledge, expansion of literacy) and science (what is the volume of water that different types of pulp can absorb).

This was what I had in mind when I talked about arts teachers needing to be good classroom managers. I was once involved with an outreach project where we went into schools with paper making. We didn’t do anything in connection with science and history and maybe we should have. But as far as I am concerned, any teacher who can keep kids engaged and on task when they have the ingredients for a massive spitball on the table in front of them is truly a master teacher.

Funny Thing Happened While Revising Bylaws

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I was really surprised at some recent developments in my block booking consortium today. For about a year we have been scrutinizing our bylaws because people began to realize that practice was deviating from the specifics of the document. I had contributed some information on bylaws to the conversation based on material I wrote about in an earlier entry.

Since the last meeting a committee had met to discuss the bylaws. I wasn’t surprised to learn that people were leaning toward merging with the organization that “birthed” us. Most of the membership overlapped so we generally ended up having meetings together. The only defining difference between us were the genres of entertainment we booked. The discussion of merger brought up many technical questions that will require consulting a lawyer.

One of the interesting questions that arose was if we dissolved one organization and consolidated everyone into the other, could the funds of the dissolved organization be absorbed by the remaining organization. While non-profits’ assets are usually only transferable to other non-profits, an organization’s charter may specify where the assets should go if it ceases operation. Someone mentioned a group to which he belonged had stipulated the funds be split among some local music programs.

What surprised me was the amount of introspection that was occurring about the organizations. It turns out my experience as a member, that of a partnership to leverage our buying power and to collaborate on grants, is not the ideal upon which the groups were founded. There is a lot of history of which I am unaware. At one time there was a much greater focus on community education projects. And the membership was much larger. As coordinating tours started monopolizing greater amounts of time at meetings, the organizations became less relevant for many members and they started drifting away.

By the time the meeting ended, we decided to have a retreat prior to our annual meeting in May to examine the identity and purpose of the groups in addition to discussing whether they would merge or not. This was the last of my associations I expected to be organizing a retreat to contemplate its ideals. Everything has been very practical. Discussions have revolved around times, dates, hotel rooms needed, artistic fees and whether a group offered ed services.

Now people are questioning whether we can be a force for arts advocacy in our community.

I am starting to get a little excited about this planned retreat in May and what might develop.

Theater That Revolves (Among Other Things) Around You

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It has been a busy week for me. All the entries this week were started on the day prior to the time stamp and finished after midnight. In the interests of getting to bed a little quicker, I want to offer you a short entry with this very cool video from TED.

Joshua Prince-Ramus, an architect on the Wyly Theatre of the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas speaks on the process they went through to create a space that is able to recreate itself. In this building, the seating and the stage actually fly in and out providing as few as two people the ability to shift the space into multiple configurations. In addition, an audience can either enter through the lobby or directly through one of the pivoting exterior walls.

Though he admits it would take a little too long to do in a 15 minute intermission, he suggests a show could start in a thrust configuration exit to an intermission and have the audience return to a second act in arena configuration–with the audience entering and exiting through different modes of egress.

All of this designed with the aim of the building serving the needs of the artist rather than the artist fitting the work to the building.

All very cool. And *sigh* very expensive, I am sure.

Chatting In The Gauntlet

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For the discomforting performance I referenced in yesterday’s entry, we had set up a seating area on stage so that audience members could sit there and watch the performance looking out at the audience in the permanent seats. The cast referred to it as a gauntlet arrangement and from the tension it evoked, it was probably an apt description.

Can’t Talk Now, I Am Acting
Part of the performance involved the participation of “volunteers” from the audience. These people were chosen from those seated on stage and at one point, they help secure a performer in a bungee rig. An interesting thing happened. One of the volunteers started chatting with the artistic director while the bungees were being flown in about how much he had wanted to take her master class and maybe even take a dance class at the college. Striking up a conversation during the performance was a pretty strange thing to do, but the show was a little strange itself. After the show he spoke with all the cast members and even emailed the group complimenting the performance.

Those that spoke to him didn’t get the sense that he normally had problems acknowledging social boundaries. He was just really excited by his experience and wanted to talk about it.

