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Heading To Other Shores

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I was pleased when Ron Spigelman over at Sticks and Drones chose to start Take A Friend to the Orchestra Month by acknowledging the poise with which the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra musicians and administration were conducting business in tough economic times in contrast with the tensions other classical music organizations were facing. Granted with their pay six weeks in arrears, the moral victory didn’t go very far in putting food on the Honolulu musician’s tables or paying their mortgages, but at least they had the consolation that someone noticed and appreciated their approach to the situation.

Unfortunately, things may be getting a little tougher for the symphony. The Honolulu Symphony announced yesterday that Executive Director Tom Gulick will step down when his three year contract expires on June 30. (Seems like it was just last year I was heralding his arrival.) Gulick has been credited with doing much to increase the financial support and income of the symphony. Whether he is leaving of his own accord or because the board decided he hasn’t done enough is unknown to me at this time. In any case, this leaves the symphony without executive leadership for a time and requires the expenditure of time and dwindling resources to search for another.

Though if you think about it, Honolulu’s composure might work to its benefit. If you are a potential executive director, you know just about any organization you join in this financial climate is likely to be in tenuous financial shape. Wouldn’t you be more inclined to interview with an organization which has proved it can resist the general trend toward acrimonious relations between administration/board and musicians? (Not that living in Hawaii doesn’t have its appeal as well.)

Is Your Price Right?

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Via Bill Byrnes, Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Southern Utah University, I recently became aware of a company called The Pricing Institute. Their services seem to focus mostly on optimizing the pricing structure of arts organizations.

My initial thought was that price does not develop relationships. If I am going to have a consultant come in to help me improve my organization, pricing while important, isn’t going to solve my organizational problems over the long term. But what isn’t valuable to me as theatre manager has worth to blogger me because I know it may be of interest to my readers.

An observation made on the Pricing Institute website bears noting. Price may not develop relationships, but it can ruin them. “Excessive or irregular discounting practices can leave customers confused and even resentful,…”

Taking a look at the case studies, it is clear that they don’t just emphasize retail price points. One of the problems they saw with Huntington Theatre Company’s approach was that the “marketing messaging was focused on pricing vs. value.” For Philadelphia Live Arts, one step they took was creating a separate identity for the Live Arts performances versus Fringe performances.

Reading through the website, I can see the value of the the services they offer. I didn’t really doubt the importance of making wise decisions about pricing. Given that fund raising is becoming more difficult, effective generation of earned revenue becomes crucial. I readily admit that I could certainly use some guidance in making prudent pricing decisions. But as I said, I can see this sort of a examination as part of a larger consultant visit.

I suspect that most arts organizations would be of the same mind. They probably don’t hire a consultant until there are so many areas of concern that guidance in just one area isn’t enough.

Come to think of it, that might be why the Pricing Institute is structured the way that it is. It is a joint venture between three different consultant firms. The structure may allow them to give stand alone pricing guidance to those who just want that while also enabling three different consulting organizations to provide great pricing advice when addressing organizations with larger concerns by calling on the expertise of their partners. As I said, I don’t know if that is how they operate, but the ability to offer a sort of “value added” service could be advantageous to all.

Artists As The New Entrepreneur

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I was reading an interview on Inc.com with Jim Collins, author of Built to Last in which he says being an entrepreneur is less risky, though much more ambiguous, than working for someone else.

Not risk. Ambiguity. People confuse the two. My students used to come to me at Stanford and say, “I’d really like to do something on my own, but I’m just not ready to take that much risk. So I took the job with IBM.” And I would say, “You’re not ready for risk? What’s the first thing you learn about investing? Never put all your eggs in one basket. You’ve just put all your eggs in one basket that is held by somebody else.” As an entrepreneur, you know what the risks are. You see them. You understand them. You manage them. If you join someone else’s company, you may not know those risks, and not because they don’t exist. You just can’t see them, and so you can’t manage them. That’s a much more exposed position than the entrepreneur faces. But there’s lower ambiguity on the paint-by-numbers path: very clear but more risky. The entrepreneurial path: very ambiguous but less risk. Of course, the truth is that it’s all ambiguous, anyway. If you think you can predict the future, you’re crazy.

One of my first thoughts was that if this were true and everyone thought this way, everyone would be an entrepreneur and no one would be around to work. Is it the illusion of security predicated on the belief that a company has a business model and system that will ensure salary and medical insurance payments are made that causes so many to work for another instead of themselves? Who wants to handle all the legal paperwork and accounting associated with running one’s own business when you can work for someone who has lawyers and accountants to do that work already? (Though lately few are investing too much confidence in accountants and lawyers.)

But on the flip side of things, I wondered if the relative lack of security associated with working in the arts is one of the reasons so many arts organizations pop up. If the prospects of success are chancy across the board, I suppose it is logical that you cast your lot with the devil you know rather than joining someone else. You figure you can out economize them. If they are putting on good shows eating frozen pizza, you can do a better job while surviving on ramen noodles all the while hoping you will be eating better at some point down the road.

I think people in the non-profit sector embody Collin’s vision of entrepreneurs pretty well in that many do understand the risk and ambiguity involved with working for another or one’s self. I almost wonder if it might not be worthwhile encouraging people in the arts to apply this energy and willingness to endeavors outside of the arts. We have all been told, if you can imagine doing something else, do that rather than pursue a career in the arts. I am sure everyone has envisioned what that something else might be. In some cases, it might involve working for someone else, but that vision might be easily be diverted to working for oneself.

I really suspect that the internal drive an arts person has that sustains them in starving for their art is the exact same drive entrepreneurs employ in starting up their companies. The only difference is that the arts person may see growing their vision to a 500 employee company as selling out. To be fair, the whole process of meeting with venture capitalists, dealing with human resources, accounting and laws can seem intimidating and impregnable barriers. They say the next phase of the economy will emphasize the creatives. What if this might portend the emergence of organizations and processes which take advantage of the drive and vision of the artist and facilitates with the removal of the barriers either through training or performance of those functions in a manner which the artist can easily relate.

Let me be clear, I am not necessarily talking about empowering artists to be more successful artists. Yes, it would be great if solid arts organizations emerged. I am referring instead to arts people bringing their drive to the thing they would do if they weren’t in the arts. I am thinking about directing that drive toward game and software design to restaurants to human resource companies.

Wouldn’t be heartening to have worked in the arts for 10-15 years and realize that your hard work and relentless drive proves you may just have the tenacity to embrace the risks inherent to starting up a new company and there are people who want to help you do it?

April Can Be A Lot Of Things Month

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So today is Arts Advocacy Day which provides a nice segue into April, the official Take A Friend To the Orchestra (TAFTO) month. If you are not already aware, TAFTO is the brainchild of Adaptistration blogger, Drew McManus who has been promoting the idea for about 4-5 years now. The people Drew has lined up this year to write on the subject of taking friends to the orchestra look very interesting.

The last few years have seen orchestra boards across the country seemingly making every effort to avoid having their musicians perform. If you have any inclination to go to an orchestra or even chamber performance resolving to attend a performance this month can play a small part in showing the classical music groups around the country that their organization has value to the community, even if you only attend occasionally. (Of course bringing 15 friends can play a much bigger part.)

Actually, April is a good time to resolve to attend an arts or cultural event. Places like Fargo, ND notwithstanding, the weather is getting better across the country so it is a fine opportunity to get out and attend performances and go to museums. If your community has First Friday gallery walks, this is weekend could be the time to step out, mingle with others and see some art.

I just heard my mayor on the radio last week saying he wished the First Friday activities downtown happened every Friday. It would be great if every mayor could encourage that level of activity. (I know he wasn’t entirely saying that to score political points because he chaired the committee of the National Council of Mayors that introduced four resolutions about cultivating arts activities across the country.) October is National Arts and Humanities Month so if you don’t feel your community has enough arts activities, maybe for you April can be Take A Friend to the City Council Meeting month where you get the ball rolling on some sort of event(s) for October.

Time To Review

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I am feeling a bit under the weather so I am not of a mind to blog very long today. However, while I was having trouble sleeping last night, it occurred to me it has been awhile since I revisited and revised our front of house procedures manuals for house managers and ushers and more importantly, our emergency procedures. The latter is especially important since we just had an Automated External Defibrillator installed on the lobby wall.

While I ask the house managers to refresh their memories every year and we review procedures with our ushers at the beginning of every season, we are actually operating on instructions I wrote when I first assume my current position. Those instructions in turn were adapted from a manual I used at another place of employment. There is nothing unsafe about the procedures I initially generated, they just may not be the most appropriate for interacting with our community in our specific physical plant.

My suspicion is that practice has diverted from the letter of my instructions. The next step is likely to be bringing the instructions more inline with reality while injecting bits of structure where it might be lacking so our service to audiences is a little sharper.

I have given the task of revising the instructions to our assistant theatre manager. He deals with front of house staff and their activities much more frequently than do I. He also hasn’t had a hand in writing any of the procedures where the rest of the staff has so he has no investment in any of the work. I have suggested he might want to call meetings to discuss revisions.

So I figured I would encourage everyone to consider reviewing and rewriting your procedures both for safety sake but also to ensure you are meeting your audience’s current expectations for their experience with your organization.

Wheels Begin To Turn

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I had a really productive meeting today to plan a site specific performance on campus for next Spring. We have never done this sort of thing before so I am starting conversations as far in advance as I can so that I can uncover problems and answer questions early on.

About six weeks ago, I approached a woman about putting a performance together than would involve our students and perhaps people from the community at large. She was excited by the prospect right out of the gate. I think what piqued her interest even more was my vision of having other members of her group conduct workshops starting next fall whose work would feed into the Spring performance. For example, we will probably have workshops in mask making and mask work and stilt work and perhaps revisit the fabric climbing tissue workshops students participated in last fall. My hope was to have these workshops open to the general public as well as our students.

What I felt was most productive about today’s meeting was that I managed to get one of our professors to agree to involve his acting class in this project instead of creating the regular spring drama show for our lab theatre. When I proposed this idea to him, his only concern was that the project didn’t replace his class or displace him as the instructor. My vision was that he would spend his class periods as he usually does, except that he would be working with his students to prepare part of a larger piece.

The academic concerns answered, he was really energized by the whole vision that the lead artist and I laid out. By the end of the meeting, he had actually negotiated another slate of workshops for his students. Not that he is a person who craves control, but I was fairly impressed by how willing he was to cede control of a project he traditionally directs.

There are a few more people I need to bring on board and a million details to resolve in the next year. This is one of the projects I was thinking about when I wrote yesterday that were there special funding or tax breaks for employing 100% local creativity, I was confident at least one of our shows would qualify every year.

Also, even though I would have likely worked on generating this partnership regardless of whether it existed, I have been inspired by the Creative Campus project. I think our program is too small to qualify for participation, (though I just realized upon linking to it, that the program is open for another round of grant applications), but I am encouraged by the efforts of other campuses around the country who are attempting the same sort of things.

You Know, For The Kids (And Everyone Else, Too)

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February was a real busy month for me so I only had the time to bookmark The Nonprofiteer’s epiphany about the value of public funding for the arts.

“Of course you’re indifferent to public funding for the arts, you dodo; you live in Chicago, where major performers and exhibitions will show up anyway. Public funding for the arts isn’t for Chicago–it’s for Bloomington.

And she remembered growing up in Baltimore, which is not a small town but which waited for months between visits of major dance companies; and she remembered the thrill of seeing those dance companies for the first time. And she realized (0r remembered) that that’s the real point of public funding for the arts: to make available to everyone the thrill of exposure to first-rate art. Everyone: that means people who live in Bloomington, and International Falls, and Arroyo Hondo, even though the free market would not support a stop in any of those places by the latest tour from the Joffrey or the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Met.

I thought she made quite a few good arguments on behalf of funding the arts. They seem of particular value given that she finds them compelling as a person who is not particularly supportive of public funding for the arts. It isn’t often that a non-politician who has not drank deeply of the Kool-Aid takes the time to provide considered commentary on behalf of public support of the arts so it behooves us to take note. As might be expected, I am not entirely in accord with her suggestion that support should only be in presentation rather than creation of new works. Though I certainly do see her point:

“…you have to accept another, equally painful truth, which is that no one can actually determine what’s “art” til at least 25 years after it’s been created. Probably the Nonprofiteer doesn’t need to remind you that people threw things at the stage the first time they saw and heard The Rite of Spring, now part of the musical canon. But what she probably does need to point out is that this doesn’t mean the public should accept and/or fund every objectionable thing it sees in hopes that it will ultimately turn out to be art. Rather, it means that support for creation is a mug’s game, a gamble at which most players lose, and that the public should instead put its money into presentation.”

I hadn’t initially assumed she was saying that public funding of the arts was needed to bring culture to the hinterlands. All the same, I was glad for Scott Walters’ comment to her about the importance of enabling local groups to develop works that emphasize and reinforce the value that can be found in their communities. For me that is the strongest argument for funding the creation of new work. I am not as vocal as Walters is on his blog about how the concept that artistic success originates from NY/LA/Chicago is robbing the rest of the country of talent. But I am certainly in agreement with him that there is no reason those places should be held as a standard of quality and be viewed as the only destinations for achieving artistic success.

Public monies and tax breaks are offered to attract and retain industry, perhaps the same should be done with the arts. The argument can be made that state and municipal support of the arts is doing just that. What the public support is not doing though is generally providing incentive to “buy locally.” In some cases, there has to be an equal investment in encouraging people to create locally as well. I have mentioned in a number of posts lately that while it would be much more economical for me to present local artists, there aren’t enough of quality to sustain the effort very long. There are a fair number of talented people in the community, but most (though certainly not all) are expressing themselves via Broadway plays and musicals or covers/derivatives of other people’s work.

Still, if the criteria for receiving public monies and tax breaks was 100% of the concept and execution by local artists, I could take advantage of the support at least once a year and guarantee my audiences the quality they have come to expect. That sort of confidence constitutes a good starting point in my mind.

One last bit of the NonProfiteer I would quote is her view that we need to get public support for the arts as acceptable a concept as public support for education.

Yes, yes, the Nonprofiteer knows: education isn’t well-funded either; but relatively few people argue that public funding for education is just a plot to spread disgusting lies, or to keep teachers from having to work. Let’s get the discussion about public funding for the arts to the level of conceptual agreement we have for public education, and then we can engage in any further battles that might need to be fought.

In other words, brethren in the arts community: stop talking about public funding for the arts as if the point were for the public to support YOU. No one cares about you. What we care about as a society is US, and how exposure to what you do will improve us.

I think there is a distinction between what she means by “how exposure to what you do will improve us” and the message the arts have been communicating along those lines. While improving test scores, reasoning skills and developing geniuses in the womb are probably part of what she is suggesting we talk about, it can’t be the entirety for the simple reason that it excludes anyone who is not a child. People care about their kids, yes, but everyone will only be persuaded when they perceive they are included in the benefits. I think it is pretty clear that the reasons we give can’t be about what we want people to experience but what they want to experience.

We want people to experience transcendent moments and there is a good chance the first time they sit down to hear a symphony play, they won’t have a transcendent experience. The measure of their satisfaction with the experience that night may simply be that no one caught on to their utter cluelessness. Transcendent experiences should certainly always be a goal and are absolutely attainable on ones first interaction. I just spoke to a woman today who had a group of students who did just that, though they probably couldn’t have identified it as such.

There is a difficulty in asking people what they want out of an experience with which they have had limited interaction. About 18 months ago I linked to a video of Malcolm Gladwell talking about how when people were asked what kind of spaghetti sauce they liked, described the sauces they were eating. However, when presented with samples of different options, expressed strong preferences for sauces that no company actually made. When asked, people may say they like car chases and gun battles not realizing what they really may value is dramatic tension and once they get past the arcane language, a lot of Shakespeare really suits them.

If trying to draw responses of value from your audiences sounds like an intimidating process, well sure it is. There are big companies sinking millions of dollars into marketing and research trying to figure it all out too with limited success. The advantage you have is that you only have to figure it out for the community you serve.

More Impact Of The Economy Conversation

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Yesterday, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters had a follow up to the conference call on the economy I listened in on in December. Given that there weren’t enough phone lines to accommodate all those who wanted to attend, this time they employed a webinar format so people could attend online. You either listen directly or download the web session.

The call is about 90 minutes long and many on the panel mention strategies and opportunities people can take. What caught my ear and interest were the approach to programming described by Marilyn Santarelli, Executive Director of the F. M. Kirby Center for the Performing Arts. She talks about how she is re-negotiating payments to artists per Numa Saisselin’s suggestions in “Arts Presenting Is Dead.”

As Saisselin suggests, she goes to the artists and talks about their sales to date, their marketing efforts and are honest about their break even point. They asked that the artist share in the risk and lower their price. They proposed that after reaching the break even point, they would start to restore to the artist “dollar for dollar from the first dollar whatever discount you gave to us.” She found the artists that bought in to this option worked harder to help promote the show with more interviews, b-roll, etc. The alternative, she told them, was canceling the show.

It sounded as if they had only done this starting last December. I am curious to know if this inhibits her planning for her upcoming season as artists and agents worry that what they initially negotiate may not be final. Likewise, would they be more open to booking with someone who has a workable alternative to cancellation if things go poorly.

She also talked about their ticket sales strategy. Her organization is discounting early in the season and offering discounts to a wider variety of people including subscribers and sponsors. I am not sure, but it sounded as if they were expanding the groups of people who are eligible for discounts. As the season goes on, the prices will go up. She hopes if they message this approach correctly, people will buy early realizing they are getting a bargain. No mention of whether they were loosening their exchange policy for people who committed early. The Kirby Center has only implemented this on a few show so far and did so because 60% of their sales were happening in the last few weeks. I suspect that this approach will vary in success from community to community and some will still rather wait and see than to buy now and that the higher price closer to the date may prove a disincentive to those with many options.

These are just some of the strategies and opportunities being employed that are mentioned in the webinar. If you are eager for a little guidance, give it a listen.

