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Actually, Now I Am Even More Confused

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Because copyright is a confusing issue, the folks over at the American Library Association have created this nifty little slider tool to help you determine if something is in the public domain or not. Frankly, at one time I thought there were some pretty simple rules of thumb you could use but now that I have seen this device, I am even more confused.

For instance, if you created a work before 1979 and published it before 2003, you might be protected. However, if during that time period, you happened to publish it between 1978 and March 1, 1989 and didn’t put a copyright notice on your work and never registered it, it is not protected and the work is in the public domain. Now given that I wrote a short story for school back in 1983 and did put a copyright notice on it, I think I am covered even though it was never registered or officially published. (Unless the photocopying of proud parents counts.)

Now I happened across an interesting situation. According to the chart, any work published before 1923 needs no permission and is in the public domain. Elmer Rice’s Adding Machine was first published in 1922 as noted here. While it was faithfully renewed, it should still be in the public domain. However, if you go over to the Samuel French website, they want $75 a performance for it.

So the question is, does Samuel French have the right to do so or not? The answer probably requires consulting experts. So despite the best intentions, this little device doesn’t really simplify matters at all and only serves to show us how little most of us really understand about copyright protection.

My Butt in the Seats of Your Neighborhood Stage

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This weekend I was a guest on the Your Neighborhood Stage podcast. (July 14 episode, number 3.21). The folks over there let me talk for a real long time on a lot of issues. In the course of the conversation, I promoted the iPod idea I had blogged on before. I had listened to some of their earlier podcasts to get a sense of what I was in for and one of the on going issues they have discussed is inverting the idea that “all good things must percolate down from Broadway.” They were trying to find a way that things could be developed at a local level and percolate up in much the same way niche interests suddenly explode into popular consciousness via YouTube.

It occurred to me that while local theatres couldn’t really hope to get anything on Broadway via the current development path, they could be the place where the innovations that reinvigorate the performing arts are cultivated. As I note in my interview, the stakes are pretty high on Broadway but somewhat less so on the local level. (Not to understate the impact of even small financial losses on local theatres.) But with the rise of Pro-Ams (Professional Amateurs) who have both passion and increased access to technology, there exists the potential for great things to result from unorthodox approaches and experimentation.

There were some other issues we discussed like censorship in a production of Ragtime near Chicago, copyright infringement in an Akron production of Urinetown (the earlier case from the 90s I refer to is L! V! C! in Boca Raton- covered in NY Times, 8th paragraph down) and whether bloggers who review can be sued for defamation.

If ever you wanted to hear my voice, albeit a little distorted (my fault, mostly) or simply just want to sip at the fount of my wisdom in audio form, give it a listen.

Oh, I just also note. When co-host Staci Cobb was praising me and said “Go You!” I thought she said “Go UF” and was tweaking me as a Florida State University grad by cheering on the University of Florida. It is only as I listened to the podcast that I realized I misheard her. I am sure both hosts were a little perplexed when I joked about her razzing me.

Parents No Longer Just At the Stage Door

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Recently I have been talking about the needs of the next generation of leaders in comparison with those of earlier generations. On the whole I think that those who feel the next generation lacks the commitment to the cause exhibited by theirs can respect the desire for a better work-life balance.

There is a characteristic of the next generation that might be a thornier problem for arts organizations–their parents. The term helicopter parents was originally applied to parents who “hovered” over their children when they went to college. The parents would bug professors about their children’s grades, dorm staff about room mates and in some extreme situations, would actually complete assignments for them.

As the students graduated, the parents began showing up at the work place, at interviews and going so far as to fill out applications and negotiate salaries for their children.

Now I don’t quite know if this is necessarily going to be anything new for performing arts organizations who have always had stage parents hovering around. However, a decision needs to be made on the organization’s policy on parental involvement. As the Forbes article I linked to above notes, some companies are embracing parents. Others feel it is not appropriate for parents to be involving themselves in decisions being made at work and have generated formal responses to the issue.

Fortunately, my mother restricts her complaints about how many hours I am putting in at work to me.

While I have known about helicopter parents for quite awhile now, I haven’t run across any cases anywhere I worked. (Well, one intern’s parents followed him cross country to check out his work site but didn’t contact us past that point except to make a donation.) What impelled me to cover the subject was a video the Next Generation Consulting blog linked to in the entry on mentoring I cited last week. The video is about an hour or so long on the subject of mentoring at accounting firms.