Encourage People To Text During Your Monologue?
I started to wonder if this might be a sign of things to come as people begin to expect that the ease and immediacy of social media conversations be translated into their face to face encounters. We have already seen the negative side of this with people talking on cell phones and texting during performances. But this incident Saturday night gave me some insight into the constructive possibilities if a performance was well-designed to take advantage of these impulses.

There seems to be a growing practice at conferences that people Twitter about the speaker/panels, often with the hope that someone is monitoring the tweets and will adjust the content accordingly to either address areas of interest/questions or move past the boring parts. This sort of interactivity could be harnessed for a performance to change its direction every night.

But I wonder if there is a way to create an entirely new dynamic between performers and audiences in which a more extensive interaction than the way having people call out suggestions at improv shows transpires. I don’t know exactly how it would manifest, but I can imagine the performers would act to guide things in a general direction and integrate audience members either individually or as a collective resource.

How Sharper Than A Serpents Tooth Is A Marginalized Audience
What I am fairly certain of is that it won’t be a matter of trying to adapt what is already done to include patrons. People may find some successes, but shoehorning your audience into King Lear isn’t going to cut it in the long run. The format may evolve from current practice in stages, but I think it will depart from it eventually.

The success of this idea hinges on the guy from this weekend being a sign of things to come where people are less self-conscious about stepping forward to become involved in social interactions in general rather than an outlier. Given that those who watch YouTube videos far outstrip those who contribute, I don’t expect self-consciousness to ever erode so far that everyone will want to be up on stage.

Fits With Other Trends
It occurs to me that a situation where those with training/greater experience in the arts act to guide those with less dovetails well with other trends we have been hearing about. It would allow Pro-Ams to become more involved and pursue their interests if greater opportunities existed. If arts people became more adept at directing people without arts training in various activities, then perhaps they will gain the requisite skills to drive the creative economy we are told is emerging.

Getting What I Wanted…And Then Some

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From the “watch what you wish for” file. Last Friday I was driving home pondering the fact that far fewer people purchased tickets over the phone or in person than they did even five years ago. As a result we have lost an opportunity to speak with people and gain clues about what their impetus was for coming to the show and what sort of experience they expect. Certainly, we can speak with people in the lobby before the show and at intermission, but both our ability and time frame in which to act on things we learn is impaired. We also aren’t getting information like “my wife asked me to call for tickets for our friends and ourselves…” to learn who it is that initiates the attendance process.

Technology allows us to provide information and an opportunity to purchase 24 hours a day. However, I being to feel that the communication stream between our patron base and ourselves is increasingly one way. We provide the information telling them about the show on our websites, emails and stories but we get relatively little back from our community. If they didn’t buy tickets, we might not get any sign of response at all. Lack of purchase may not necessarily indicate lack of interest, just use of the wrong communication channel to reach people.

So as I was driving home Friday, I started pondering making today’s entry an open letter to our communities telling them they needed to be partners in the communication process to let us know if we were meeting their expectations.

Then came our show on Saturday.

We had advertised the performance everywhere noting that it was for mature audiences only. You couldn’t buy tickets online without seeing an image of the brash performance group making crude gestures (crotch grabbing, etc). We didn’t hide that the show might offend people. We warned people we suspected might be upset by it, including mentioning that it might not be suitable for their kids. We made a similar announcement before we opened the door that night.

Within 10 minutes people walked out and asked for a refund. I gave it without question because there was worse than that to come and I didn’t want to be accused of manipulating them into sticking around. More people walked out at a particularly intense scene. One woman threw her program book down in the row in front of me and criticized the choice of the performance while the show was continuing on stage before storming away from me. (This was the person who had come in to buy tickets and we cautioned against bringing her kids.)

Let me just say at this juncture that the show, while quite unsettling, wasn’t providing an extreme experience. There is far more coarse language concentrated in the first 10 minutes of David Mamet’s American Buffalo. The subjects being covered frankly and with some profanity, were not pleasant ones as you might imagine. I started to realize that people may be confusing being made very uncomfortable with actual obscene acts. Far more violence and sexual situations can be seen on television and in film but there is nothing to mediate the experience when it is live.

I admit that the show made me uncomfortable as I knew it would and I approached the lobby at intermission and the end of the show with some trepidation. But I guess everyone who hated the show had already left because no one approached me with complaints.