Ignore The Title, Come For The Exuberance

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I usually don’t speak specifically about the performers we present for a number of reasons. Among them is my concern that inclusion or omission will make a tacit statement about the quality of the performance or my interactions with the group. The last event we had was so superlative and the positive feedback so strong that I feel the need to single it out by name for what I believe is the first time in my blog’s history.

The performance in question is the India Jazz Suites. The baggage that name brings with it is part of the reason I felt the need to wax rhapsodic about the performance. It needs all the help it can get to overcome the assumptions people make based on the name. While it does have Indian and Jazz elements, the show’s focus is really on the joyful exuberance exhibited by Indian kathak exponent Pandit Chitresh Das and tap dancer Jason Samuels Smith. The problems people seemed to have with the show name is akin to if you had never experienced opera. You would have just as much insight into the nature of Loony Tunes’ “What’s Opera, Doc?” were it billed “Animated Opera Short.”

In promoting the piece, I kept emphasizing the idea of a partnership infused with “joyful exuberance.” Even if people didn’t know anything about kathak and weren’t too big on jazz, I hoped the concept of dancers from two different traditions having fun would make them curious enough to get more information. Jason and Chitresh met backstage at the American Dance Festival in 2004 and became interested in working with one another. Kathak is similar to tap in that it is a percussive dance form performed barefoot with about 10 lbs of bells attached to the ankles. Like tap it lends itself to dramatic flourishes. Pandit Das speaks in interviews of his long desire to work with Gregory Hines, lost upon Hines death, was renewed upon meeting Jason Samuels Smith. The two perform with two trios of musicians. One trio on tabla, sitar and sarangi; the other on piano, drums and bass. The musicians challenge each dancer to match different riffs and the dancers engage in a dance battle to match each other.

But as you can see, unless you already had a sense of the show’s content, it takes a bit of explanation to get people to a place where they understand what the performance will be about. We worked hard on press releases, radio interviews and in media ad buys to communicate all this. I don’t use a lot of unwarranted hyperbole in my ads and releases so I hoped when I emailed our subscription list in earnest that this was the show I had was most excited about and had waited all season to see, they would trust that I sincerely meant it. It was absolutely true. As soon as one of my consortium partners proposed the show, I jumped on it afraid that one of the others in the city would first.

One of my reasons for wanting to host the show was that there was little chance of seeing a collaboration like this, much less with artists of this caliber. Unfortunately, this being absolutely true, people had few frames of references to help them comprehend the performance in advance. People with whom we discussed the performance at length on multiple occasions were having “ah-ha” moments just days before the show about details we mentioned many times before.

What I think explained the show best is this YouTube video of excerpts from the performance:

As you might surmise, the audience wasn’t that large but the show superb. It was easily in the top three performances of the past five years. I can’t help but wonder if the entertainment sector as a whole has poisoned its relations with audiences by diluting language by over promising. I place a lot of the blame on movie ads but pretty much every discipline and area is guilty of employing hyperbolic language. Now when we have an offering which is challenging to understand on the surface but easily enjoyable by the layman without benefit of specialized knowledge, we can’t simply say trust me, you will enjoy it immensely and have people believe you. Even with lengthy explanations, interviews and multimedia support, people are risk averse partially because they have been disappointed by previous promises.

I have no experience with jazz or Indian dance. I jumped on the opportunity because I knew by reputation alone that Chitresh Das was worth seeing. It wasn’t until I watched the YouTube video weeks later that I realized not only did I want to see it, it was intellectually accessible to a very broad audience.

The show started with Smith and Das doing separate solos. One of the points they make is that neither is scaling back his art to accommodate the other. They are both highly accomplished artists. In the first half of the show they make that abundantly clear. To be fair, the musicians make that clear about themselves before the dancers step on the stage. Given that jazz, tap, classical Indian music and dance are all heavily improvised forms, the musicians have to be extremely skilled to operate at the level of the dancers.

As I stood watching, I started thinking that the audience was paying far too little to see this performance. I know that had we charged more we would have likely had fewer people so it was good that a greater number of people were able to experience the performance. Still they were getting a hell of a lot of value for their money.

People realized this. Well, perhaps not the money part, though someone did ask how they could donate. The atmosphere in the lobby at intermission was completely energized. We were half way through the show and people were responding at the same level they did at the end of a performance after a big finale. I was engaged in conversations by multiple people who were somewhat at a loss to express their excitement. I had to keep excusing myself as I was continually intercepted on my way backstage to make sure the second half would be starting shortly.

The second half absolutely delivered on the promise made in the first half that the talents of both men together would be greater than the sum of the parts. The interactions between the two dancers and the way they engaged the musicians was exceptional. Everything intertwined so well I forgot that it wasn’t all choreographed in advance.

Lest you imagine that the show had fallen into rote after repeated performances constituting a de facto choreography , it was only supposed to run 1.5 hours and ran 2.5. And no one cared to complain. I hadn’t realized things had expanded until I noticed intermission was getting over when the show was scheduled to end. I think part of it was due to Pandit Das, considers himself as an educator as much a dancer. He did some demonstrations and discussion of the principles behind his art during his solo. I assume seeing people were entranced, he was happy to keep dancing for them.

This week has seen me copied on emails people are sending their friends raving about the performance they attended. When I am stopped on the sidewalk by people, the conversation runs longer than usual about what a wonderful show we brought the previous weekend. I will openly admit that I am contributing much more to the exchange myself.

Again, none of this is meant to detract from any of the other artists we have presented. I think the last two shows of the season went a very long way in creating very positive impressions about our theatre in the community. I suspect that will be worth a lot to us as economic times become more difficult.

So, you know, I can’t help wishing there were more people participating in the experience.

Perhaps some reading this account won’t quite understand my excitement having seen the like often enough. It isn’t all that frequent that someone operating in my budget range gets to present performances of this caliber. So I guess it would only go to prove my point that people weren’t paying enough to see the performance which makes me all the more grateful that we had the opportunity. But even for those accustomed to experiencing exceptional performances, there is always a show that transcends your past experiences to a great degree and provides a “Wow” moment.

NJ Would Rather Go Broke Than Fund The Arts

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Via Artsjournal.com comes news that New Jersey Governor John Corzine wants to cut arts spending below the legal minimums. A few years ago, the NJ State legislature decided to set legal minimums for funding the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Historical Commission, the New Jersey Cultural Trust and Shore Preservation Fund.

State treasurer David Rousseau made it clear how the administration feels about those laws. They just don’t apply anymore.

“We will be setting aside those laws,” said Rousseau. “We didn’t want to be bound by laws that were created that say shore protection has to be this amount.

“Same thing with arts. Why should they be held at a higher standard just because some Legislature in the past put a law in that says it can’t go below this amount of money?”

It isn’t terribly surprising given these tight financial times that state governments would make a move to claim monies set aside for funding arts and culture. I think we pretty much expect it. What does raise eyebrows is that by doing so, New Jersey stands to forfeit greater income. The laws which set the funding minimums have poison pill clauses included to prevent just this very thing. (my emphasis)

The law changed the way New Jersey funds arts and culture by replacing their direct appropriation with a portion of the hotel tax. As revenues grew, so would the funds supporting the cultural agencies and tourism advertising. If the tax revenues dropped, the cultural and tourism programs would get less.

The law mandates the four areas receive at least $28.2 million or the tax disappears at the start of the fiscal year. Corzine’s budget allocates just $24.9 million. Similarly, the realty transfer tax has a provision that eliminates the tax if the beach replenishment fund drops below $25 million.

Sen. Kevin O’Toole (R-Essex) wondered why the administration would risk losing a tax that has generated hundreds of millions of dollars since 2003 in order to save a couple million dollars next year.

The governor and his allies in the legislature are trying to mount challenges to the poison pill provisions. It will be interesting to see if they hold or not. I have personally never heard of such arrangements being used to guarantee funding for arts and cultural purposes. If the laws hold, it might be worth advocating for similar protections in other states. (If they don’t hold on the basis of technicalities, it would be worth advocating for under better written terms.)

My suspicion is the governor figures even if the taxes do automatically disappear, the revenue source will be viewed as too crucial to the operation of the state and the legislature can be prodded into reinstating them without the arts, culture, history and shore preservation encumbrances.

I am interested to learn if any other states or municipalities have similar arrangements to keep funding for non-emergency causes secure from raiding. Comment below.

Vital To Discuss: Graduate Preparation

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In a confluence of good timing, my Inside the Arts compadre, Jason Heath, touched on a subject yesterday aligned with that of two of my favorite bloggers. In an entry with a self-explanatory title, Music School Enrollment Spikes as Economy Tanks, Jason cites a Chicago Tribune article on that subject. Jason discusses the cons of pursuing a degree in music but seems heartened by the article’s assertion that studying music confers skills applicable to other fields. (Given a recent post, that is good news to me too.) My only concern is that in tough economic times, there are so many people with direct experience with jobs, there is no need for those with skills that carry over.

The article notes that music schools are making sure their graduates have training in addition to performance to make them more capable and prepared for the realities of the industry. Theatre schools are apparently not following suit in the estimation of Theatre Ideas blogger, Scott Walters, and A Poor Player blogger Tom Loughlin who met for the first time this past weekend at the Southeastern Theatre Conference where they presented a session on revamping the way theatre students are prepared.

Both gentlemen reflect on the experience in their respective blogs with some disappointment that the conferences do not really allow serious conversations about the state of the industry and how graduates may be better prepared.

Says Mr. Loughlin:

“At places like SETC, NETC, and ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) the emphasis is 97% on “how to succeed in the theatre business by trying a little harder.” It’s self-perpetuating, narcissistic, and almost cult-like. Anybody interested in having an adult conversation about what might be wrong, what might need reform, etc., is faced with the reality that everyone else there has drunk the kool-aid of pre-professionalism. You might as well be talking to a wall.”

[….]

“As I walked through the halls of the hotel complex during the afternoon I grew more and more sad watching all these young dressed-up kids with their audition numbers pinned to their chests waiting for their turn to show everyone what they could do and begin their climb up the great Broadway ladder. They know nothing else at all about theatre except this professional business model, and they have no sense of independent thought in terms of thinking about how to push back against it. They’re just buying it hook, line and sinker. And we, the educators, are tossing them the baited hook.”

Both felt the keynote speaker, Beth Leavel, was the worst offender when it came to underplaying the difficulty of making it in theatre and overselling NYC as the sole source and standard for success.

Scott Walters’ observations were most pointed in this respect.

“The crack she peddled was pontent: she had only had to work two weeks in her entire career at anything outside the theatre. I could see young girls texting their parents with this fact, proof that their choice of a major in theatre wasn’t foolhardy in the least.”

[…]

“Not surprisingly, nobody ever asked, and clearly Beth Leavel never considered, the utter insanity of such an arrangement. Nope, it was all about New York, and Beth had made the leap from SETC to Broadway, and you can too. You just have to want it badly enough. Because we are so lucky to do what we do. Why, she burbled, I’ve never worked a day in my life, and I mean that.”

[…]

“It seemed so appallingly irresponsible. To look at all these young, hopeful people with numbers pinned to their chests, I kept thinking of Biff Loman’s pathetic plea at the end of Death of a Salesman: “Will you let me go, for Christ’s sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?” I knew that many, many of these kids were very talented, and that for most of them those talents will go unused and unappreciated in the theatrical Oz to which Ms Leavel had pointed them. And they will limp home thereafter and, like Mr Tanner in Harry Chapin’s heart-breaking ballad of the same name, they’ll never sing again, or dance again, or act again.”

I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but I found it interesting that both men reference the audition numbers pinned to each person’s chest in what is probably not even an attempted veiled allusion to the “hopes pinned” phrase. According to Walters, they did their best to dash what for most will be false hopes in their session citing dismal employment and median income figures of Equity union actors.

We urged teachers to ” take that phony dream and burn it before something happens” and replace it with something important, something rooted, something that would enrich our towns and cities and states. We urged theatre teachers (and had we not presented before she did, Beth Leavel) to get out of the export business, in which our purpose is to ship off “goods” to New York City.

None of the entries are terribly long and bear reading in their entirety. If you aren’t familiar with Loughlin and Walters, they are both professors in performing arts programs who have been reflecting for some time on the education processes with which they are involved–and on the fate of their graduates.

As a person who came out of a theatre background, I have always felt a little superior to the other arts disciplines because theatre tends to be a lot more together in many regards. In graduate preparation theatre seems to be lagging. Not all music training programs offer the type of preparation mentioned in the Tribune piece, but there are enough to serve as examples for theatre training programs.

Under Pressure To Find Value In Live Performance

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Thanks to YouTube I have been thinking a lot about the experience of live performance. A couple months ago, for reasons I can’t remember, I watched this cover of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” done by David Bowie and Gail Ann Dorsey.

I thought their rendition was great and a couple weeks later, I wanted to hear it again and ended up with this version.

It was soon clear that it wasn’t the same performance. I liked the first version much better. One of my first thoughts was how interesting it was that the same song, same performers, same tour could have a vastly different quality. It seemed to me a good argument for seeing live performance. Often people say they don’t want to see a play or hear a piece of music again because they have already seen it. People in the arts generally counter that different groups render different interpretations. If that doesn’t work, we break out the old opportunity for disaster option noting that you never know what will happen at a live performance. Even better in this case with almost all things being equal, one performance is so much more exciting than the other which proves another degree of value for live performances. I started checking to see if Bowie was coming to town soon.

Well, come to find out it is not quite all things equal. The second video is from 1997 and the first from 2003. (In my defense, not all of the copies are well dated.) I imagine part of the reason I like the 2003 video is that the sound is much better. I also believe Dorsey got more kickass in that time.

Which brings me to the second revelation about the experience of live performance–the importance of reference points. My sense of where the videos fall on the quality continuum is based on my experience with the original version by Queen and Bowie vs. 2003 Bowie and Dorsey vs. 1997 Bowie and Dorsey. What I have no ability to judge is the relative value of a piece of classical music played by the NY Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, much less the same piece by a single ensemble now and six years ago.

From my perspective, no symphony would allow themselves to take the liberties in interpreting Beethoven Bowie and Dorsey took with Queen’s original music. But I could well be wrong. I have no experience upon which to base that assertion other than my belief that symphonies are too tradition bound to do so. This lack reinforces the importance of regular and repeated exposure to the arts. It also reveals why the belief that people will become enamored of the arts if only they will step through the door is erroneous. People can only judge something is good if they have a basis upon which to make the judgment.

The general implication of making a statement about exposure to the arts is that it has to be in schools. Students are a captive audience and unformed vessels ready to receive. The parents are lost to us. They are too old and too busy at work to pay attention to our lessons. Yes, that is mostly true. But when they take breaks from work they go to things like First Friday’s downtown where they will stop and satisfy their curiosity about Southeast Asian dance if the opportunity presents itself in a easily accessible place.

Cheap dates are important in this economy so First Friday type events may present an opportunity for increased exposure. Expose people often now and maybe they will be prepared to pay for the experience by the time the economy turns around and increases their disposable income.

April is Take A Friend To the Orchestra Month (TAFTO) and provides a good opportunity to position events and opportunities that encourage friends to experience an event together.

(You don’t actually have to be an orchestra to take advantage of April in this manner. Just don’t tell Drew McManus I gave you permission.)

Looking For Shows In All The Close Places

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Last Friday I went to First Friday downtown. My main motivation was that my assistant theatre manager and his wife were performing at an outdoor stage. The theme was Asian performance so there were performances of gamelan, kulintang music, Balinese, Cambodian and Thai dance and a couple of fusion pieces.

While I came to support a friend, I was soon evaluating performances for suitability in upcoming seasons. We have been told to expect that we are all but guaranteed to lose $20,000 from a regular source so I need to identify generally inexpensive quality performances. Ultimately, I didn’t think any I saw that night were quite right and a couple, pretty awful. Before I made this determination I started to ponder how I might structure future seasons.

I started to wonder if it might be possible to follow Numa Saisselin’s example and announce a shorter season in my brochure next Fall with the intent of adding two or three performances as the opportunity presents itself. There are always a few shows that do well and a few shows that attract a third of what the best shows do. My expenses are generally the same for all of them so if I can reduce my costs a little, I will be doing better. What contributes either directly or indirectly to my costs is distance people have to travel so I can realize some significant savings if I can control those expenses. Since people are making their attendance decisions extremely close to the performance dates, I don’t think I would lose anything by having some events absent from the season brochure.

I often have a general idea of which shows will have a lower appeal but pay the price knowing that the work is worth seeing and if I don’t bring them, then no one else will. The smaller audience appreciates the opportunity no less than the larger one. Unfortunately, that idealism may have to be indulged slightly less often in favor of discerning whether there are local/regional performers who have the quality but haven’t had the opportunity to be seen.

Outside of my uncertainty about such groups existing, one concern I have is that if I don’t set my schedule early, I will have to really control what dates I rent out. We have a fairly strong facility rental program and can have most of the year rented out almost immediately after releasing the dates we don’t intend to use.

I would most certainly make more money renting instead of presenting on those same dates but I don’t want to reduce our offerings even in these financially tenuous times. I believe we would lose momentum with our community. While precious few seem to have any loyalty to us, I suspect their numbers are greater than we imagine. There is also the issue of slipping out of the collective consciousness if there are fewer mentions of us in the media.

So for the next few months I am going to be doing a lot of pondering, talking and consulting with people on our direction. There is no option before me that I want to fully commit to –fully a rental house, fully produce local performers–but the fiscal realities before me are likely to mean exploring these options to some degree.

Yes, But Can You Get Donations With It?

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In my letter to President Obama post I advocated for increased options under which non profits could incorporate. So I was very happy to see Drew McManus’ post today on that same theme.

I was even happier when one of the commenters to the entry, Ian David Moss, pointed out there were people working on that option. Namely, the L3C. In the comments section, Drew asks if anyone has successfully gotten a grant under that status. Moss responds that it lends itself more to attracting social investment and micro loans rather than grants.

I am going to keep an eye on this thread in the hopes that more information about other options emerge. (I am also going to add Non Profit Law Blog where this information originates to my reading list!)