As the speaker, Rita Keller, discussed the issue of parental involvement, she noted that employers needed to be prepared to have the new employees making a lot of personal calls or texting throughout the day. Now if the parents are prodding their kids to get to bed and wake up on time, this can be beneficial to a company. The area she mentions that I believe would be the biggest concern for employers is lack of initiative and decision making skills. Because these young people have consulted with their parents and friends on so many issues in their lives multiple times a day, they tend to crave/require specific guidance or advice and lack the ability to act independently.

The results of helicopter parenting and the general technological environment the next generation of workers have grown up in is the subject of a really good article from HR Magazine that addresses the issue and how to structure the work environment to best channel younger workers’ energies. There are some benefits these folks bring like familiarity with technology and a facility of working with groups and multi-tasking. But there are also some disadvantages too like indiscretion, unrealistic expectations and impatience.

Stopgap Mentoring

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Over at her blog on the Next Generation Consulting website, Rebecca Ryan asks, Is Mentoring a Coverup for Poor Management? According to an article she links to at the end of her entry, most companies are actually coaching rather than mentoring. Coaching essentially consists of helping someone fulfill their function for the company whereas mentoring is more of a customize relationship aimed at growing the person.

In Ryan’s view, most mentoring programs are essentially buddy programs. Whereas:

“True Mentoring occurs when an elder’s intention is to entrust another with the welfare of her or his estate (or something similarly signigicant.) In business, this means that one generation of leaders takes the next generation under its wing and over time, teaches them everything they know….So you see, Mentoring is intended to occur alongside a transfer of responsibility. Most Mentoring programs have no such intention.”

The problem she feels lies in the fact that companies try to use mentoring to fill in gaps but don’t commit to designing and implementing the program resulting in low retention and burn out.

The next generation of leaders are looking for mentoring and presumably want it to be high quality. Just as interns don’t want to just be a photocopier, new employees don’t want a coaching only experience. So if you have a mentoring program, the question to ask is, Is it any good?

Will You Love Me If I’m Cheap?

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While I have been encouraging arts organizations to create opportunities for local citizens who have decided fuel costs are too high to travel this summer, it has only been because I don’t have a direct line of appeal to the local citizens. One of the things I am wondering is if people will look for entertainment closer to home if they have decided not to travel or if they will simply look for entertainment at home on the 72 inch television they wisely purchased when times were better.

I have been wondering if I should promote the fact that knowing costs were on the rise, we are keeping our ticket prices the same as last year. This is absolutely true. I figured we could probably weather another season at the same prices if it made our shows more accessible to our community. But I wonder if people would care that we were trying to strengthen our relationship with them. Given that people no longer subscribe and wait until a few days before an event to buy tickets, will our attempt to stay affordable even register?

I am pretty sure I know the answer. I have read a number of studies on customer service and retention which I have cited in talks that show price does not develop relationships. This is mostly in terms of customer loyalty in situations where you and a competitor offer a comparable product. If someone defects to your competitor and says it is price, chances are the reasons run much deeper and price is the easiest excuse to use. With that in mind, it seems price should be a minor player in a campaign to win loyalty.

Another complicating factor– with the rise in fuel prices my partners and I are beginning to get requests to re-negotiate performance fees. So now I wonder if I can keep the prices the same or not and whether we will be able to afford to present as many artists come next year. I sense the developments over the next year or so will instigate a sea change in the way we do business in the future (as well as if.)

Going off on a little tangent from the topic of booking, one of the artists I was excited to be presenting decided they wanted to change the time frame that they toured. This will put them outside our planned season. We hadn’t gone to contract but thought we did have an understanding with their agent. This wasn’t related at all to fuel costs but rather the timing of other projects the artists were involved in. My partner presenters decided not to replace the group. I have a smaller schedule than they so I have been seeking a replacement and hoping I can do so before it is time for the brochure to go to press.

A substitute was suggested by some staff people and their friends. YouTube videos were reviewed and the artist judged to be of good quality. The sole booking contact channel turns out to essentially be the artist’s email address. An email is sent inquiring about availability and bounces back because the artist hasn’t been reading their email and is over quota. We may go back to them to inquire, but probably only if others don’t pan out.

Word to the wise all ye starving artists. Keep your lines of communication open and your email boxes clear! Rising fuel costs and declining attendance ain’t gonna be increasing opportunities to perform, there is no need to provide impediments to the process.

Constructing Leaders

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Some disclosure right from the beginning. While most of my involvement with the project I am about to describe will be voluntary, I am receiving some travel and lodging in return for my participation.