-One woman praised me for being brave enough to present the piece. She said of the four people in her group, she liked the show the best. She also said we gave her group something to talk about on the ride home. They were one of the last people to quit the lobby that night.

-Another woman told us that she was amazed at how far the performers went with the subjects. She noted that most of the time, groups were afraid to really commit themselves to fully exploring tough subjects so she was amazed when she realized they had reached the point people usually retreated from were going to just continue on. She said something to the effect of “I have had these conversations in private before and was flabbergasted that someone was saying them aloud for all the world to hear.” She said she was going to blog on the experience. We told her we hoped she would and asked her to send us the link.

-One of our students said his perspectives had changed.

-This weekend the performers forwarded comments attendees had left on their website. The commenters repeated the sentiment about the show giving them a lot to talk about.

I was surprised that we didn’t receive any negative emails or calls about the show over the weekend. The woman who complained to me in the theatre during the performance did call today to continue her criticism. I mostly just listened and let her talk. She told me how the show was inappropriate for the type of organization she perceived we were. Even though I didn’t agree with her about the type of places these shows should be performed; the responses of other audience members clearly showed there was some value in broaching the subject, I didn’t mention any of that.

This was the conversation I was yearning to have with my audiences on Friday. I didn’t necessarily want to have a criticism infused discussion, but I was getting what I had wanted–an audience member telling me how she perceived our organization and what she valued about it.

I really don’t have any desire or ambition to upset my audiences to elicit these sort of conversations from them. I would love for them to say these things to me all the time. But even if I was having rich, meaningful conversations with my audiences all the time, I would still present challenging work that made sense for us when I had the opportunity. Conversations on those subjects are desirable as well.

If I Were David Byrne…

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I just couldn’t help it.

When I started reading the reactions (Theatre Ideas has a good discussion in comments section) to David Byrne’s blog post about how spending on the arts is prioritized (including what sort of arts were getting priority), the first thing that came to mind was a line from Crash Test Dummies 1993 song, “When I Go Out With Artists.”

The song starts out with the singer feeling overwhelmed and somewhat alienated by all the specialized language surrounding art and feeling a little anxious about being asked what he thought of the art. He imagines David Byrne wouldn’t have that problem.

If I were David Byrne
I’d go to galleries and not be too concerned
Well I would have a cup of coffee
And I’d find my surroundings quite amusing and
People would ask me which were my favorite paintings

All I could think upon reading Byrne’s entry was that he actually is concerned about the measure of art, acknowledging that he doesn’t really get Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, though he doesn’t feel he is any less accomplished as a musician for it. I very much get the sense that if Byrne was in the Crash Test Dummies’ hypothetical gallery, he wouldn’t find his surroundings very amusing if one was required to subscribe to tightly defined standards of evaluating art.

Of course, not everything is negative in Crash Test Dummies’ universe. While everyone is pretty snooty, single malt whiskeys get their proper due and greater exposure.

Only 15 Minutes Of Fame For Tragedies?

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Lucy Bernholz at Philanthropy 2173 makes some fascinating reflections on the impact of technology on giving vis a vis the Haitian earthquake relief efforts.

I confess a huge amount of skepticism when I had first heard that one could donate to the relief effort via text messaging on your cell phones. I wondered how much the phone companies were profiting off this and how big a cut the donation processors would be taking. Apparently I wasn’t the only one because according to Bernholz, the phone companies have waived the fees under pressure of public opinion.

She also talks about the possibility that those who received funds may be under greater scrutiny. I remember after Hurricane Katrina, many people were horrified to learn how great a percentage of their donations were going to administrative overhead at the Red Cross and similar organizations. The Red Cross has shown some transparency by tweeting near real time updates of the climbing donation totals. Bernholz suggests that Twitter may become the platform where this is not only reported–but where people also question what has been done with the money.

The suggestion that really grabbed my attention was her idea that technology might cause/allow people to acquire “Donor Attention Deficit Disorder”

That people all over the world can be so instantly engaged and moved to donate is certainly a good thing. But does it come with costs?