What surprised me most was that the structure was proposed by an individual, Robert Lang, and that by getting Vermont to pass legislation recognizing it, the structure became viable nationwide since people can incorporate in Vermont the same way companies do so in Delaware. How this is all possible is being hashed out on many fora where people are a little wary about how the IRS may react. Thanks to a link on a Fractured Atlas blog post that apparently failed to register with me a year ago, I was able to track down a FAQ on the site of Americans for Community Development who are promoting this format.

I would be rather excited if this were successful because it facilitates the development of other forms of incorporation that might be helpful for activities currently performed by non profits.

Overhaul The Arts And Install New Standards

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Couple weeks back I mentioned I wanted to explore the idea of greater standards and training for administrators and board members Numa Saisselin floated in his “Arts Presenting Is Dead” piece. As one might imagine, from the number of times I have cited it, I was pleased to see Saisselin cite the Conversations With The Field study Neill Roan did for APAP which noted learning was not valued in the arts presenting field.

Saisselin feels that service organizations like APAP need to be more aggressive about identifying and contacting new entrants to the field and providing them with the basic information they will need even if the new presenter is not a member of their organization.

Just as the model of a modern presenting organization is shifting towards earned income, and on the fundraising side, earned income tactics, the model of a service organization should be shifting away from the all-access or no-access membership model, and towards an aggressive recruiting model that incorporates at least some free exchange of information.

While I agree that any organization/company/corporation is better served by actively engaging its constituencies, given the ease with which small groups can enter the field and operate on a limited basis, I am not sure how easy it might be find and identify these entities. I suppose they could start by looking through the records of where artists have recently performed in trade magazines and websites like Pollstar.

He likewise suggests that individuals avail themselves of free sources of information – “For example, Musical America, Celebrity Access and Billboard Magazine all publish free weekly newsletters by email. Countless fundraising, accounting and management firms publish their own newsletters, which often include lengthy and useful papers and articles.”

He bemoans the dearth of arts management training programs in higher education but seems to acknowledge that many working professionals don’t have the time to return to school for training. Saisselin suggests a certification system similar to one developed by the International Association of Assembly Managers (IAAM). I took a look at their website and it seems to be a pretty rigorous set of requirements to obtain various certifications.

Arts service agencies might do well to consider developing something similar. They have the example of the IAAM program to use as a type of template given the overlap in a number of areas. They also have the benefit of being able to consult with the existing arts management programs about the training they provide. In turn they can suggest what college students should be taught if they want to be employed. While the colleges may not be able to host classes for the busy arts professionals, they might prove good regional testing sites on weekends.

The observation Saisselin made that most interested me because I hadn’t encountered it before was in regard to board training. He makes some common observations about how poorly board members understand and are educated as to their duties. Then he relates an anecdote about a time when he and a friend were considering leaving their jobs. The friend worked for a radio station and had a fairly constructive conversation with a supervisor who understood the desire to move on and discussed the pros and cons of doing so.

Saisselin’s board was hurt that he was considering moving on and while he stayed, the dynamics between the board and himself were strained.

“….the component that is pertinent to this discussion is this: my friend’s boss was straightforward in the way he dealt with this scenario, because he worked in the same field she did, and he understood first hand why she was thinking about making a move. My board, on the other hand, with no career experience of their own in the field, responded the only way that they could: emotionally.

There is a critical weakness at the executive level of the nonprofit arts field: board members join a company at the very top of the organizational chart, but more often than not they have little or no experience in the field themselves as working professionals. Experienced board members may have vast knowledge about being a board member, but there is no way for them to personally understand the issues that professional staff members must be concerned about on a daily basis, or when thinking about their own lives and career. A board member’s personal commitment may run deep, and a paid staff member’s personal commitment may run just as deep, but the motivations of each for being involved in an organization in the first place, and for sustaining that involvement, are very different.”

Now my perception is that appointments to for profit boards aren’t necessarily made with people in the same field. Though there may be more uniformity in the way boards of widget manufacturers and banks operate than one of them and a non-profit board. The whole practice of placing inexperienced people at the top of an organizational structure may actually be flawed regardless of industry.

An emotional reaction may not be something that non profit organizations can escape. A year ago I talked about how the high emotional satisfaction people experience working in the arts may inhibit their desire to improve themselves. Boards involved with non profits may be so invested in the organization’s cause, it might be difficult to favor a rational reaction over an emotional one.

Frankly, I think other employees are likely to feel betrayed by a fellow who is letting the cause down or, given the generally poor pay and working conditions, escaping. Board members are probably more likely to be uniformly hurt than seasoned colleagues but I don’t think all bosses will be as supportive as Saisselin’s friend’s.

Saisselin extends his idea of insuring quality to the industry as a whole citing the example of the regional accrediting bodies which set the standards for institutions of higher learning. I get a little nervous at this suggestion. I am all for increasing the quality of arts organizations. I don’t know if formal accreditation is the way to go. Such a process is incredibly time consuming and diverts a lot of resources. For colleges, loss of accreditation means, among other things, loss of access to funding sources. I would be afraid that arts organizations that do good work would lose out on grants and foundation support because they didn’t have the wherewithal to complete an accreditation process. One of the biggest complaints people have about charities is the high percentage of their donation that goes toward administrative overhead. Accreditation process has to be incredibly well thought out to avoid this situation.

All this being said, Saisselin mentions that the granting process constitutes a de facto peer review system but that it is a binary result. You are either funded or not.

Beyond funding an application, or not, and in some cases providing applicants with a written summary of the panel’s comments, there are no “next steps” to assist organizations that don’t measure up, and the field at large desperately needs to take those next steps to strengthen the field at large.

There is no avoiding the fact that meeting greater standards requires increased effort above what is already being done. And there is no guarantee that meeting those standards will lead to greater organizational success. It is painfully clear to many in the entertainment industry that high quality product doesn’t necessarily draw a larger audience.

If there is an industry wide push for higher standards it is certain there will be instances of greater efficiencies, more effective leadership, constructive partnerships and more united advocacy efforts. But none of it is guaranteed to happen to you the individual or to your organization. In fact, the obscene inefficiency of your company may be revealed in the course of this movement putting you out of a job.

So what is your motivation as a belabored arts professional to join an effort that provides no surety of things improving for you? Well, that is about the same promise you had when you made the decision to devote your life to the equally abstract concept of artistic excellence.

Artists- Economic Alfalfa

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According to the recent Congressional debates about the economic stimulus package, the arts apparently make no significant contribution to the improvement of the economy.

I guess that is why Philadelphia’s South Street district has repeatedly owed its revitalization to artists.

According to an Associated Press piece the City of Brotherly Love is looking to have artists bring activity back to South Street for a third time.

Once it was a thriving entertainment district, then the artists were booted in favor of a planned highway that ultimately never emerged. The artists returned and enacted the old story of making the neighborhood so chic, they couldn’t afford to live there any more. Now there are empty storefronts again and the artists are being invited back rent free. All they need to do is pay utilities. The hope, of course, is that the activity will resuscitate the neighborhood again. The article makes it pretty clear that no one should expect to keep their space once conditions improve to the point where someone will actually pay to occupy the space.

“No-rent leases will be signed for two months, with month-to-month renewals, and new empty spaces will be found for the artists if their studio finds a paying renter.”

I guess I am feeling a little cynical on many fronts in regard to this story. First, I obviously resent the idea that the arts don’t contribute to the economy. As I read this article though, I wanted to be happy that people acknowledge the value of the arts to their community, but it seems like the recognition is just utilitarian. The lease arrangement feels like crop rotation. You plant artists in depleted soil and as soon as it is enriched enough to grow your target crop, you move the artist to the next depleted place. It is especially poignant for a place like South Street where artists get pushed out, return and are pushed out again.

If artists go into this with their eyes open and promote the hell out of themselves so they can make as much money as they can before they get displaced, then it can be a winning proposition. Whatever money they make becomes the seed money for developing their work elsewhere. Maybe all the artists taking up residency on South Street can get together and start planning what neighborhood to take over when they get evicted. Go to a place that has a couple decades before things get too expensive to operate so their money will last awhile. (Hello guys, Camden, NJ needs you!)

Math, Science, Reading, Writing, Thinking– It’s In There

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My assistant theatre manager and I went to speak at an elementary school career day today. This is the first time we have been invited although the school has apparently been doing career days for nearly 20 years. They often have the same groups year after year so wanted to change the line up a little this year.

Now if you are thinking a theatre manager talking about his job for 30 minutes is about 27 minutes too long for your average fifth grader, I am way ahead of you. Some of the students had been to the theatre for an outreach performance last week so that gave us an opening to talk very briefly about what went in to getting the performers to the theatre. I squeezed in a stay in school pitch by noting the necessity for good reading, writing and artistic skills in putting a brochure together but then we moved on to the exciting part of theatre–performance and technology.

The sounds and faces actors make when they are doing vocal warm ups is pure gold for getting elementary age kids to participate. I also did a bit about how performers communicate non verbally with body, props and facial features. It was a big hit with the kids and provided the assistant theatre manager photos with which to blackmail me. My consolation was that I got asked for my autograph.

Then I broke out the lighting equipment my technical director gave me for the demo. This really lent itself to our message about the value of education. I used the equipment to illustrate the importance of lighting people from all sides. Then I talked about the importance of math in figuring out how many instruments you could attach to a circuit. We had one bright light that used the limit of 1,000 watts but didn’t cover me from all angles vs. four instruments of 250 watts each that covered my whole body but wasn’t as bright. Which did they like better?

I pulled out some gels and talked very basically about additive vs subtractive color just to introduce the concept of color we perceive directly vs. what is reflected. Gotta know your science. At the student’s suggestion, we experimented using multiple gels to see what the result of mixing them together was. The big finale was putting the portable dimmer we had into demonstration mode to create a chase sequence of our gels.

I take the time to recount some of what we did because of a conversation we had with the Vice Principal at lunch. He volunteered, without anyone mentioning it, that he really wanted more art in the school but No Child Left Behind requirements were inhibiting him. He started citing studies that showed that the arts improve scores in the areas NCLB was requiring improvement.

Boy, it is great when you can eat your lunch and have people make the case you would normally deliver to them for you.

Catching up on my blog subscriptions, I came across this entry by Adam Huttler over at Fractured Atlas

I’m always skeptical of arts advocacy arguments that emphasize the importance of arts as a hobby in support of other (presumably more serious or important) endeavors. You know, like when people claim arts education is important because it helps kids do better at math. That’s great and all, but what’s wrong with the fact that it helps kids do better at art? Why isn’t that enough? Even setting aside the intrinsic value of the arts, the direct benefits to society from arts and culture activities are well documented (economic development, urban renewal, etc.) We shouldn’t have to justify our existence on the idea that, by supporting and practicing the arts, some totally unrelated but positive thing might happen by accident.

I agree wholly with him but would just like to add that people getting better at math, science and reading when they experience the arts doesn’t happen by accident either. The arts don’t existing in a vacuum and magically bestow their benefits. People become better at math, science, reading, writing, critical and creative thinking etc through the arts because the arts require you to use math, science, reading, writing, creative and critical thinking. We know that people have a more positive relationship with the arts if they have had active interactions vs. experiences where they simply watched. I feel pretty confident in claiming, without any statistical backing whatsoever, that students also gain greater benefits in the aforementioned subject areas if they have actively participated in the arts.

Living The Fantasy..Sort Of

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One of the reasons I enjoy my job is because I get to live my fantasies. One of my favorite involves standing in front of the ticket office having ticket holder praise my acumen in contracting high quality performers while those who did not purchase in advance wail in lament at seeing the sold out sign in the ticket office window.

Of course, being a fantasy, it doesn’t live up to reality. In my fantasy, the show has been sold out for weeks or showing clear signs of doing so for some time. The most recent reality is that ticket sales were steady, but few for months. At week out we we barely had 150 tickets sold. Then things started picking up 3 days before and exploded the last two days before the performance.

The people who showed up having not bought tickets had spent 6 months telling me how excited they were this performer was coming. They worked two buildings over, had a poster for the event right next to their office doors and received two emails exhorting them to purchase tickets.

It is hard to be savor being pleased with oneself when you are stifling the instinct to smack people upside their heads.

Granted, it is inevitable that a popular show will require dealing with a few disappointed souls who did not act quickly enough. My real reaction was more to roll my eyes in exasperation than to enact the V-8 forehead smack.

My real concern is that with people making decisions so close performance dates it is becoming harder to discern between a show destined to sell out and a flop before the actual performance date. In the context of the proposal of my last entry to allow presenters to cancel when ticket sales look dismal, I might have canceled had I been engaging in that practice. The article I wrote on came into my hands in a timely manner. It not only got me thinking, but it connected with a situation I was experiencing.

Numa Saisselin’s proposal to allow presenters to cancel includes proving diligence in promoting the show. In this case, I can pretty clearly trace the surge in sales to media coverage for which I did not pay. I probably need not have bought any advertising space at all. One story on the local NPR station I knew would probably happen because the interviewer asked for a contact name. The second, a feature story in the newspaper, was totally a surprise to me. The writer, who usually asks me for contact information didn’t in this case so I had no idea the story would run.

I feel confident in saying I wouldn’t have needed to advertise in this instance because I believe a lot of people knew and valued the performer. The stories were merely a kick in the butt to get them to start buying. For the rest of my performances, it can be difficult to make effective decisions. I am fairly certain advertising and electronic reminders during the week of the performance is effective for one portion of my demographic and that periodic exposure of the information over a longer period of time is effective for another segment even though both groups are buying their tickets at the last moment.

Other than the brochure and email, we aren’t quite sure what is most effective. When we ask people where they heard about the performance, many times people can’t decide through what form of media they heard it much less what station or newspaper. (It can be quite interesting to learn we are advertising on radio or television when we haven’t.)

In any case, I could have shown an investment in promoting the show through various media and promotional campaigns and asked for a cancellation based on awful ticket sales–and geez I would have been wrong. Yet there have been a few times when I would have been oh so right to cancel based on identical circumstances. Hopefully most people don’t operate in a market in which such nebulous conditions exist, but I suspect a great many do or will in the course of a few years.

And I begin to think the agents already know this and have been monitoring the situation for years. The last couple places I have worked, agents periodically call to get ticket sales counts even though the artist is guaranteed a set amount rather than a percentage of the gate. I can’t recall any agent or management company directing promotional resources to our market if tickets weren’t selling well. Yet at times the agents could be pretty relentless about getting the attendance numbers.

Saisselin’s mention of the unofficial procedure for cancellations made me think that perhaps agents may have assembled quite an in-house database of artists’ average sales X days out in cities with Y demographics. They may have a fairly accurate idea of when a cancellation request might be in the offing or perhaps when it might be prudent to either drop an artist from their roster or work with the artist to improve elements of their performance.

In spite of my sold out performance fantasies, the trend seems to be toward committing to attendance later and later in the process. If agents are in fact compiling information for decision making purposes, they may find the predictive power of their stats to be increasingly less dependable any distance out from a performance as reality confounds their expectations. (Or maybe they have really good statistical models.)

It Might Not Be Entirely Dead Yet

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The president of my consortium went to a Western Arts Federation meeting and returned with some materials for the membership to read. One of the more provocative pieces was written by Numa C. Saisselin, Executive Director at the Count Basie Theatre entitled “Arts Presenting Is Dead.” (Full disclosure, I once interviewed with Numa for a job at the Count Basie.) Unfortunately, the document isn’t online. I would have to make some inquiries to get permission to store it on my blog.

Numa’s basic premise about presenting being dead is that the practice of offering “serious work” like “theatre, dance, classical music, and maybe the occasional folk singer” and being successful focused on doing only that is no longer viable. What has eroded this situation are elements of which we are all generally aware: The low barriers to entry of the presenting field means there are more people doing it in the general vicinity; competition comes not only from other performing arts organizations, but sporting events, television, computers; costs are going up but earned income, drop in corporate support and other economic factors make it difficult for presenters to break even; organizations aren’t doing new things to attract new audiences; “every market is different, but by and large we all compete for the same programs” and “every market is different, but by and large we all employ the same generic marketing strategies.”

Saisselin does a good job tracing the direction things have been headed and giving concrete examples of how his organization has faced each of these essential areas. The way he has found success is to become more nimble in his programming focusing less on establishing a concrete season for people to subscribe to and more on taking advantage of opportunities that present themselves in the short term and then communicating these new developments with his mailing lists. While they take the long view on some things, he likens his approach to that of a concert promoter rather than the traditional definition of a presenter.

He notes this approach may not work, and should not work, for everyone given that every market is different. He also acknowledges that his organization has to ask granting entities to have faith in them since they don’t have a concrete idea about what they may do with the money at the time of application.

One of the benefits of his approach is that it allows him to take advantage of opportunities where an agent is offering an artist at a lower price in order to keep them busy between performances. Saisselin feels that presenters need to move even beyond this and educate themselves more about artistic fees rather than blindly accepting what is asked. There are databases of artists performances all over the country that can allow you to compare yourself to similar communities to get an idea of what attendance was like and what ticket price was charged.

Now I know none of this sounds terribly provocative. I included most of this narration so you could get a general idea where Saisselin was coming from. What I am told has quite a few people up in arms and calling him irresponsible for suggesting is that presenters be able to cancel a performer 30 days out.

If the artist can cancel a date on 30 days notice to take a more important gig on a TV show, a feature film, or in a Broadway production; or a more lucrative gig in Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Reno or Tahoe; or in some cases for any reason, then the presenter should have the option of canceling on 30 days notice if ticket sales do not warrant proceeding. If the artist has the option of canceling to enhance their overall career or make more money, then the presenter should have the option of canceling if it’s going to lose money, or at least if it’s going to lose a lot of money.

From the artist’s and management’s perspective, not allowing presenters a cancellation option protects the artist from bad presenters. In other words, if the presenter does not do their job, the artist should not suffer, and that makes sense. But if the presenter does do its job, and tickets still do not sell, artists, agents and managers should accept at least a measure of responsibility. If we’re really all in this together, we should share the pain as well as the rewards.

He notes there is already an unofficial process one can follow to achieve this that generally ends up with the presenter paying 50% of the artist fee as a cancellation penalty. He suggests making it a formal part of contracts. While the presenter will still realize a loss, it won’t be a debilitating one

The presenter would be required to jump through some hoops to make such a request. When booking an artist, the presenter would have to submit a marketing plan, and satisfy management that the plan is reasonable, and has worked in the past. When making a cancellation request, the presenter would have to document that they had followed through on the marketing plan, without achieving the desired results…

…Artists would not be forced to play for half empty (or less) houses to collect their check, but in the event of a cancellation would still be fairly compensated for reserving the performance date. Agents and managers would be saved from having their artist develop a reputation as a box office loser, and would have the opportunity to revisit and revise their own strategies, perhaps getting their artist into smaller rooms, and building or rebuilding their artist’s career in another way. Presenters would be saved from throwing good money after bad when they already know a show is not selling.

He goes on to make some good points about improving standards for arts managers and boards of directors which I hope to address in later entries. For now I just wanted to float this idea. I am not quite sure how I feel about it. Assuming the practice moved in this direction either through active efforts of presenters or by default as tough economic times make the unspoken procedures into the standard, is it a direction we want to head?

It is easy to get angry at ever increasing fees and being left in the lurch by artists and talk about leveling the field in the abstract. There can be some unwanted repercussions though. I have been to the booking conferences and there the dynamic is one where the presenters have all the power. Artists and agents complain that presenters won’t acknowledge them or meet their eyes as they pass. I suppose if more people moved to act as promoters as Saisselin has, then fewer arrangements will be made at conferences and more will be made as a result of emails and YouTube videos. Not to imply artist cancellations for a better gig is revenge for the conference snub, but maybe it will be good if that uncomfortable vibe was removed from the equation.

My concern is that the money factor becomes a larger issue and emerging artists get further marginalized if 30 day cancellations become standard. Is an agent or manager really going to invest time in cultivating someone who is yielding them a percentage of 50% fee or are they going to go with the known quantity that dependably fills seats?

Certainly, the internet allows people to promote themselves fairly well so they don’t have to rely on an agent. For those like me who already get a constant stream of artist availability emails, more virtually unknowns adding themselves to the mix only makes things more difficult. As evil as agents may be made out to be, the good ones develop relationships with you that enable them to provide appropriate advice to presenters. Saisselin mentions his appreciation for an agent that invested years in a relationship with him before he actually booked an artist.

One road to success I can see is if the economy gets so bad that presenters turn their attention to seeking out low cost regional and local performers. Sasselin mentions how the record single went out of vogue only to come back again thanks to the iPod. Perhaps the impresario will make a return of sorts as people with theatre facilities turn their attention to cultivating the careers of regional artists as agents drop them.

Sasselin’s proposal is certainly something to consider in some form or another in order to relieve the pressure on presenters. I don’t think it can be applied in as straightforward a manner as he suggests.

**One thing that did occur to me as I was writing is that it would be great for the small touring artist if someone would create a piece of online software that integrated communications, scheduling and maps. That way a person could email, IM, etc about a gig, have the mapping feature tell them if it is actually reasonable to drive/fly that distance in the time allotted between gigs and then place it in a schedule they can access while on the road. Heck, if it could suggest flights, car rental places and hotels, that would be great too. (Except I imagine the top suggestions would be positioned there by paid advertising and may not be the most affordable for our struggling artist.)**

Fought The Board and The Board Won

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With Drew McManus’ post about Scorched Earth Governance today, I thought I would share my own tale of overbearing boards. My story isn’t as extreme as anything Drew mentioned but it does illustrate boards micromanaging, perhaps to the detriment of the organization. I haven’t told this story before out of respect for the Executive Director who had to continue working with the board. About three weeks ago, I noticed the ED position was being advertised and upon further checking discovered the ED had moved on to fresher fields.

When I write that decisions were made “perhaps to the detriment of the organization,” it is because this involves a job for which I was interviewing. Obviously I can’t make an objective judgment about whether the person who got the job was better for the position. This isn’t a disgruntled story about how poorly I was treated. It was only because the experience was so strange that I felt the need to record notes on it. I actually felt highly complimented and valued by the whole situation. It is the Executive Director who was probably came away with the worst of it.

A number of years back I had interviewed for a General Director position at an arts center. The position required that I handle a lot of the financial aspects of the center. It also required that I have a great deal of involvement in operations of an annual festival and troubleshoot problems that arose with classes and artist residencies. I would be the first person called in the middle of the night.

After the interview, I pretty much felt that I had won over the staff but wasn’t sure about the Executive Director or the Board. Eventually, I got a call from the Executive Director that said exactly that. Then he added that while he had gone into the interview looking for someone different, as he reviewed my application, read my blog and spoke to my references, he realized he had initially been looking for someone like himself when I was clearly the only candidate suited for the job.

So I was elated that my interview, my references and best of all, my blog had come together to make such a strong case for me –and that the guy I am going to be working for is thoughtful enough to examine and reevaluate his expectations.

As the Executive Director continued, the complicating factor emerged. The board wanted someone who was more of an accountant and had reservations about me. He called me so he could go into a meeting the next day with responses to their concerns and fight for me as top candidate. He felt that the board members who had called my references were twisting what the references said around to make unwarranted assumptions about me. They told him if he hired me, his fate would be connected with mine.

This had a quite a chilling effect on my enthusiasm. I mean, I was even more flattered than before that someone believed in me so much that he was willing to put his own employment on the line. As much as I wanted to believe that once on the job I would win the board over by exhibiting my excellence, I wasn’t terribly keen on having people rooting for me to fail before I started.

In the end though, he found that the power unilaterally hire a subordinate was taken out of his hands as the board insisted on the person who was predominantly an accountant. The ED said the whole situation cost him a great deal politically. I actually don’t know how much longer he lasted. It has been a few years so the recent job ad could well be to replace his replacement.

It was just a very strange situation. I had never heard of a board involving themselves so intimately in hiring a person who wouldn’t be answering to them. The position didn’t set organizational policy and direction, nor did it have the ability to act autonomously. The place already had a book keeper so proficiency in keeping accounts wasn’t a high priority. Assembling and interpreting financial statements was important but I had years of experience doing so at that point.

It is the Executive Director who bears responsibility for the staff that is hired. Unless they are incredibly negligent in monitoring and disciplining employees, the ED’s job shouldn’t necessarily be directly in jeopardy with every new hire.

I spoke privately with a few people about the whole situation. The general sentiment was that the board needed better instruction about what its role in the organization was. While a board generally makes decisions about new member recruitment rather than the executive director, the ED had a role to play in educating and steering the board in its development.

So often the concern is that a board is too disengaged, unaware of the activities of the organization and remiss in the exercise of its oversight and fiduciary responsibilities. This board seemed hyper-engaged, at least in relation to this particular function. I suspect my experience was not an aberration but rather a symptom of an unhealthy dynamic between the board and the executive director. Just as the executive director saw my skills as complementary to his, since this was a newly created position, I wonder if the board’s agenda was to fill in the places in which they felt the Executive Director was lacking.

Art. But Only If You Say So First

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All right. I realize the question “What is art?” is extremely complex on its own and talk shows, especially comedic ones, do not lend themselves to nuanced explanations. I would think a former director of the Whitney Museum could do better than definite it solely as the artist’s intention. Yet that is exactly what David Ross, said former director of the Whitney did on the Colbert show when discussing the copyright issues surrounding Shepard Fairey’s alteration of Manny Garcia’s photo of Barack Obama.

First he says Garcia’s photo is not art because Garcia considers himself to be a journalist rather than an artist. Then goes on to say “Works of arts are essentially the function of intention.” When Colbert asks if Ross, as a professional in the visual arts field, couldn’t declare Garcia’s photo art, Ross disavows any ability to do so without Garcia taking his hint to do so. Which I guess means that all that pre-Columbian pottery on display in museums isn’t art because the potters intended them to be functional and not art.

Is this some new trend in arts ethics where you respect the creator of a work’s perception about what it is they have created? If so, it doesn’t seem like everyone has gotten the message. Ray Bradbury, for example, keeps insisting Fahrenheit 451 isn’t about censorship but people continue to insist–to his face–that it is. Of course, he intended to create a work of literature. Perhaps once you label something as art, people figure you cede ownership of the interpretation.

Ross doesn’t qualify his definition as only being in this case. He openly says that even if it is completely awful, something is arts by simple virtue of a creator’s statement. Actually, like all discussions of art, I guess it isn’t quite that simple. What if two people with song writing credit make contradictory statements about what they wrote? What happens when one person calls it art and the other considers it to be an ad jingle? Plenty of classical music appears in both television commercials and in concert halls. (I can’t find it at the moment, but I have a vague recollection of a symphony orchestra programming television jingles as a concert.)

But really, none of that explains why Ross was so cagey about his answers. If anyone has some insight, I would be interested in hearing it. In the meantime, here is the clip.

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Obama Poster Debate – David Ross and Ed Colbert
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

When You Grab That Cute Ball Of Fur, You Also Get The Teeth

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Sometimes I wonder if my first entries for this blog were among some of the best because I seem to find myself drawn back to their topics more often than later entries. A recent piece [ed. original link is broken, updated with 2014 retrospective post] I read via Artsjournal.com by Melodie Bahan, the Director of Communications at the Guthrie Theatre makes me think back to the piece by Chris Lavin I wrote about early on. Bahan, like Lavin argues for better writing by arts journalists. Like Lavin, regarding the depth of coverage sports sports receive, Bahan notes that articles on movies provide a fair bit of background information to a reader while it is hard to discern between preview and review pieces for theatre.

Features about theater are often glossy, shallow puff pieces that are indistinguishable from reviews. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had someone say to me, after reading a feature story about a show that hadn’t opened yet, “Wow, great review in the paper today.” And the very sporadic stories that do get reported are disproportionately about money – or the lack thereof – and therefore focus on only the large theaters. Plus, because these stories are so sporadic and lacking in context, complex issues are boiled down to one line conclusions.
[…]
When the Playwrights’ Center or the Guthrie or Mixed Blood gets a grant, the papers run a paragraph culled from a press release announcing the grantor, grantee, amount and purpose. And then…? Our critics don’t have time to follow the money to see how it actually creates art because they have to write reviews of the six shows that opened this week, an interview with an American Idol reject who’s appearing in a touring production of Grease, another profile of that really gorgeous actress they’ve profiled twice this year, and a Valentine’s Day poem.

In this performing arts community, there are personalities and huge egos and unsung talent and incredible artistry and gossip and bad blood and conflict. Readers are being denied those stories because our writers are spending their time writing reviews that won’t be nearly as interesting, vital, or even as accurate.

Bahan points to the work of papers like Time Out Chicago as something of an ideal. (Though she admits she might not welcome their attention were it turned on her organization.) She cites as constructive contributions to the arts articles examining the causes behind the preponderance of Caucasians in Chicago theatre and the positive and negative impact of large commercial shows on the local theatre scene.

His stories are fully reported and sourced – nowhere in his stories did I read, “Some say…” or “The theater community is buzzing about…” – both phrases used by journalists who have no sources to confirm their own opinions. Real arts journalism is informative and detailed and interesting, and it makes theater relevant.

Artsjournal also carried a rebuttal interview with Claude Peck, senior arts editor for the Guthrie’s home town paper, the Star-Tribune. Peck acknowledges that theatre reviews are generally designed to advise people whether they should spend money on a performance or not. His most pointed criticism for Bahan was that it is difficult to do any substantive journalism because arts organizations, the Guthrie especially, deny them access.

He paused, somewhat dramatically: “Very difficult, for example, in the case of the Guthrie, which has had a long reputation of giving the barest minimum of cooperation for our newsgathering efforts.”

By this point, I realized this had become a February Festivus — a full-scale airing of grievances. Bahan had exorcised some demons about writers, and Peck was now unloading on subjects: If they plead for tougher journalism, they best not be hypocrites when their own phone rings.

“We recently did a story on Guthrie director Joe Dowling’s salary,” Peck said. “Melodie made it clear to me in a conference before the story ran that she and the Guthrie would officially participate in no way whatsoever, be of any help with any numbers for that story.”

He added, “I told her I didn’t blame her, and we would try to newsgather in any way we can. And fortunately, we found board members willing to speak on the record.”

After the piece ran, he says she wrote him an email “comparing that story to a Molotov Cocktail tossed into an already fearful community. And yet we did see the news value in that story: Dowling was making more than any New York not-for-profit theater director or any regional director — even discounting a one-time $100,000 bonus, he was at the top of the heap nationally. As the economy was heading into the shitter, we felt that was some news we wanted to write about.”

This all recalls portions of Chris Lavin’s earlier piece:

When compared to the open access a sports franchise allows, most arts organizations look like a cross between the Kremlin and the Vatican. Casting is closed. Practices closed. Interviews with actors and actresses limited and guarded. An athlete who refuses to do interviews can get fined. An actor or actress or director or composer who can’t find time for the media is not uncommon….How often have journalists either ignored or been kept from financial problems that plague many arts organizations until a “crisis” makes publicity — late as it is — unavoidable.

The parallels with Lavin’s observations go a little further in this case. Bahan criticizes the local papers for not sniffing out the massive financial troubles at Theatre de la Jeune Lune. Peck notes that the guarded status the arts world maintains kept his paper from confirming any rumors of problems Theatre de la Jeune Lune had for quite some time.

I just thought the whole situation was a great reminder to us all that when we bemoan the lack of good arts coverage, we should be mindful that what we wish for is a double edged sword situation and not entirely the ideal we envision.

Programming Comfort Food

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I attended the season planning meeting of my block booking consortium today. As I suspected, many projects which would have been quickly picked up by the membership in recent years were deferred to other years because of financial concerns. One partner is going into a major retrenchment mode reducing their events from 10 to three or four. I left the meeting with fewer details solidified than in the past, in part because there were fewer tours available to collaborate on. There are a few dangling possibilities that I can pursue but I will have to work much hard to build a tour working on people individually than I would have in the meeting.

The situation was expressed best by one of the members. She spoke about her audiences orienting on “comfort food” rather than experimenting with new fare. While she isn’t moving toward more pop culture acts, many of the performers she is looking at have performed at her venue before or are similar enough to previous artists to provide audiences with a familiar reference point. Because of this approach, even though economics are driving so many decisions, she actually turned down the opportunity to present a less expensive, lesser known act that would be more intellectually challenging in favor of a much more expensive, better known one.

There were a couple positive outcomes to the meeting. A board member flew over with the director of his organization in an attempt to understand how the consortium worked. When a board member is motivated by financial uncertainty to involve themselves in some aspect of operations, it can be a iffy proposition. Negative judgments made after a short exposure to an unfamiliar process can be unhealthy for an organization. In this case, it was a positive experience all around because the board member asked a lot of questions and seemed to recognize that the problems they were facing were widespread and not particular to them or due to missteps by the director.

That was the second positive outcome of the meeting. For the first time since I have been a member of the consortium, people actually took the time to talk about a number of subjects. The people who attended the Arts Presenters conference last month spoke about the Marketing Segmentation Study Alan Brown from Wolf Brown spoke on. I was pleased, of course, since I am a believer in arts people taking the time to stay abreast of recent literature and generally stay informed.

There was also discussion of different strategies people are using in pricing, marketing and sponsorship. I took quite a few notes. The one idea I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of was providing show sponsors with the option of either having a full page ad in the program book or donating the space to a non-profit. That is a win all around since the sponsor gets points with both the theatre and another non-profit and gets to write off more of the sponsorship as a donation since they didn’t get the value of the ad space. The theatre gets the financial support and scores a few points with the non-profit and its supporters. The other non-profit gets increased exposure.

Is This The First Step To Better A Structure?

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If you haven’t heard yet, Michael Kaiser, President of the Kennedy Center has decided to turn the Center’s resources, knowledge and expertise toward helping arts organizations around the country weather the current financial turmoil in a program called Arts in Crisis.

I am very hopeful about this effort and I want to encourage people to participate either as a seeker of knowledge or as a mentor. Like many people, I have some reservations. My primary concern was if he and his staff were really equipped to do this. It seems like a big job. I haven’t really been impressed by ArtsManager.org which is also a service they offer. The discussion boards are barely trafficked, resource area doesn’t have much and job boards are completely empty. I can participate in more lively discussion on blogs and other forums without having to register. There are much better free job and resource sites.

On the other hand, Arts in Crisis effort might be closer to the Kennedy Center, and certainly Kaiser’s true competencies. There are few organizations in the country who have the resources and knowledge to act as brokers of knowledge in this manner. Frankly, if this is going to work Kaiser might do well to tap those other few organizations to get involved and provide guidance, resources and leadership in encouraging people to become mentors. This may mean that Arts in Crisis needs to leave the Kennedy Center’s direct control if another has the infrastructure to marry knowledge with need. The National Performing Arts Conference Conveners and Partners, for example, have databases full of arts professionals and have had more personal and direct contact with them than the Kennedy Center has.

My optimism and hope is that the current necessity is the mother of invention of a method of partnering, mentoring, information sharing and learning that arts and cultural institutions sorely need. If some strengthening network emerges out the road Michael Kaiser and the Kennedy Center have started upon, that will be great.

My concern is that for this to happen there is a lot of resistance to overcome. People might have fear of revealing weaknesses to local competitors or fear of mentoring a competitor only to have them use the good advice to eclipse them. It might be best to match up people who aren’t too far away to drive for site visits but distant enough not to be in direct competition.

There might be fear of helping another organization will mean neglecting your own. Or people might just not think they have anything to offer. One of my initial thoughts was that I wished I had the knowledge necessary to help–forgetting for a moment that I have contributed a respectable amount of constructive feedback for the PACE construction project.

The truth is, a lot of arts professionals with a great deal to offer may not have the first clue about how to effectively mentor and provide feedback to others in the industry. It will probably be important for the Arts in Crisis team to provide training videos and printed materials to assist in the process. My suspicion is that it may take a lot of poking and prodding from discipline service organizations and state/local arts councils to get people to imagine themselves as a mentor and download the materials.

As I said, the best of all possible worlds will be one where the industry emerges with greater strength and unity, confident and having proved they are a force to be acknowledged by governmental entities.