On Wednesday, January 13, #Haiti was a trending topic on Twitter all day (a measure of what the millions of tweets are discussing). By Thursday, January 14, it was gone. Does the ability to give instantly and painlessly (mobile donors won’t even see a charge for the gift until they get their next phone bill) make it extra easy to give and move on? Will “donor fatigue” be replaced by “donor A.D.D.?”

The concept that even tragedies have only 15 minutes of fame before people move on is pretty chilling. If the best tactic for successful fund raising is providing people with an opportunity to give at the point where the emotional appeal is greatest, it is going to be increasingly difficult to sustain any sort of long term support. And how long will it be before people become inured to solicitations of calculated to concentrate a great deal of emotional response in a short span. Such an approach might stunt efforts to gather support for true tragedies.

It probably doesn’t help that we are told to just give money. Granted, in this case, it just isn’t practical to become physically involved. Much less so that after Hurricane Katrina. There is also something of an underlying message that once you have given, you no longer need to be engaged with the problem. All you are being asked to do is just give money and you can accomplish that by doing something you enjoy doing everyday–text a number.

First Creative Campus Class Reports In

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As I have been reading blog entries about the recent Association of Performing Arts Presenters annual conference, (APAP) I have seen mentions of Creative Campus project presentations. Since this information isn’t widely disseminated, I thought I would give the projects and the participating organizations some publicity to share the news of their success.

First a little history, APAP administers the grants program but the original idea emerged back in 2004 at the 104th American Assembly. (The paper they produced on the concept may be found here.) The first group of projects is drawing to a close (though some were only one year projects and have been completed) and the granting for the next group is in process.

Many of the organizations in the first group created dedicated webpages to archive their efforts which you may be interested in visiting.

Dartmouth College dedicated themselves to exploring the class divide in the surrounding community as well as within the college community.

The University of Nebraska Lied Center worked with multimedia performance group Troika Ranch to create a new performance piece, bring the disparate departments of the university together in creative experiences, and most interesting to me, adapt motion performance software for modern dance for use with rehabilitation patients.

This is not to be confused with the efforts of the University of Kansas Lied Center’s project, Tree of Life Creativity – Origins and Evolution which involved a intra-campus collaboration as well as partnerships with other campuses.

The University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium, still displaced by the damage caused by the flooding of summer 2007, commissioned the development of a world premiere, Eye Piece, in cooperation with various departments. The work explores the process of gradually losing eye sight. The topic may seem a strange one until you learn that the university’s Carver Family Center for Macular Degeneration was a project participant.

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s current theme is Diasporas. I say current, because it the description implies there is a different theme each year. Indeed, the APAP website information about the project lead me to believe it was about the death penalty. The university’s some times controversial summer reading program is a partner in this project along with the departments of communications, dramatic arts and resident LORT company, Playmakers Rep.

I wasn’t able to find information about their respective projects on the Hostos Community College or Stanford University sites, so the final project is Wesleyan University’s Feet to the Fire on global warming. This project involved interdisciplinary learning that appears to have permeated every corner of campus activities and moved out into the surrounding community. From the video summary of the project, it sounds like people who attended their events felt the power of the arts was essential to getting the message across, as was suggested in recent posting.

Even though the project officially ended last June, the university has continued to provide the experiences they initiated. Like most grant programs, I am pretty sure this was the goal–that the funded initiative will be perpetuated. If you are inspired by what you see, it is unfortunately too late to get into the current grant cycle. But it is the perfect time to start conversations about what you might like to do–including prodding a local university member of APAP to get involved.

Art. IT CAN INFECT YOUR BRAIN!!!!!

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Before the Christmas holidays I was watching a TED video of Golan Levin using interactive technology to manifest visual art in response to human action. The video is pretty cool itself, but there is a section starting around 6:30 (video embeded below) with Jaap Blonk performing Kurt Schwitters’ tone poem The Ursonate. (There is a longer YouTube video segment of Blonk’s performance here.)

Much to my surprise, the cadence of Blonk’s recitation ran around in my head for a few days after. I don’t know if it qualifies as an ear worm since I couldn’t tell you a single word. Though I could spout nonsense syllables in an approximation of Blonk’s performance. Maybe that is the point. The experience sent me to a website containing recordings of the work, including two by Blonk whose delivery varies in the two decades between the recordings.