Going beyond that, the ideal would be for many organizations to form productive partnerships and then be able to go out and instruct others in their core competencies. One group might have developed a crackerjack presenting consortium, another might have a great method for developing and producing new works in partnership with higher education writing and performing arts programs, still another might have successfully leveraged their collective purchasing power to share legal, accounting and facilities services.

What will ultimately strengthen us is not depending on the expertise concentrated in a few central entities. It is going to be cultivating collective strengths
and having a system by which others can access the knowledge, even if it is as simple as having a list of the right people to call.

Is Audacity What Counts?

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In December I wrote that one of the initial speakers at the Arts Presenters conference was going to talk about how the current financial crisis evolved. Arts Presenters posted Jeremy Nowak’s conference remarks today. It is a little long, but if you are seeking an understanding of the forces and situations that came into play, he does a thorough job explaining things.

His suggestions on how arts organizations should operate in the new economic climate appear at the end of the piece. He talks about collaboration, emphasizing the economic and status quo smashing value of creativity and cautious management, but ambitious planning.

His observations under the heading “Defining What Counts” resonated with me most. (emphasis mine)

“A crisis brings an opportunity to define what is most important – the core part of what you do and what counts the most. In this sense, a crisis can be a painfully clarifying opportunity. A crisis also creates a political screen to eliminate legacy programs and initiatives that are hard to remove for historical reasons but can be justified at a point of financial duress. A crisis is a time to preserve what is core; organize your constituents (including funders) and define what efficiencies can be instituted.”

My first thoughts connected back to a story he told early on. He talks about how his organization is rebuilding a community made famous in HBO’s The Wire.

“Two weeks ago, in a magically irrational economic act, we purchased a liquor store that was selling alcohol to young people and functioned as a gathering place for drug distribution. We overpaid because its demise was worth more to us than the market value (and the owners knew it). We then added to this irrational act by publicly burning the liquor license – which we could have sold on the market for $75,000. At least it got us a good article and picture in the Baltimore Sun.”

My first thought was that this act defined what was important. It exemplified the an argument for investing in arts and culture in times of crisis. Even though there may be a higher cost involved, you pay it because it changes the dynamics of the community and improves the environment both directly and indirectly.

My second thought focused more on the sentence in bold above. Although Nowak meant it to be an internal practice, crisis very frequently provides a political screen to eliminate funding for arts programs in communities and schools. What it is that matters is not easily defined. The result is that often the trash trimmed away having been determined not to matter can very well be another person’s treasure.

Both Andrew Taylor and Greg Sandow have entries along these lines. Sandow specifically cites the oft used argument that if a government entity supports the arts, then babies will have to go without food and medicine. This seems a bit of a false choice because there are plenty of other categories of things you can choose to cut as well that can result in more people being fed. How many more children would be alive if legislators didn’t have franking privileges? Not a question entirely lacking in relevance given the NEA’s budget is generally measured as about two postage stamps per person in the U.S.

I want to make it clear that I haven’t really been a big proponent of some sort of arts bailout. I am still not convinced the sector is best served by jumping on the bandwagon. That said, I am beginning to think that the arts and culture industry ends up being treated thus because they are not audacious enough. There is never any money in the budget for the arts but we can go deeper into debt to bailout the banks, automobile companies and wage wars.

I will acknowledge that perhaps the production methods and business models the arts employ might be as behind the times as those of the automobile industry and are need of revamp. I have admitted as much throughout this blog. It really requires some cojones to take bailout money from the government meant to provide relief to debtors and pay yourself huge amounts in bonuses. Yet despite all the displeasure the U.S. citizens. and their president feel for this activity, the administration is still working their butts off to convince Congress to find a way to give them another infusion.

I know that arts organizations get “bailed” out by state, city and county governments and concerned citizens on a regular basis and in many cases, the organization is back asking for more a couple years later. But I can’t think of any who have been accused of so blatantly misdirecting these funds the way the financial sector has, much less on the same scale. The peril is genuine.

I begin to think that maybe we should be standing up and asking for a bailout. While the effort should be entirely serious, the ultimate goal might not be to get the money as to become less timid about asking. If the banks aren’t cowed by the idea of people being dispossessed of their homes and belongings, maybe we shouldn’t be deflected in our efforts by protests that saying yes to us means people will die or live in agony. I think we are all comforted by how empathetic arts and culture people are but I wonder if the recognition of that is being employed to manipulate us.

Actors Locally

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About a year ago I started thinking about doing a project that involved our organization’s immediate artistic community, artists throughout the county and as much of the public at large as we might be able to entice into becoming involved. Bringing different artists who don’t normally work together is one goal. Second, I was thinking that as much as I talk about how groups should offer audiences alternatives to sitting passively in a dark room, I should really put my money where my mouth is. I would also like to break down barriers members of the general public have about their artistic abilities.

When I originally began considering this I was thinking of bringing out an artist who was well-practiced at taking volunteers with little or no experience and producing a show in two days. My thought was to have a site specific show developed over the course of a week to ten days and then have a final performance. The assistant theatre manager suggested a local artist who could spearhead the same sort of effort. Suddenly the necessity of having someone who had experience putting a show together in a short time was less relevant.

It also has the benefit of being less expensive since I don’t have to house, transport and feed guest artists. Ultimately, I may end up spending the same amount of money, but it will be over a longer period of time which will hopefully allow a greater number of people to be involved.

I didn’t really plan it this way, but I think I may be presenting more local artists in the near future. I suspect when I attend my consortium meeting next week, I am going to find that my partners are really scaling back their activities. I will probably have fewer opportunities to partner with them due to scheduling conflicts and differences in our respective audiences’ interests. Buying local won’t be sustainable over the long term because there are few local artists I can present that people can’t see more frequently closer to the city core and drink alcohol while they are doing so. The strength I have is an ability, limited as it may be, to encourage and cultivate some new works.

None of the three artists I have spoken with over the last month about developing performances are new acquaintances. We have had relationships over the last couple years and we have reached a point where broaching the possibility of collaboration was logical. The tough economic times weren’t really a motivation. I haven’t suddenly decided to make due with the local talent because it has become tougher to bring people in from afar.

Anyway, I spoke with the artist today and she was just thrilled by the prospect. I could see the wheels beginning to turn inside her head. I presented the whole concept to her as pretty open ended. I know who I want to have involved, but until we have a core idea I can’t go convince them to sign on. As we spoke today, we realized we can really expand this project out a little bit. There is a possibility to have the produce of workshops, continuing ed courses and street fair craft projects created over the course of a year integrated into the final performance. Some possible workshops might even be designed to begin eroding anxiety and make people comfortable with expressing themselves with the aim of involving them in the final effort.

For example, we talked about mask making classes/workshops. Masks can be fun to make and wearing them allows people to be less self conscious. The artist related a story of how she brought a group of visual artists together to help her with a performance piece and they all protested they weren’t performers. Then they began to tentatively approach the masks and play with them. By the end of two hours the biggest problem was that people couldn’t decide which of the characters they had created for the masks to use in the performance.

Right now I am pretty optimistic about the future of the project even though I don’t know when it might start or finish. The woman with whom I spoke isn’t letting any moss grow on her and wants to get right to planning. We have a meeting on Thursday to look at possible locations around the grounds. I intend to post on the progress we make in the planning and implementation of our little scheme and share some of the challenges we face so that others might avoid them.

Cost Is More Than Pocket Change

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We had a meeting today with some renters to discuss an event they will be presenting in about a month. It is going to be a performance by a youth orchestra and choral group. One of the organizers told us his method of figuring out how to arrange his musicians given the space constraints. He uses pocket change.

Pennies do for most musicians but nickels are necessary for those like the flautists who need a little more room. Much of the percussion section is represented by quarters.

This low tech approach brought some “kids today” thoughts to mind. Many industries complain that recent graduates from all levels don’t possess the basic skills to perform the task at hand. It is frequently mentioned that the performing arts are so expensive because production costs can’t be circumvented/minimized by advancements in technology and efficiencies (aka Baumol’s cost disease).

However, there have been instances when technology seems to have indeed left people lacking in the ability to perform basic tasks. A few years ago, there was a problem with fitting a visiting designer’s design in the facility at which I was working. He was asked to quickly revise the problem portion and hand it off to the technicians to execute. Unfortunately, since his design software wasn’t available, it had to be done by hand and the designer didn’t have the requisite skill to effectively execute it. The project was delayed a bit longer than expected when one of the technicians had to draw what the designer dictated.

In this last year we had a similar problem with another designer who insisted the show couldn’t be done without a specific type of computer controlled lighting equipment which we didn’t have. We were somewhat incredulous when it turned out that all the special equipment for was going to be used for was backlighting. Using the special equipment would reduce the number of instruments needed by 1/3. However, we had plenty of lighting instruments and circuits to produce the effect. But it took the better part of a week to convince the guy to add the other instruments to the design rather than insisting we rent expensive equipment for a half hour piece.

Alas, technology may have advanced, but the ability for our budgets to acquire technology for our house stock hasn’t. Nor had it for three of our partners so resistance to change in the face of such dearth was also puzzling and frustrating.

I can’t say for sure if the designer wasn’t just busy with other projects and really did not want to revise plans. From my vantage and from the responses we received, it appeared to be lack of imagination and problem solving skills to conceive of alternatives.

I don’t want to leave the youngest set out so I will also roll my virtual eyes at some of our students who don’t know how to use a ruler. I am not talking about scale rulers which I will admit make my eyes glaze over. I am referring to a standard 1 foot ruler. Guys, 1/4 scale means 1 inch equals 4 feet. Shave something off that chair you made out of foamcore–it is 8 feet high on your set model!!!!

I understand that technology does actually contribute to greater efficiency. It is quicker to hang one instrument instead of three. You can also do much more with the same number of circuits. You can design much faster if the computer does it for you and automatically includes all the pertinent information people need to execute the plan. But I think there is a greater cost when people don’t possess the basic skills of their profession for which technology provides a shortcut.

I really do comprehend the desire to move beyond the basic rules to the place where we get to express ourselves. I still have a paper from college with a comment that the content of my writing was simply excellent and insightful–but the grammatical errors were legion. At the time, all I cared about was the recognition of my brilliance. My grammatical skills were obviously sufficient to allow my brilliance to shine through after all. No need to shackle myself with tedious rules which only professors valued.

Now if you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you have probably come across instances where my fingers act independently of my brain. Those times notwithstanding, there came a moment when I realized if I was to advance in nearly any career, I needed to embrace basic grammatical discipline. I know now that paying attention to how others employ those picayune details has enhanced the sheer magnificence my literature professor acknowledged so long ago.

Interesting Thoughts From Other Places

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Read some good stuff today on two blogs that really can’t be improved upon by any commentary I can offer so read on—

The Nonprofiteer had some sage advice in a recent entry regarding recruiting people to fill volunteer roles be it a board member or ticket taker — recruit in pairs.

The two-by-two recommendation is most often made about Board members, and specifically about minority Board members: don’t ask someone to be the only African-American or the only woman in the room. But it’s equally true of any Board recruit, or in fact of any volunteer: bring in 1 person, and you’ve got a 50% shot at keeping him/her. Bring in 2, and you’ve got an 80% shot at keeping them both.

Why? Because misery loves company, and being a newcomer/outsider is always misery. And because unless your Board or volunteer program is truly astonishing, anyone observing it from the outside will think it could use a lot of improvement. The prospect of trying to improve something unaided is usually daunting to the point of not bothering.

Seems easier to do with board members who tend to be actively recruited as opposed to volunteers for other areas which are often self-selected. You don’t want to turn someone away simply because no one else offered their services this week. It is possible though to orient people in pairs or small groups to facilitate bonding among them. If the 80% retention stat is correct, it seems prudent to arrange the situation so people’s initial volunteer encounters are in multiples.

Over at Producer’s Perspective, Ken Davenport relates an answer Sandy Block of Sernio Coyne gave to the question about why producers attempt to mount Broadway productions given the enormous challenges. Block stops the class in which the question was asked and queries those attending how many remember the first movie they saw and then how many can name the first Broadway show they saw. Few people raised their hands at the first question but everyone raised their hands at the second.

Says Davenport:

There’s a highly emotional experience connected with Broadway; a passion that can be turned into profit . . . Now the real question is, how can we capitalize on that?

Davenport then asks his readers to take Sandy Block’s survey and record the first movie and first Broadway show they saw in the comments section of the entry. If you remember, go on over and write it in.

New Place, New Look

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As you can see, the blog has a new look. It may not be as apparent that the blog is in a new place as well. After five years on my old Movable Type platform, I accepted Inside the Arts founder, Drew McManus’ invitation to move my blog entirely to the Inside the Arts website. I still own the Buttsseats.com domain name and have it directed here so you can keep your bookmarks. Those who subscribe by newsfeed are probably going to have to reset them. I know that some people liked a verbose feed and others preferred a more compact feed and I plan to feature both.

I apologize to those who had difficulties reaching the blog these last couple days. I was having some difficulty getting my domain name to redirect here properly. I appreciate Drew’s patience with my emails urging him to try various settings in an attempt to make things work. There are still a couple things that probably need to be worked out but my intention is to limit such flailing to times of low traffic to the blog.

My primary motivation for moving is difficulties I had getting Movable Type to do what I wanted. It is a very flexible platform for blogging and as such has a lot of settings that can be adjusted. I believe that despite my best efforts in emulating standard settings, there was something set somewhere that precluded the execution of my changes.

Had it just been a matter of cosmetics, I wouldn’t have had a problem but there were problems with comment posting where you would be scolded for not entering the spam prevention password—only you were never given the opportunity to do so unless you previewed your post first. I spent the better part of three weeks playing with various settings to no avail. I believe this new location will provide readers with a much better experience.

My second motivation was based somewhat in envy. Drew McManus is an attentive shepherd for our merry little band of bloggers here. Evey week he sends out tips on how to improve blog posts. Often these tips include information on new plugins and programs available for the WordPress platform Inside the Arts uses. Given I was faced with so much frustration, the proposition of accomplishing my goals at a click of a button was rather seductive. There are also little nifty tools that seek out broken links within entries which will enable me to keep my old entries either up to date or at least bereft of dead links. Months of coveting such luxuries inspired me to move my blog.

I am pleased thus far with the new blogging accommodations and look forward to being able to provide a more informative experience for my readers given the new tools at my disposal.

Tough Times Bring Not So Strange Bedfellows

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I have often written about what I felt was the very likely need for arts organizations to start partnering in some manner, be it booking artists or sharing the cost of bookkeeping. The approaching/continuing financial crisis seems bound to force some arts organizations into such arrangements if they want to continue operating. In the Chronicle of Philanthropy, there is a piece about the distress the Charleston Symphony Orchestra has been going through as a result of their past administrative decisions.

The one thing that grabbed my attention was a quote from the Coastal Community Foundation following the mention of Charleston Stage and Charleston Ballet Theatre having similar problems.

“For the longest time, each of the organizations thought they were alone in having financial difficulties,” says George C. Stevens, the foundation’s chief executive. “When they began to realize that, no, their partner down the street is also having the same challenges, then they started saying, ‘Well, how can we work together?'”

The organizations’ first step: a $30,000 joint marketing campaign to promote their holiday performances. The city of Charleston covered the cost of the campaign.

The community foundation created a Web site to complement the advertising, and media organizations threw in donated ad time and space on top of what was purchased.

The effort seems to have paid off. The symphony sold more than 90,000 single tickets to its holiday performances, exceeding the goal it had set of 76,000.”

I am not going to claim partnering will solve problems by increasing attendance, etc. In fact, there is no mention about how well the ballet and theatre did as a result of the effort. The entire story might not be wholly positive. Still, I applaud the Coastal Community Foundation for organizing and facilitating the marketing campaign.

I also won’t claim that I know the status of all my neighbors in the arts. However, I do work together with other arts organizations to put our seasons together. For all the areas in which I wish our partnership did better, I will say that I am aware of the troubles other arts organizations are having. Frankly, I would never have listed our frequent communications on various details as a benefit of membership but in light of these Charleston groups feeling they were alone in their troubles, I guess it does assist in placing one’s situation in a larger context.

About three years ago, Andrew Taylor had an entry on his blog suggesting arts organizations be open about things that went wrong with a program on grant reports. Though you might imagine other arts organizations in your community are just waiting in the wings like hungry wolves ready to drag you down at the first sign of weakness, the stakes probably aren’t really that high. Chances are you would find it beneficial to talk about some of the significant and not so significant challenges you face.

Also—it would probably help me personally if you all would be a little more open. When people email or ask me how things are going, I am fairly open about some of the challenges we face in a general sort of way. I talk about the annoying and sort of troublesome, potentially cause for concern, but not so dire stuff. I get the sense from people’s reactions that I sound like Marvin the Paranoid Android. Okay, well maybe I stray into cynicism a little. The whole romantization of martyrdom a Catholic upbringing affords you and all. But really, once people realize half the stuff they are experiencing is actually the status quo, franker folks like me don’t come off as such downers.

Letter to President Obama

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The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

There are many calling for you to create a cabinet level position for arts and culture. There are certainly many factors involved in such a decision. There is a necessity to exhibit how the country values arts and culture by providing leadership, but also revising the way we fund these disciplines. You may not be aware, but the section of the tax code under which many non-profit arts and culture organizations operate, 501 (c) (3), does not mention the arts and culture at all. Despite this, it is fortunate that the generosity of the American people, businesses, foundations and endowments flows to arts and cultural organizations under the auspices of this section of the tax code. Whether or not arts and culture find a greater representation within your administration, you can do a great service to the community by creating an improved, more focused way for the arts to acquire support.

For a sense of why the current method of funding the arts is in need of change, one might read John Kreilder’s “Leverage Lost The Nonprofit Arts in the Post-Ford Era.” In the third section of the piece, Kreilder notes that the theory employed by the Ford Foundation was that support they provided could be leveraged by stimulating donations from other sources. This same approach has been used by the National Endowment for the Arts, many state arts agencies and some private funders.

But as Kreilder notes:

“Any student of biological, physical or economic systems would immediately recognize the flaw in the logic of funding leverage, as it has been practiced not only in the arts, but also throughout the nonprofit sector. One of the fundamental tenets of systems studies is the “free lunch” principle: no system can depend on the unlimited growth of resources. The leveraged funding strategy of the Ford era can be likened to a chain letter, a Ponzi scheme, or any other pyramidal growth system. The initiators of chain letters and Ponzi schemes often claim that, for a small effort or investment, a virtually limitless return will be realized, and though initially this prophecy may appear to be feasible, inevitably all such arrangements must fail because resources are finite. In other words, there is no perpetual free lunch. Ultimately, funding leverage will become unsustainable.”

Five years ago the Independent Sector issued a statement calling on foundations and endowments to shift their focus to long term broad support of organizational core programs rather than the short term project support prevalent today. The Independent Sector felt this short term emphasis keeps non profit organizations focused on reinventing their programs to comply with narrow guidelines rather than investing their energy in building institutional capacity.

If your administration were able to provide leadership and incentives to encourage longer term, core support of non-profit organizations, it would be a boon for the entire sector. But for non-governmental funding of non-profits to thrive, there needs to be greater opportunities both in the way these entities can incorporate themselves as well as the mechanisms by which they can raise money. The origins of both these solutions will be found in the tax code.

One of the ways this might manifest is by providing increased options for the formation of non-profit entities. Among the possible processes by which a company might form could be as hybrids between the current 501 (c) (3) and for profit methods of incorporation. It might be necessary for such an entity to pay more taxes than a current non-profit but such arrangements will expand the avenues by which people can pursue serving myriad constituencies while facilitating opportunities for greater self-support.

As for diversifying the means for garnering support, Douglas K. Smith had an intriguing idea a few years back he termed, Dynamic Deductibility The piece he authored explains it in detail, but simply, a person would buy X amount worth of shares in an organization but doesn’t take a deduction until he sells the shares. If the share value goes up, he takes a bigger deduction than he would have had he donated directly. If not, he takes a smaller deduction.

The primary way this would differ from the stock market is a non-profit would get money every time the stock changed hands rather than the one time infusion a for-profit gets at its initial public offering. This option doesn’t exist as yet because there are no laws creating or governing such transactions. Certainly there is much to be considered in how the tax code and laws might be written to accommodate such an arrangement and guard against abuse. When I first read the article, I wondered if the activities of non-profits would be substantial enough to attract investment interest. Having since learned of the financial instruments in which people were investing that lead to the current financial crisis, I am convinced these organizations offer more than enough tangibility. Donors employing this avenue to support an organization realize returns in the form of both observing how the non-profit is able to serve its constituencies and tracking how the organization is valued via its shares.

My hope would be that smaller non-profit organizations who did not feel they could garner significant interest on their own, or even larger organizations looking to enhance their value, would come together to offer shares in partnership with one another. I am an arts person so my immediate vision is of visual and performing arts organizations cooperating to increase their shared value. It doesn’t take much effort, however, to also imagine social work and health care organizations working together to improve the value of their shares by improving the lives of the communities they serve.

I hope you have noticed, President Obama, that while our endowments and savings, small as they were already, have shrunk severely we in arts and culture have not asked for a bailout. Certainly it has been suggested. It is difficult not to want a portion of the billions of dollars being distributed. Yet the loudest cries right now aren’t for you to increase the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, but rather to create a cabinet position. We don’t want a bailout as much as we want the esteem and respect of our government and our countrymen. We want to be better organized and educated so we can achieve and serve with greater efficiency.

What I ask is in the same vein. Assist us in becoming more viable and integral contributors to the economy, the national cultural and social identity.

Most respectfully,

Joseph Patti

What Price Cultural Leadership?

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There has been a real big push in the last month or so between articles and email exhortations to have President Elect Obama appoint a cabinet level secretary of culture. As I read these things it really appears that no one has really stopped to consider what the implications of such a position might entail. There was an article that appeared right after the idea came up at the National Performing Arts Convention (NPAC) this summer. I have spent about 8 hours over the last three days, alas to no avail, trying to find it because it made a convincing case for being wary about instituting such a position. It might be that I am misremembering when it appeared and that is preventing me from finding it.

From what I do recall of the article, one of the points it made was that the effort would cost the President a huge amount of political capital because there is no national popular support of the arts. Education, Health, Defense, Homeland Security, Interior, etc can all have cases made for their importance and people will go along. Government support for the arts has often been a contentious issue disproportionate to the actual funding it receives. It certainly isn’t a reliable survey method, but when you read comments on the articles about a cabinet level culture position, those against pretty much unanimously mention not wanting their tax dollars to go to the arts. If the Obama administration pushes for the creation of this position, there is going to be a great deal of public debate on the topic.

Now I will be the first to admit that short of some transformative incident, national support and appreciation for the arts will likely never emerge on its own. I don’t anticipate there will ever be a good time to institute this position so there may be no point in waiting. If the next phase of the economy is going to be creative, then we certainly want strong leadership in that direction. Arts and Culture could absolutely benefit from stronger central leadership and advocacy. I would welcome a scenario where everyone working in an cultural organization was better educated and equipped, working collaboratively with other entities and enjoyed the confidence of having support on the national level.

A Secretary of Culture would also benefit the country internationally since we don’t have a central person with whom foreign officials of similar portfolios can meet. There would be much rejoicing if Visa processes for artists were facilitated and that pernicious 30% tax on foreign performer income was adjusted.

The thing to remember is that the agendas of the government, no matter how sympathetic an administration might be to one’s cause, is unlikely to be synchronized with the agendas of the arts and culture organizations of the country. It is one thing to disagree with the initiatives of the National Endowment for the Arts because the worst impact they can have on you is to decide not to fund you. When you have a person making cultural policy decisions for the entire country, that is a different matter. And if you stepped up to call for this cabinet level position, your cooperation will certainly be expected.

There is the question of whose interests will this person predominantly represent. Both Hollywood and folk artists are home grown and national treasures, but money buys access and influence. Will the Secretary of Culture press for greater freedoms of artistic expression or fight to preserve and extend copyright and intellectual property protections at the behest of large corporations? Will live experiences and interactions with art be valued or more virtual experiences like television, film, internet and video games?

If one thing is supported, other areas end up lacking by simple default. What happens though if an administration decides something should be actively censored or undermined? Things can be declared as unrepresentative of the culture of the United States or simply un-American and we will have asked that someone be placed in the position of doing so.

Don’t think it will happen? Last year British Culture Minister, Marge Hodge, criticized The Proms of…well actually being too British and not inclusive enough of the multi-ethnic backgrounds of the country. Yes, multi-cultural focus is to be desired, but it could have easily gone the other way and people were still miffed at her comment. In 2002 another British culture minister, Kim Howells, stated the contenders for the visual arts Turner Prize had produced “conceptual bullshit.”

It is one thing if a senator stands up and criticizes a work of art but quite another when someone whose job it is to eat, drink and sleep arts and culture and theoretically knows what they are talking about makes damning statements.

Finally, don’t forget, there is no guarantee arts and cultural institutions will get any additional money. The budget can be cut regardless of the title the nation’s top arts official holds. In fact, for a number of years Congress will be able to claim they quintupled the arts budget without grant awards increasing a penny because all the money will be directed to the bureaucracy of this new Department of Culture.

So the question is, are you willing to accept the possibility of all this? As cynical as I may sound here, honestly as soon as I read about the NPAC proposal to have a cabinet level position, my first thought was of Gilberto Gil. In my mind, he is the Culture Minister to emulate in terms of striking a balance between the interests of the creators and consumers and promoting creative expression.

But I am also cautious. Given how we have discovered that the Justice Department and Inspectors General of many government offices have been subverted and suborned in recent years, there are no assurances anyone can offer me that my gravest concerns can be warded against.

I guess for me, it comes back around to where I started this post. If there is enough political will to make the position effective and credible to accomplish all the positive things we hope for, then I am generally willing to accept the potential for the negatives.

Stuff You Can Use: Google Analytics

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Analyzing Effort Effectiveness
As a logical follow up to yesterdays post about how we have been communicating with our constituencies, I wanted to mention one way we are trying to track effectiveness. I recently started using Google Analytics to get a better sense of the traffic on our website. The service is free, probably because Google is already collecting the information and all you are doing is asking them to share what they collect from the pages you mark with your unique code.

I tested it out on my blog for a couple months before applying it to my web pages at work. As I noted, you have to add a short bit of code to each web page that you want it to track. Since the blog has fewer distinct pages on it, I felt it was a better use of effort to monitor the viability there. The data is much more organized and easier to read than when using programs like Awstats. Analytics also theoretically weeds out visits from search engine spiders and other automatic processes so the numbers you see are more likely to represent real people.

Sooo Much Information
The service provides some interesting information. You can see what pages people visited, how often they visited, how they got to your page (direct address, search engine, referred by another web page), how long they stayed, from where they were visiting and what search terms brought them to your site. You can also see how often someone from an IP address returned to your page and how many new visitors you had. The default setting is to show you the visits over a month’s time but you can expand that to a longer period or focus in on just one day. If you are interested, you can even learn what sort of operating systems, monitor settings, browsers and Flash versions your visitors are using. If a lot of people are using older computers, you may want to reconsider optimizing your web pages for viewing on monitors with higher resolutions. As I see from the report, there are a couple people viewing our web pages on iPhones.

I Think They Like Us!
One of the things I have discovered using Google Analytics on our work pages is that people seem to read and act on the emails we send out. The number of visitors to our web page shot up a great deal the day we sent out our last email and remained higher for a few days after. The visits to the event we profiled also increased as you might imagine, but we also saw a bump in visits to the pages for later events. We also saw an increase in ticket sales though that is a separate system from what Google tracks for us.

Who is Watching Me?
There is an option to create your own custom reports from the information provided. Despite all the information available, there are a couple weaknesses with the data you collect. With my blog I noticed that often when I visited from my home computer, my visits wouldn’t register. However, there did appear to be visits from the nearby Air Force base in the same number and duration of my visits. My theory is that because cable modems shift traffic around to nodes with less traffic, sometimes my visits registered as my neighborhood, sometimes I was apparently on an air force base. To bolster my theory, on January 12 both my blog and work website registered two hits from the Air Force base. When checked Network Location on my blog report, there were a bunch of links from the local internet server. The Network Location report on my work site shows “DoD Network Information Center.” So I am pretty sure the Air Force isn’t monitoring my blog on a daily basis. (Or at least they are doing a better job covering their tracks.)

But I Wanna Know More!
The other aspect I find lacking is that the report maker is limited. I don’t know if this is just because it is a beta feature and they haven’t enabled cross referencing for everything or because the limits help protect the anonymity of the data. What I would love to do is cross reference hits on certain pages to neighborhoods. The neighborhood data might not be entirely accurate but there would still be some value in knowing certain shows were attracting interest from certain general areas.

There are definitely entire swaths of the county that are under served and granters are interested in having us reach. Because these are people who are least likely to order in advance, it is difficult to use ticket sales records to prove an event designed to appeal to them actually did. If I was able to show there was a lot of activity on the show specific page of our website from these areas, it would lend some veracity to our claims. I am hoping this capability emerges at some point.

Even though the vast majority of the Network Locations register as large providers like Time Warner, Comcast and Verizon, there is enough specific information to give you a hint at the type of people viewing your pages. In addition to the aforementioned members of the Air Force, there are a couple hits from various universities, the city, the state department of education, health care providers and insurance companies on the theatre website.

On the whole, Google Analytics’ data is both feast and famine. You learn a lot more than you did without it, but in some cases you have no idea how the data might be pertinent to your needs and activities or you can’t process the data as presented in a manner that is meaningful. This is probably actually comforting to many of us since this means the sites we visit can’t easily figure out a lot of stuff about us either. (Though I am sure there are some smart people out there for whom this data is more than sufficient to establish identities.)

Still, if you acknowledge and accept the limitations, it can be illuminating and fun to explore. I have certainly only scraped the surface. We probably haven’t been using and playing with Analytics long enough to discover its full potential. I would really love to learn how other organizations have made the data work for them.

Segmenting Mass Appeal

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More and more often these days at work are segmenting our message to audiences and I have to say, it is a pretty labor intensive undertaking.

In the last week I have:

Contacted Newspapers
Sent out press releases and images for our upcoming shows and discovered the newspaper arts editor who was there in November took the buy out package and is no longer there. The features editor who oversees the weekend arts section has stated she is taking things in a new direction. Considering that the last direction was more pop culture oriented and away from the arts, I am reluctant to learn what this new focus might be. In any case, this means shifting the language of my releases yet again to make our performances seem to resonate with this new theme without misrepresenting the shows.

It would be great if the rival papers, seeing the shift in focus figured the main daily was on to something and copied them. The problem is that the alternative weekly defines themselves as an alternative to the main daily. We get a healthy portion of our audience from the alt-weekly. Where the main daily wants to write stories on shows with the widest appeal, the alt-weekly wants to tell people why a select niche go to these shows. Their readership is pretty savvy so a lot of explanation isn’t necessary. However, I did make a note to the editor observing why people might, on the face of things, underestimate a couple events.

The main daily paper has also started to emphasize user generated content which makes me think the days of the editors that remain may be numbered, too. We already lost the editors who did stories for the neighborhood inserts a couple months earlier. For the moment, it gives me another avenue of communication with the public. Although this means essentially writing a press release that appeals directly to the general public rather than one that tries to convince an editor the performance is worth tasking someone to write a story about.

Contacted Schools
Because it is the start of a new semester, we emailed information to many of the area colleges suggesting professors add us to their syllabus as supplementary material or extra credit assignment at the very least. I email the theatre, dance and music people, of course. However, thanks to online course listings, I am able to contact history, education, religion, anthropology, literature and philosophy professors when the subject matter of a performance aligns with course topics. Some shows are more suitable than others. Although it is fairly labor intensive to cross reference course titles with the descriptions on other web pages, we get enough professors giving positive responses to make it worthwhile. At the very least, many of the professors attend even if their students don’t. Since these academics are from other campuses, this helps spread the word about our venue to a desirable demographic.

Contacted Our Email List
Every month I send out emails about the performances for that month. Because this group is so large, we know the least about how to effectively pitch to this group. Our approach can be similar to the material we use on the newspaper’s user generated content. Except these people know us and have a relationship with us and we can’t talk to them as if they are entirely anonymous entities. We also have the benefit of controlling the timing and content of what we release. This is the group I am most anxious about contacting because I don’t want our communications to come across as spam.

Back in November, Adam Thurman at The Mission Paradox touched on this subject. I am indeed the Joe who made the comment on the entry. I am concerned about find a balance between telling a compelling story about our organization and saying so much people consider it spam and don’t read it. Every month we have a few people who unsubscribe from our list. I keep a list to make sure we honor their wishes and don’t resubscribe them at some point. I rarely know why people leave our list. Why did they chose this month to leave and not last month?

Today I actually received one answer to this silent question. A woman emailed us to tell us she was leaving the list because she lived on the other side of the county and no longer drove at night. She urged us to keep up our good work offering people great performances. It is encouraging to get emails like this. I don’t have the capacity to ask people and allow people to explain why they are unsubscribing when they do so. I am looking into a technology which I believe might actually facilitate this.

Adam Thurman’s answer to the questions I had about balancing selling with creating relationships was a suggestion to add a couple interesting tidbits into the email. He noted that if an item needed more than a tidbit in length to explain it, a link to a page expounding on the item should be provided for those interested in more information.

The performance schedule for the next six weeks really lent itself to this practice. One event, the performers encourage people to bring hand held percussion instruments for audience participation. . Another event we are able to offer an opportunity to attend a master class so suggested people mark the date. We will follow up with another reminder next month.

We Also Did Everything Else
We were also working on PSAs and print and radio ads making changes appropriate for each audience as we went. You pretty much have the idea of how we were working so I won’t belabor the point with each of these.

The thing that is intimidating is that as much as we have crafted our message for each of these audiences, we could be doing more. Technology allows us to collect and process information more readily than in the past. We only have a small portion of our total audience’s email addresses and attendance histories because so many people are buying tickets at the door where it is difficult to both capture contact information and serve everyone on line in a timely manner.

Still, I have quite a bit of information with which to work. I can target all people who attended dance performances with a custom message about an upcoming dance performance. I could subdivide them and target people who attended sub-genres of dance similar to that of an upcoming event and further customize my message to make note of that similarity. I can toss in other criteria like frequency over a set period of time if I wanted.

Just as there can be a Tyranny of Choice with consumer goods, so too can the plethora of options paralyze your marketing and promotional plans in an attempt to find the perfect permutation of elements to generate the most effective appeal.

The Emperor’s New Ad

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I emailed an ad to our local weekly for the Spring Arts issue today… only I forgot to attach the ad. The realization appropriately hit me about the same time as the incoming email chime sounded alerting me to the message from the newspaper informing me of my faux pas. Trying to save face, I wrote back that we were experimenting with user generated content and our goal had been to have readers use their imagination to create our ad in the blank space. But, I continued, given that our ad did not appeal to smart, savvy people like themselves, perhaps I needed to re-evaluate our campaign design and the ad I had attached would have to suffice for now.

When I finished that bit of wit, I started to wonder if we would one day reach a point where our audience was creating promotions for us. It would involve a heck of a lot of trust on the part of an organization to give up control of part of its message. In the presenting field, I think it would take even longer to cede control over an entire season given that an artist’s image would be involved along with the organization’s. Many artists reserve the right to review promotional materials utilizing their image before they are submitted for publication. Not that artists working for a producing organization shouldn’t be concerned about how their image is being used. It is easier for the producing organization to communicate and gain agreement about the type and manner in which images will be released for use.

People already use social networking sites to send out information and links about their favorite performances. Often the materials being used are low resolution or low quality and stolen/borrowed from a source that stole or borrowed it themselves. One of the ways I imagine this evolving is that organizations will place images, video and audio in a publicly accessible place and allow people to manipulate the material to promote a performance. Providing descriptions and scripts will allow people to get a better idea about a production. The process might even go so far as to allow people to sit in on rehearsals so they can get an even more accurate sense of the production. If a performer or group isn’t present, then video of past performances might be made available.