I am sure if I started pondering the intent beyond the composition, I would be told I was over thinking it. But I am also certain that like the works of e.e. cummings, there was a great deal more energy invested in its creation than is initially apparent.

I immediately thought of my undergrad acting classes where we were supposed to carry on a conversation using numbers rather than words communicating our intent employing various vocal qualities. We generally limited ourselves to a pretty narrow range of expression.

I probably wouldn’t have appreciated the performances back then. Listening to Blonk’s and some of Schwitters’ recitations today, I recognize just how fun language can be. (I haven’t listened to all the different recordings.) Blonk especially seems like he enjoys playing with the sounds, luxuriating in the pleasure of pronunciation and takes joy in the enthusiastic exclamations. (I didn’t watch the YouTube video above until after I listened to the audio so my impression of his joy is almost entirely aural.)

By listening to vocalizations that are bereft of meaning, I also feel like I gained slightly more insight about how music acquires intellectual significance for people.

This is what is so great about the arts to me. I watched the TED video because I have an interest in technology and the arts. I thought the inclusion of Blonk’s recitation was fun, but it didn’t especially excite me. I wasn’t about to seek out performances of Dada tone poems at the end of the video. But something about it penetrated into my brain where it was identified as interesting compelling me to return for further investigation.

 

Outsourcing Creativity To The Rich?

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Newsweek recently had a short piece on the increase of Pro-Ams, though that isn’t what they called it. I don’t know that there has been a precipitous increase in the rate at which people are engaging in these activities since I wrote about it two years ago, though I would grant that it probably has since I first wrote about it four years back. I felt like they were just playing catch up on how things were developing. And not very well, either.

One of the reasons I didn’t post yesterday was because I was doing a lot of reading of other blog posts. Among them was an excellent series of posts by Ian David Moss on the Pro Am subject (h/t to Adam at The Mission Paradox). The post itself make a good argument, but his “Further Reading” links at the bottom really expound upon his point.

That point, summarized too simply in the face of many well-constructed discussions of the subject, is that as people acquire competence and are willing to perform a task for less money, or have the resources where they don’t care about their losses, starving artists ended up starving more.

It seems the age old narrative of the threat to employment coming from poor immigrants or residents of foreign countries who are willing to work more cheaply than Americans is being rewritten a little to include people who are wealthy enough or have enough leisure time. Moss mentions amateur wine makers who essentially knocked the profitability out of high end wines by accepting lower margins. But the same factors are at work when families support students through their low/no paying internships allowing them to gain valuable experience and often cachet of working for prestigious companies.

Though they didn’t refer to these things directly, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) piece I referenced four years ago, Bill Ivey and Steven Tepper did suggest that money and opportunity were going to divide those who had a variety of cultural choices from those whose choices were tightly limited.

One of the reasons economic forecasters say that the next phase of the economy will emphasize creativity is that creativity can’t be outsourced. That may be true, but as I read these blog posts, it didn’t take long to realize that it can be underbid and even crowdsourced. If you are going to be competitive in the coming economy, your are apparently going to have to get creative about being creative.

Just as today, those who can make a living in the arts are going to have to possess skills and vision beyond that of the average person. The bar is getting raised.

While I won’t deny the reality of this situation and am concerned, I guess I have a more optimistic view over the long term. I imagine it is because my facility does a pretty active business renting out to community groups. I am using some of the proceeds from rentals to support the presenting side of things so I see a lot of it as beneficial.

I will freely admit but for the support of family and friends, the quality of the work produced often wouldn’t garner much attention. Those I interact with are not necessarily moving us toward some Pro-Am utopia. There are a lot of erroneous beliefs about how simple things are to accomplish because they benefit from the efforts of professionals with Master’s degrees, additional training, long professional experience and hearts of gold.

While I agree that an increase in Pro-Ams will glut the marketplace, over the long term my hope is that amateur participation will increase appreciation for the arts and the effort that goes into them. Some will keep at it, but eventually many people are going to realize they can’t make a living doing the art for nothing and scale back. Even if they are replaced by younger folks, they will hopefully retain an interest in the areas they had invested themselves.

The complicating factor is that these Pro-Ams are likely to contribute to changing the whole game. They may not be content to do things as they have always been done and will create new standards for what live performances look like. So we may all still be in danger of losing our present jobs even as a resurgence of interest in dance, music and theatre emerges 15-20 years down the road when younger folks today approach their 40s. Which at least these days is an age where people start to re-engage with the arts.

Ah, Proscenium!

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I am beginning to understand why performance spaces were constructed in the first place. I have done some talking in the past about how performances may need to be uncoupled from the traditional performance spaces to have significance to audiences whose entertainment experiences continue to evolve. But now that I am actually trying to do that…. Well, I begin to see the wisdom of having a controllable environment.

I think the problem is that we are trying to offer people a traditional experience in a non-traditional space. I have moved performance operations to remote locations and run outdoor music festivals so I am familiar with the logistics of having performances in places that were not designed to accommodate them. Some of that will help me make arrangements for our site specific production, the Celebrity Project. In the long run though I think committing to taking art out of the traditional spaces is going to require a concomitant effort to change expectations about where and how arts can be experienced. (And yes, it certainly can be argued we are trailing so far behind in that respect, we may not be in the position to shape and define these expectations.)

But in some ways, I think we are hobbling ourselves by cleaving to old practices. Our concerns revolve around getting enough lighting equipment to different outdoor locations. People will move between different locations, but will stay there for a long enough time that they may want to sit so we will have chairs set up. But the chairs need to be set up in a way that has good sight lines but doesn’t congest the movement of people between different areas.

I am starting to think that next time maybe the site specific show needs to make more use of the site specific features like natural light. The Greeks might have been big on outdoor theatre, but they knew the natural features were of great importance. But with a show dealing with celebrity, moments in the limelight certainly can’t be neglected. Modern technology helps us cheat a little and put shows where we want them rather than needing to places with natural sound reinforcement.

Part of this is because are somewhat slaves to audience expectations. If we have a show as an event rather than just a happening on the street, people have a certain expectation of length to motivate them to make the drive. Comfort and accessibility for aging audiences during that time period need to be addressed. They will also want to see and hear everything that is going on from whatever vantage point they are at. All these considerations shape the staging and seating arrangements for our performance.

Most nights we only need to direct audiences to locations that meet these expectations once a night (we assume they can find their way back pretty well after intermission.) For this project, we will need a good plan for doing it multiple times over the course of an evening. So even as rehearsals start today, we are starting to plan. Though not too carefully too soon as I am sure the layout will change a number of times before the show opens.

How Much Am I Bid For This Sweaty Towel?

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When it comes to fund raising, I imagine there have been quite a few people who have looked around their buildings wondering how much they could get for various objects laying around.

They probably aren’t the first, but Philadelphia radio station, WXPN has started an auction section on part of their website in the hopes of shortening their fund raising drives. They offer a mix of objects from access to special seating sections at concerts and dinners with artists to old stuff they found laying around their former building.

There are times I have joked about selling the towels artists have used on eBay to raise funds, but sent them all to the washing machine. I wonder if I have been too shortsighted….

If you are like me, your problem isn’t that you don’t have plenty of interesting stuff to auction off. It’s that your budget is so tight, you have recycled the stuff so many times you can’t decide which significant performance to claim it belongs to.

In fact, it may have more value to schools teaching art restoration. Students can practice removing successive layers of paint to analyze the techniques used. Most of the stuff you have is probably good for at least five-ten semesters of instruction before they reach the original finish. This is probably the way to go anyway since the multiple attempts to repair the objects over the years have endowed it with a good three pounds extra in glue and screws and a strange tilt when placed on a flat surface.

But in all seriousness, it is something to consider to raise some extra funds. Certainly, it can’t become a veritable business unto itself for your organization or else the IRS may be stopping by to review your non-profit status. I know there are a few theatres around that rent/sell costume pieces just before Halloween to clear out their storage areas and generate a little income.

XPN’s auction site seems to be created via AuctionAnything.com. Services like theirs can provide a more professional environment than something like eBay can. However, given the cost, it would likely only be worth it over the long term, (as opposed to single use around a special event), if you intended to offer things consistently and had someone tasked to attend to the arrangements.

Joe Patti's Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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