Some groups might allow unfettered access to their materials and let people go wild with the philosophy that the only bad publicity is the lack thereof. Others may limit access to individuals who have shown they can produce high quality, respectful products.

My initial thought is that people might mash materials up and send some sort of promotional piece out to their friends or post it on their personal sites. I would think that mainly it would be those who have a personal connection to the show who would put something together. But who knows, maybe the challenge of making highly creative promotional pieces will become something everyone does to express themselves. I rather suspect that it will take the development of some new platform or channel that facilitates this sort of thing that propels it as a widespread activity.

Wherein I Become Interested In Eskimos

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Busy, busy, busy day today. I had a lot of meetings, some of which I enjoyed more than others. One that gave me cause for optimism was a planning meeting for a show we will be developing and co-producing to be staged in September 2010. As part of this partnership we provide rehearsal and performance space as well as design services and facilities. The other organization is creating the performance. One of the things that encouraged me was that they held an intimate fund raising event with only 20 invited and raised a fairly respectable amount toward development costs. (I was also happy that we had the meeting because I was able to remind him about an impending grant deadline.) This is a good sign that in these financially troubled times, people are still willing to provide support for a project.

Most of the conversation revolved around set design. Since we are hoping the show will do a little touring, trying to get a preliminary idea of how to create something that was light enough to travel, strong enough to bear weight and durable enough to be reconstructed frequently monopolized a bit of time. This is one of the aspects of my job from which I gain satisfaction. I may be the administrator guy but the dynamics are such that I feel I can run around making suggestions about materials and design and not have the designers and artists look at me with disdain for treading upon their territory. It won’t be long before the project progresses to the point my insights have little value, but I enjoy the fact that I have enough expertise to have my suggestions valued.

The guy with whom we are partnering is doing some amazing cultural exchanges via his company with Japanese groups and has started making contacts in Korea. In addition, he is often asked to participate in cultural exchanges and projects with the Inupiat and Yupik people of Alaska. His interactions with these two latter groups are going to inform the content of the show we are developing. So I am sitting there thinking, why the heck isn’t more funding going his way? He is developing some really vibrant new works that are culturally respectful and have a fairly wide general appeal. I know we will sell out so I need to make sure we don’t limit the number of performances we can do like we did on the last project we produced.

He isn’t reticent about promoting his projects and he sits on a lot of grant panels so he has a pretty good idea how to make a persuasive case. I mean, until today I had no familiarity with the Inupiat and Yupik. I have to say, I want to learn a little more about them because this guy got me excited about the cultural elements he intends to integrate into the work. The tech director and musical director are pretty excited about these elements too. As I am writing this, it strikes me that maybe he isn’t getting more funding because no one is writing letters in support of his grant that say he has made them excited to learn a little more about Eskimo cultural practices–and this is for a show that has nothing to do with Eskimos.

I am already pointing him to some of the grants I listed last week. Maybe I need to offer to write a letter talking about how impressed with his cross-cultural work I am and how it makes me want to learn. This guy is worth funding.

What Price Success?

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A recent revelation that Guthrie Theatre director Joe Dowling makes over $680,000 in salary and benefits in 2007 has a lot of people grumbling. As of this writing, there are 156 comments on a Star-Tribune article on Dowling’s pay. Some commenters defend the salary in the context of the Guthrie being at the top of the theatre game as opposed to the local sports teams who are not performing too well and get paid much more and receive public funding for stadiums. Others are saying his pay is ludicrous and that the theatre should not be receiving any more public money if they can afford to pay him that amount. Of cited is a desire that proceeds of the tax passed last month to benefit the arts not go to the theatre.

Dowling is purported to be the highest paid theatre director in the country. I don’t have my passwords to the latest salary surveys with me to check but I will assume it is correct or nearly so. A couple years ago, I asked if a musical director of a symphony was really worth X times as much as the musician. (I can’t seem to find the entry, so it might have been another highly placed position in a symphony.) Looking at the same comparison on an annual basis between Dowling and an actor or perhaps ticket office clerk, I would say Dowling wasn’t worth it.

However, looking at Dowling’s history at the Guthrie, that is another matter. He has spent the last 13 years there. Twelve of those years the theatre has been in the black. He retired $1.8 million in debt, expanded audiences and guided the organization to construct a new facility on the Mississippi River. ($100,000 of his 2007 salary was a bonus for doing so.) In this context, he is someone the board of directors will want to keep around. Whether they could do so for less might be the question but they would certainly be fools to immediately pay whomever eventually replaces him close to his departing salary. I daresay there are few in the country capable of directing the Guthrie at the level it currently operates.

As something of a comparison, this past November it was revealed that the highest paid university president in the country was David Sargent at Suffolk University. It raised quite a ruckus when it was learned he makes $2.5 million when the median salary for presidents is about $500,000. There were some extenuating circumstances like the fact he has worked for the university since 1956 and has been president for the last 19 years and never taken a sabbatical in that time.

Is longevity and dedication worth that much? Is it worth that much in light of the rising cost of college educations and the declining value of personal assets?

Given the tough financial times, people are especially sensitive to any indication people receiving public monies are squandering it. There is some indication that Dowling is responsive to the needs of the organization. According to the article when times were tough back in 2003, he took a voluntary 20% pay cut. Now assuming he was making around $300,000 at the time, (I don’t use Guidestar often enough to spring for the Premium membership necessary to view 990s from that far back.), that is a $60,000 cut.

For a lot of theatres, that number probably represents a position or two. Given his most recent salary, the same percentage would probably represent four or five positions. In that context, you can see why people commenting on the article are suggesting public and personal funds be directed toward the less affluent arts organizations. It is people’s right to spend their money where they feel it will do the most good.

I would argue though that the Guthrie Theatre isn’t just any ordinary theatre. It’s founding has a place in theatre history at the start of the residential theatre movement with the intention of being an alternative to Broadway. It is ironic then that the first salary comparison the article makes it to New York. The Guthrie is meant to set a standard, and by many measures it does, but Broadway is apparently still the gold standard. So if the Twin Cities and surrounding region feel the organization has lived up to the promise of it’s founding and has cultivated a high quality product for audiences without commercial success being the sole driving force, they ought to be proud and support it.

This is an entirely different issue than how much the people responsible for creating this state are being paid to do so. There are far too few great theatres around to damn the organization for how much the director is being paid. It is perfectly valid to be identify the Guthrie as a source of Minnesotan pride and ask the board to engage in a conversation about the appropriateness of the leadership’s salaries. I am afraid it would get lost in the noise of a hundred other issues that spawn objections, but it would really be exciting and interesting to have someone lay out the case for why the pay is justified.

Because you know, everyone is focused on the issue of why he gets paid so much more than everyone else for the work he does. No one in the article or comments asks why it is everyone else puts up with getting paid so much less for the work they do. That is the conversation the Guthrie should start.

N.B. – January 6 – Editorial in the Star Tribune defending Guthrie board’s decisions regarding Dowling’s salary. Additionally notes that in the larger world of non-profits, Dowling comes in at #14 in the Minneapolis area.

Great Performances, No Ads

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So I went to see Slumdog Millionaire last night. Terrific movie. I am a little puzzled why with all the national ads running for this movie, a county with 115 first run movie screens and 800,000 this movie is only playing on one screen. The movie has been running here for about a month and the theatre was still pretty packed last night. But that is an entry for another time.

What I wanted to gripe about a little is all the freakin’ ads. I know that you all know about them so it isn’t news but I have never seen so many ads before the previews even started. By the time the movie began to run, I realized, I was no longer interested in seeing it. Fortunately, the story started to appeal to me pretty quickly.

My point is, the movies are hobbling themselves from the very start by running all these ads. I wasn’t in a receptive frame of mind when the show started so the film had to start winning me over right from the beginning. If the movie had only been mediocre or designed to start slow and build, it would have been over before it had begun. No chance, no way, no how. Because movies aren’t live events, the producers and performers can’t sense the audience getting restless the way a person giving an overlong curtain speech can. (or should be sensing) So the ads keep going on and on heedless of how the audience feels.

I am thinking my next wave of promotions for our productions should have the words, “Great Performances, No Ads,” using the absence of ads as a selling point.

Information You Can Use- Grants and Foundations

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I don’t know if there is something in the air or just a lot of grant deadlines coming due but there were quite a few funding opportunities listed on the WESTAF website last week. I thought I would post on some of the opportunities that caught my eye. These aren’t all of them. WESTAF does good work and I don’t begrudge them their subscription fees which are pretty reasonable given the number of opportunities they list. Based on my assumption that everyone needs money and opportunities these days, it seems a moral imperative to post this information.

Google Grants
The first one is for free advertising for your non-profit from Google. It is similar to their Ad Words service though you don’t get as ready access to keywords and your ad has to be focused on your organization’s mission which is to be expected.

This is actually only one of the services they offer to non-profits. Check out the aptly named, Google for Non-profits for more information.

PennPAT
I have to say, I love PennPAT. They provide nice support for artists and organizations in the Mid-Atlantic States. I just wish I lived in the Mid-Atlantic states! However, no matter where you live, PennPAT will provide assistance with travel costs from anywhere in the US if you are traveling to see one of their artists perform. From the way I read the eligibility requirements, you could be living in Oregon and traveling to California to see one of their artists on tour. Or you could attend their annual showcase in Pennsylvania.

Wachovia Foundation
To receive support from these folks, you pretty much have to live in an area served by Wachovia Bank because they support non-profit organizations with which their employees volunteer. Focus is making artistic opportunities available to people with low to moderate incomes. If you think you are eligible, check out the details. At the very least, it is good to know the bank encourages their employees to volunteer with non-profits and then backs it up with some financial support. (Hey, I also don’t live in a Wachovia state!)

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
As the foundation name suggests, they are primarily focused on contemporary visual arts. However, they do occasionally support performing artists “when the visual arts are an inherent element of a production.” The scope of what they support in visual arts is pretty broad and includes scholarship as well as exhibitions, catalogs and creation of new works. There is also an award for defending the First Amendment right of artists.

Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs
This one is actually a program of the U.S. State Department supporting “cultural exchanges around the world as part of the nation’s public diplomacy strategy. ‘The Department’s agreements support academic, cultural and professional exchange and training programs as a means of seeking mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries and to promote the free exchange of information and ideas.'” If you want to be part of promoting international understanding, you may want to check out the website. I am actually not clear how performers position themselves to be considered since the project proposals apparently originate from what I assume are U.S. Embassies abroad.

The Dana Foundation
The Dana Foundation supports programs that provide professional development opportunities for arts specialists and professional artists who teach preK-12. They are looking for people who have created a curriculum for teaching the teachers essentially. Bad news is the are interested in supporting project originating in 50 mile radius around NYC, Los Angeles or Washington D.C. OR in rural areas. Not so good for those folks in Chicago and Dallas, et. al. but there are still a lot of people able to qualify from rural areas.

National Education Association (NEA) Foundation
The NEA you may not be as familiar with. These folks are also interested in supporting education, but don’t have a geographic limit. They also don’t have a subject area limit so you are potentially competing with everyone from every public school and public higher education institution. On the flip side, this provides possibilities for interdisciplinary and college prep projects.

The Multi-Arts Production (MAP) Fund
“A program of Creative Capital, supports original new work in all disciplines and traditions of the live performing arts. The goal of the MAP Fund is “to assist artists who are exploring and challenging the dynamics of live performance within our changing society, thus reflecting our culture’s innovation and growing diversity.” I haven’t applied for this but some groups with whom we closely partner have. It is a pretty competitive from what I hear.

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
The NEA we all know. Whether Barack Obama will be able to make good on his promises to have a robust arts policy while he is fighting to get the economy stimulated to the point it can be described as tepid remains to be seen. Still, seems like the time to stand up and advocate and apply for some funding.

Tough Times Follow Up

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Arts Presenters posted the audio from the conference call I sat in on two weeks ago.

At the end of my last entry, I referred to cryptic notes I had made to review information. One of the notes was “write about the Boston organization.” This was in reference to Sandra Gibson’s discussion of World Music/CRASHarts in Boston. The organization is sort of shaking up the type of events they offer and how they market them. According to Gibson, they have been cutting a lot of programs over the last 10 years due to increasingly constrained budgets, but they knew they had the ability to expand their reach to younger audiences. They hired a young man who started them on the road to adding back programs. One of the things they have done is began to collaborate with other area organizations and have added 50 concerts in the last year.

This new hire was the impetus for the programming but the fact he has been promoting the events in unconventional ways is really causing conflicts in the organization. The marketing department is anxious about not knowing how to message the events. They feel they should be doing press releases and making other promotional efforts. World Music/CRASHarts lists eight different venues around Boston at which they have events so it is understandable that clear and organized communications would be highly valued. The executive director has started conversations about the situation and the staff has decided to take a chance and market these 50 concerts employing Facebook and other alternative means.

Gibson says they are seeing 60% sell outs (not sure if she means 60% capacity or 60% of the 50 events have sold out. I assume the former.) close to the performance date. As a result they are changing their income projections to reflect an expectation of cash flow later in the process. They are seeing a crossover of audiences who usually respond to subscription campaigns and mailers who are getting their information from these alternative online sources.

In the context of my last entry, this seems like a good example of an organization that has questioned their assumptions about their programming and promotion methods. World Music/CRASHarts hasn’t gotten a huge infusion of cash, yet they have expanded their programming rather than contracting it as they had in the past. Though it was a source of anxiety, they also put some effort into less tested methods of communication to promote their events. At the end of the season, the new direction may turn out to have been unsuccessful. With some luck and discernment, it may provide lessons about how their approach should be refined as they move forward. The former process is unlikely to be sustainable, especially as it apparently involved an increased series of cuts.

Finding Some Direction In Tough Times

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Last week I participated in a conference call sponsored by APAP on the impact of the economy on the presenting field. The call was about an 75-90 minutes long and covered a fair bit of ground. They were supposed to post an audio file of the call this week but haven’t yet. Once they do, I will link to it. As you might imagine, there is quite a bit of concern about the topic. So much so that the opening plenary speaker at the conference will be an economist who will speak on how the current crisis came to be.

A lot of the participants were looking for guidance on possible solutions and ways to cope with the stresses they were feeling. There was a lot of constructive advice given but one of the earliest caveats issued was to resist making decisions that might provide short term relief but damage your organization’s reputation and goodwill over the long term. One example given was trying to dissolve contracts instead of trying to find areas to negotiate costs down.

Word gets around the industry so breaking a contract with one agent/artist can have repercussions for your organization very quickly. In the past month, I have conversations with three people who have moved to a different employer. If I had had poor relationships with any one of their former employers in the past year, word would have easily spread to take care in dealings with me.

Among the suggestions for coping with the current economic situation were examples that many arts organizations are now looking at collaborating, partnering or just plain merging operations. Some are looking at increasing their family programming since people are looking to do things closer to home. Someone on the call suggested that one of the great values of the arts is that, properly positioned, it can help communities deal with tough times and even build communities with others who are having a similarly tough time.

One term that kept coming up in the discussion was Porter’s Five Forces. (or Wikipedia entry) I could, and probably will, do an entirely separate entry on how this applies to the arts. If you have the time to read it, it will put some of the concepts brought up in the conference call in context.

One of the suggestions that was made was to examine the problems your organization has and determine if they really have their origin in the economic problems of if they are pre-existing. Were shifts in local demographics, values and preferences already leaving your organization behind? Was there another organization that had entered the market that was doing what you do, only better?

Something to look at is refocusing on the core competencies of your organization. By which the speaker meant, the elements that were central to what the public valued about your organization. The speaker (sorry, tough to keep track of people on a conference call) reiterated the idea that given another organization might now be doing a better job than you, it might be time to shift your focus.

Someone emailed in a question for the panel about how you innovate in times when there aren’t a lot of funds to support such activities. The answer that was given was to find a new path to achieve the mission. Shift the organization’s pathway away from business as usual. One should be prepared to question the underlying assumptions that you have about every aspect of the business from what your audience and community values to the effectiveness of the business model and organizational structure.

This strikes me as requiring a lot of bravery and resolve. With all the problems that an economic down turn brings, do you really have the time to devote to effecting this sort of change? Though frankly, in good times, do you really have the incentive to do so? In better times, you want to avoid the type of radical changes that may send you into a death spiral. You also have so many things to point at that are apparently working there is no need to closely examine the underlying assumptions.

Addressing other portions of the conference call will have to wait until they post the audio. The rest of my notes contain semi-cryptic messages to review parts of the session whose interesting details came too quickly for my note taking abilities. I am pleased that APAP has taken steps to inform and educated its constituency.

Answering “What Can I Do To Help?”

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NPR’s All Tech Considered show today talked about a website which helps a person’s friends assist them in times of crisis. The site, Lotsa Helping Hands provides the tools to create a free site at which people can volunteer to help someone out without actually having to ask them directly during stressful times. Among the examples given in the piece and the cases discussed were cooking food for funerals or people who had undergone surgery and arranging play dates to keep kids occupied during such times.

The site gives examples of coordinating rides to medical appointments, keeping track of elderly love one’s care, including confidential legal, financial and medical details from a distance. But they also suggest uses of the product for less worrisome situations like simply organizing volunteer efforts in the community.

What made me immediately think about this as being useful for arts organizations was that I was reading the blog at the Hancher Auditorium today. This summer they had an unfortunate visit by the Iowa River when heavy rains caused flooding. They might have been able to use this web site to organize the efforts of sympathetic supporters to clean up and move equipment and materials to dumpsters and alternate performance sites.

Presumably, the software can also be used for more mundane tasks such as allowing and organizing volunteers who sign up to usher, build, conduct tours and the like. I have passed the link on to the gentleman who handles our volunteer coordination to have him assess its usefulness to us.

Creativity Now

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Sort of busy as the holidays approach but a thought came up in recent conversations.

They say the next phase of the economy will emphasize creativity and so people need to acquire the appropriate skills.

I wonder if the recent financial problems originating from Wall Street compounded by the billions lost to the massive Ponzi scheme perpetuated by Bernard Madoff might actually help usher a higher valuation of creative backgrounds along. After all that has happened, and in light of what is yet to come, perhaps an MFA might have less of a stigma than an MBA.

More Manufacturing Your Worst Enemy

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As the title of the entry implies, I did a little more digging on the subject I covered in my last entry. The author of the story I originally quoted, Kaihan Krippendorff, mentioned that he would be writing about his interview with ePrize founder, Josh Linkner, over the course of a week so I sought out the other entries. In one of the entries, Krippendorff links to the audio of his interview.

There were a couple things of note. First was a promotional service (starting around 23:00) he designed to be affordable and accessible to the owner of “Jimmy’s Pizza Shop.” ePrize’s clients essentially pool their money in order to syndicate participation in the pool drawing of promotional prizes. Presumably, you can’t promise a Ford truck if you aren’t investing as much money as Coke does (or maybe you can, I won’t make any claim of being an expert on the business model.) The small business owner can log on and guided by a web based program, design their own promotion in about 15 minutes and have it immediately go live. The drawing is legal in all 50 states, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

If it is as easy as Linkner says, this could be a great resource for arts organizations. You could offer subscriber and employee rewards and perhaps even show related promotions.

Back on the topic of their invented rival, Slither, Linkner verifies that my suspicion of Krippendorff taking poetic license was completely unfounded. Slither did indeed “invade” the company to commit sabotage and espionage (starts around 33:00).

There were some things said in the interview which expound on the concept of how useful an invented enemy can be to a business. One benefit to corporate culture Linkner cites is that it allows open conversation that can circumvent office politics. Normally, he says, one might be hesitant to suggest that a policy is flawed for fear they will insult the person who created it. In a meeting Linkner says he may ask how Slither approaches a problem or to talk about the one thing a Slither counterpart does better than him/her. This allows conversations about weak spots in the organization’s processes and policies and how to improve rather than criticizing something specifically and marking it for elimination.

Manufacturing Your Worst Enemy

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I was reading on Fast Company about a company called ePrize that didn’t have a sufficiently large competitor so they created one to keep themselves innovative. ePrize created a company called Slither complete with logo, an industrial espionage group and history of competitive campaigns. (Though I am not sure about the latter two. That may have been the writer taking poetic license on ePrize’s poetic license.)

By asking its employees what they think their counterpart at Slither would do differently, Linker says ePrize “creates a fun, safe opening for continual discussion about what the company could do better.”

Ask yourself these three questions to see if a threat can unblock your business’ innovations.

1. Who or what is our worst enemy?
2. What is our enemy doing that we can do better?
3. Can we create an enemy to spark new ideas?

Arts organizations have no lack of competition of every shape and size so they have no need of creating an entity for that purpose. I was thinking that perhaps creating an imaginary competitor might be helpful in removing emotional elements which may present an impediment to objectively approaching problems and generating solutions. As I noted a year ago, there is a lot of emotion investment by those working in the arts.

In my personal experience, there is often a lot of envy for our arts neighbors: The other guys are favored yet undeserving of the grants they receive. The other guys are the darlings of the community. The community will give lots of money to save the darling from their missteps but don’t give us a second look. The other guys are bloated, arrogant and outdated; we are lean, innovative and the wave of the future.

In some places this attitude is more prevalent, other places it is less.

By creating an imaginary enemy, you can concentrate on responding to events without the emotional subtext lurking beneath the conversations. Yes, there are plenty of groups out there eating your lunch, but your biggest problem is The House of Extraordinary Matinee idols. (THEM) Your fictional enemy, THEM, noting the trend of sold out shows has decided to program seasons of 100% musicals. How do you position your next season in relation to this imagined challenge?

The fictional enemy doesn’t have to be a proxy for an actual rival in the community, it just has to present a credible challenge to your organization in order to spur innovation and creative thinking. I will confess there are three local organizations that do musicals 100% and others that include a couple in their seasons. I don’t see them as a direct threat to my audiences as I am annoyed by the fact they are essentially forced by the dearth of commercially viable musicals to mount a show another has done a year or so later. It drives me crazy to see the same titles coming around again. (One recently had to promote their production of High School Musical as the first community theatre production in the state because at least nine schools in the county have mounted it in the last three years. Last February & March, three schools performed it in the course of two weeks.) I frankly feel less agitated and more rational when I think of how I would approach the problem of the disembodied THEM.

Now as I said, I don’t see these groups as a direct threat to me. Other than being philosophically offended when I see their advertising, on the whole I don’t have any ill-feelings for them. I rail about the lack of diversity in local offerings for 5 minutes, mostly to entertain myself, and then get on with my day. There are others groups and factors I see as more direct competition. I don’t really harbor any ill will for them either. However, if I were going to design a hypothetical competitor, one of the things it would probably do is produce all musicals all the time. This is because it would have the characteristic of being a popular draw competing for people’s free time and disposable income but not have more elements in common with those I perceive more directly as rivals. Making the fiction resemble reality too closely might impede my ability to stay dispassionate.

Give it a try as an intellectual exercise. Think of a hypothetical entity with characteristics that might challenge you and decide how you would respond. When you have completed your thought process, think back and see if you actually acted that way in a similar situation. I will admit, hypotheticals can only help you so far. It is one thing to talk about how you would handle an irate customer and then discover how you really react in that situation.

In a sense though, what I am suggesting is a sort of reverse engineering where you reflect on the challenges you have faced with the emotion removed. That is why you need a fictitious opponent. When you engage in hindsight, you bring the emotional memory of what happened into your decision making process. Analyzing a situation in terms of “when he said X, I wish I had responded with Y,” can involve anger, resentment and self-recrimination. Also well phrased retorts, while satisfying, don’t solve the larger problem. Coming to the realization that your policies appear inconsistent to a hypothetical segment of your patrons can lead to communicating the policy differently or scrapping it altogether.

Theatre of the Future Gives Me Ulcers

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I happened upon the YouTube video below by Imagination Stage. I surmised that it was part of a contest of sorts held by Theatre Communications Group for organizations to make a video about the future because it is organized in the TCG YouTube account and most of the videos seem to deal with the future of theatre. Also, I have a vague recollection about the contest being listed somewhere.

At first I was a little depressed by the world they portrayed. Then I realized they probably have a pretty accurate view of how things will be. The opening where the girl is getting poor grades, most likely because she is involved in theatre, is actually pretty comforting because it show that some things won’t change.

At first I was a little put off by the idea that she was learning acting from a hologram, especially given that the hologram was pretty over the top. Of course, I figured holograms and virtual reality would be part of the future of theatre back when I started the blog. On the whole, I thought the video was well done and the details of the user interface they portrayed was spot on.

For a moment I was also a little turned off by the idea that acting instruction was structured as a video game with levels to advance through that people would try to gain shortcut cheats through.

Then I thought, we should be so lucky to have people that invested!

I was also heartened by the fact the young woman in the video wouldn’t even consider giving her friend a shortcut hint. There are no shortcuts to hard work, after all.

What disturbed me the most though was the concept that a production would be subject to the caprice of whether talented people chose to log in or not and doing so at the last minute. The video shows the young woman manifesting in a theatre and the director saying they hoped she would log on, tossing out an auditioner who was less qualified for some reason. I assumed she hadn’t obtained enough points/levels. Then the young woman rehearses as a hologram opposite live people and performs as Juliet at the opening the next night.

As I acknowledged though, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility. If audiences are waiting until the last moment to buy tickets, could not artists delay the decision about which production they wanted to be involved with until the last minute? If performers have the ability to manifest themselves as holograms in 2028, opportunities become available across the entire country and perhaps the world.

As long as there are more actors than roles, then there will always be competition. But then competition for elite performers also becomes extreme. Get great reviews for your performance as King Lear in Madison, WI one night, you could receive an offer to play Lear in Hong Kong the next night and actually be able to do it. What worries me is the ulcer inducing environment this will create for arts managers.

But damn, wouldn’t bring a real sense of excitement and unpredictability to the arts. The most notable companies won’t be those who can maintain a stable cast, it will be those who can produce a consistently high quality product regardless of the vagaries of the cast.

Prepare for Feast in Famine

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As much as I talk about what a bad turn things have taken of late, I do want to advocate cautious optimism unless you are in immediate danger of closing your doors. This may be a period of retrenchment and delaying activities, but it probably is not good to abandon long term plans entirely.

For one thing, your supporters may be more optimistic and energetic than you give them credit for. As you may remember, I am providing feedback on the design and construction of a performing arts center in Bellevue, WA. Within weeks of our group site visit, everything really went to hell on Wall Street with Lehman Brothers and many banks failing in the space of a week or two. I was praying that the finances of those who supported the performing arts center construction weren’t too entangled in these troubles. My fear was that the next email we got from the arts center administration was that they decided to scale back given the financial woes.

I was quite pleased when the next email brought news that everyone was excited by suggestions that came out of the site visit and that the plans were getting a little more ambitious. Around the same time, the local Indian community, undeterred by the emerging economic problems announced their intent to raise $1 million and were already $400,000 along. Last month, another support group held a benefit that raised $450,000. Given that the same event in 2007 raised $320,000, staying ambitious and optimistic in a faltering economy seems to have yielded some results.

Now I don’t expect everyone will realize a $130,000 gain by thinking positive. I am sure a lot of ground work was required over the intervening year to realize that sort of success. It’s the ground work, relationship building and planning that you can’t allow to falter if you decide to put activities on hold. In my theatre we are planning for a renovation. We know the renovation is going to be further off than it was last year but we are still moving ahead assessing the work that needs to be done. When things turn around and money becomes available, we want to be ready with a plan. Not having a plan at the time might mean getting passed over for another budget cycle or two.

Even if you aren’t building something physical, you can use the time to meet key decision makers to gauge what their agendas are so you can make effective proposals when they are more open to receiving them. It is also the time to research and learn new theories related to your long term plans. True, arts leaders have little time to engage in research as it is. The necessity of putting action on hold allows you to research periodically over a longer interval than trying to cram it into a short gap before implementation. Or even worse, neglecting to be up on current practices and theories while executing a program.

Certainly tough times bring their own problems which displace our ability to engage in any of these practices. Yet, we do have the ability to be constructive even as we may choose to defer construction.

NB-Since this entry first appeared, I have corrected my math 😛

The Lipinski Stradivarius Is Coming To Town

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…Oh and it is bringing Frank Almond with it.

I have been hearing ads and stories about a performance in which Frank Almond will participate shortly. However, they all lead in by talking about the violin. The story goes on to talk about the sponsoring organization and then Frank’s interview is at the latter third.

It is always important to work with high quality tools but usually it is the musician that lends cachet to the instrument, not the other way around. You want the guitar Jimi Hendrix played or one that Pete Townshend smashed. But with classical stringed instruments, especially the violins, it is the other way around.

The presence of the violin eclipses the musician. Because a superlative instrument needs an excellent player, Frank Almond is elevated to the plane of the lone cowboy who can tame the wild stallion or the only pilot with the skills to keep the experimental airplane under control. In this context I begin to imagine the grisly deaths of second chair violinists when the first chair’s concentration flags for a moment and the bow is torn from their hands. Or violinists decapitated by a snapping string when the instrument decides the musician is not worthy of it. With such power imbued in it, it is any wonder the devil has chosen a fiddle as his instrument?

Okay, so maybe my imagination is more vivid than most. But in the interview with Frank I heard today, he as much admits he is servant to the music and the instrument. “When it is working, it is great fun. Practice makes perfect,” he replies to the observation that it must be fun to play all the double stops in the Bruch Violin Concerto.

From a butts in the seats perspective, it is amazing to me that a well crafted piece of wood can command the attendance of so many. I will be the first to admit that the storied past of the instrument of which Frank is merely one of a series of custodians is quite exciting and engaging

Must Remember: Innovative, Not Creative

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I have been over at Artsjournal.com reading the entries in the Arts Education discussion. The entry that gave me most pause was one by Eric Booth today where he notes,

“people in business have asked me if we can just stop using the word “art” because they stop listening. They then confessed they are not really interested in the word “creativity” either–they kind of glaze over–they like the word “innovation” because it is the product that they really care about, getting new business-ready products as a competitive advantage.”

A Rose By Any Other Name Is Just As Fluffy
This is not something you want to hear if these same business people are the ones involved in the philanthropy decisions for companies. Booth makes some interesting points answering comments in that entry which expound on this idea. He says business people feel creativity is a “fog-sculpting word that fluffy artsy people use.” They prefer innovation because that is the result they seek. They see creativity as being on the path to innovation and they will tolerate the use of the word as long as we can trace the path for them.

I couldn’t help thinking that innovation is easily as nebulous a word and only derives its power from the fact they repeat it back and forth to each other. Recall these are the people who were tossing “synergy” around as a desired outcome a few years ago.

Direct and Indirect Arts Encounters
As I was reading the multiple entries on arts education, I was reminded of a locally produced show on the public radio station I heard early last month on the topic of technology use in the classroom. Now there are many options for including art in a student’s experience from a direct experience with a performance or having the students perform/create themselves. On the other end of the spectrum is including art in instruction of other subjects. Making those hand shaped turkeys while teaching about the first Thanksgivings, for example.

Focus on the Objectives, Not the Tools
What I saw as applicable from the radio show about using technology in the classroom is on the latter end of the spectrum. The people on the show talked about the importance of focusing on the learning and not the device. One of the guests who is involved with a local foundation said that they wouldn’t provide grant money for a project seeking to use cell phones in the classroom because the focus was on the technology rather than the learning. The example he gave of what they would be interested in supporting was a program that focused on how students learn and how to develop critical thinking skills. If the teachers decided to have students collect and record information as part of this process and realized that one of the best methods available would be by having students utilize cellphones since they always had them handy as they go through their day, the foundation would be interested in funding this sort of endeavor.

Given that I am in the business of offering live performances, my first vote is always going to be for live interactive experiences with art. Watching or participating in some sort of activity is my first choice when it comes to arts education for any demographic or age group. You will never achieve any real aptitude either in understanding or execution if your interactions with art is slipped in between the pages of some other subject. You may develop appreciation, comfort and familiarity which these days is not to be discounted. But I want people able to enjoy interactions with art.

Wherein I Contradict What I Just Said
Now all that being said, I am going to do a little reversal. What seemed to be the core of the discussion regarding technology in the classroom was the idea that you shouldn’t define what you need to be doing in the context of popular technologies, rather how the technology can facilitate what you really need to be doing. That is my basic point when I suggest people not jump on adopting every new technology that becomes vogue. I think there may be some validity in taking this approach when advocating for arts education.

Arts Prescriptions
Right now a lot of the arts education is promoted along the philosophy of “You must have Mozart or you brain will atrophy.” This is the case made for in utero exposure as well as arguing music will raise math and science grades. The prescriptive approach to arts advocacy doesn’t really benefit us in the long run. Saying that you have to integrate cellphones into classroom instruction is much the same approach. You don’t need to use cellphones, you need to teach critical thinking and the cellphones are a tool. You can use the arts to teach critical thinking. Heck, the arts don’t exist in a vacuum today and they certainly didn’t in the past. The subject can be used to teach literature, history, politics, etc,. I did well in history, but I would have been all the more interested had I learned that someone commissioned a work to tweak the nose of an enemy or rival.

I will admit I haven’t had a lot of experience seeing it implemented, but whenever I hear people talk about integrated curriculum whether it includes arts or not, it sounds so clunky and unwieldy. The way it is described sounds very prescriptive and evokes an image of alternative subject matter inserted in a textbook on handwritten sheets of looseleaf because an administrator decided that this was the new way it was going to be taught. I am sure there are very successful programs out there on which to model an approach but I am entirely unaware of them.

Everyone Is Happier With Shoes That Fit Well
What the arts have to do is convince educators and decision makers who aren’t familiar with our disciplines that their instruction does not necessarily have to be defined by a need to shoehorn the arts in but rather that the arts can be a tool that integrates smoothly into achieving their objectives.

Of course, if you see an opening to champion direct arts instruction and after school activities, push, push, push for that!

What A Great Show. Please Pass the Pumpkin Pie

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I tell you, there is nothing better for your digestion on Thanksgiving Day, nothing better at waking you up from a carb induced doze, than someone praising your last show and insisting people go see one of your upcoming performances. That’s what happened this past Thursday. I was having dinner at the house of a friend who has no connection to the performing arts at all. One of her guests, clearly intelligent and possessed of good taste, praised the most recent performance and then went on to talk about how excited he was that a particular artist was scheduled in the next couple months and that everyone should go see her.

While this gentleman was talking about how exciting the most recent show was, I had a reaction very similar to one that Inside the Arts neighbor Holly Mulcahy describes in a Partial Observer post today. In her second point, she talks about the importance of not allowing our hyper-awareness and intimacy with a performance get in our way of accepting a compliment.

As we are wont to do, my staff and I talked over the strengths and weaknesses of the performance casting a pretty critical eye on the production. While I was happy that the dinner guest hadn’t noticed any of these things, I was a little disappointed that he was focusing on the spectacle and not really talking about the actor performances or at least things about each character that resonated with him. I tried to steer the conversation in that direction a couple times but what I really wanted to do is throttle him while screaming “Stop talking about the spectacle!!!”

Now I have to admit, achieving the spectacle took a lot of hard work and those who executed it deserve a lot of praise. I have absolutely no problem with people noticing and complimenting the beauty of the set and lighting design since those folks rarely get enough recognition. The performed spectacle occurred just a few times in the production so it didn’t overwhelm or really define the show. But that is what impressed him most. That is what he remembered best. That is what he talked about.

But as Andrew Taylor notes in a talk posted on his blog today (around minute 20), the producers of an experience don’t get the final say in how the experience is processed. Something happened that was meaningful for him. And he had it in my venue which is a small victory for both of us since my preference is for people to be here than elsewhere. Despite all the flaws we may have seen with the show, I knew that overall we offered a quality product to our audiences and there was ultimately no shame to be associated with the show.

I really didn’t have any problem accepting the compliment. I am sure the delicious pumpkin bread helped make it taste all the sweeter. My comment about choking him was a bit of hyperbole, especially since I probably would have knocked over the gravy. I don’t think there is anything wrong with wanting your audiences to speak a little more confidently after every visit and it is part of our job to help them get there.

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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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