I have recently been chosen to participate as a lead partner in an very intriguing project. There is a new arts facility being planned for Bellevue, WA and I have been asked to provide input into it’s planning and construction. I assume I was chosen for my past work experience but especially because I provided input into the theatre portion of a community center the Salvation Army is building with a bequest from Ray and Joan Kroc.

But providing input into building projects is no big deal, right? What makes this so intriguing is the process the organization is using to gather and integrate the input. All ten of the lead partners (later phases will involve additional people) were chosen from among those who have participated in the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Emerging Leadership Institute. The thought behind involving ELI alumni is to tap into the collective knowledge and experience of people in mid and senior level positions who are involved in both overall policy making as well as day to day operations.

What is deemed of additional importance is providing professional development opportunities for people in these positions. The lack of these opportunities has been a concern since I first attended ELI. In explaining this need, the pilot project document quotes an address Ben Cameron of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation made to International Association of Assembly Managers about the next generation of leaders’ view of careers in the arts which appears to be pretty much what he said to the Southern Arts Federation.

In addition to providing excellent career advancement opportunities, they hope to create a template with which future projects may be built. While I will be traveling to learn more about the site and talk with those involved, a lot of the work I will perform will apparently be online discussions and reactions to materials posted by staff. Perhaps the fact that I actively use a blog was also a factor in being chosen since that will be one of the tools that will be used.

I have signed a non-disclosure agreement agreeing to keep many of the details confidential. From my experience on the Kroc Center project I understand that there is some information that can also prevent the organization from receiving the most competitive bids for services too. I am generally pretty conservative about revealing what I really know about situations so I don’t perceive any difficulties in my participation.

What I do hope to be able to do is report on some of the general topics that are discussed that are worthy of consideration by arts organizations everywhere– “How does the design make passersby feel welcomed?” “How does the design facilitate emergency evacuation.” Though I will steer clear of publicizing some questions that while valuable to ponder and a valid part of the design process, might cause people to lose confidence in the organization without reason–“Aren’t you concerned that that placement there might have a potent for a toxic spill?”

Needless to say I am pleased to be involved with the project. But also gratified to learn that people are seriously thinking about ways to create opportunities for leaders to attain career and personal growth.

Shall I Not Be On A Pedestal, Worshipped And Competed For?

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There are times during the year where I find myself singing “Where Are The Simple Joys of Maidenhood” from Camelot. Now if you have seen my picture on Inside the Arts, you know Julie Andrews I ain’t. Part of the reason I start singing the song is because I spent half a summer in my younger days running spot light for a production. Another reason is that the image of me singing this song amuses me so. But really I can often identify with the raw romantic innocence Guenevere exhibits singing lines like

“Are those sweet, gentle pleasures gone for good?
Shall a feud not begin for me?
Shall kith not kill their kin for me?
Oh where are the trivial joys?
Harmless, convivial joys?
Where are the simple joys of maidenhood?”

Now given those lines fall at the end of the song, I rarely get to them for all the laughing going on by that point — mostly mine.

When people hear what my job is they view it with the same romantic innocence. Surely such a cool job is not susceptible to mundane concerns like bugging agents for contracts and images so you can put a website and brochure together. Or if the mundane does intrude, it must be over shadowed by the joy of working with such amazing artists. Actually, the last bit is true except for the “mundane” concern about why people who praise the artists aren’t buying tickets to see them. So yeah, when I am singing songs like that one, I am trying to get back in touch with the idealism that made me pursuit this path to begin with.

Fortunately, people are familiar enough with the basic functions I fulfill that they don’t assume I should do my job for fun.

And there is the tricky part. Last week, Artful Manager Andrew Taylor cited a comment from the Americans for the Arts conference that, “‘We need to stop making the arts so special.” It occurs to me that the arts community needs to be in control of the way the arts are demystified. With auditioning for American Idol essentially a rite of passage being a good performer appears to be a matter of hard work, luck and getting enough people to vote for you. Anyone can do it if the stars align correctly. The necessity of talent and hard work over decades to hone one’s skill rather than a few weeks doesn’t seem to register.

The scenario shows like “Dancing with the Stars” and “So You Think You Can Dance” promote is that amateurs thrown into a crash course in a subject can compete and be winners. Even Bravo’s “Step It Up And Dance” where the contestants were trained and danced professionally had episodes where a choreographer would say they usually worked on rehearsing a piece for 5 days and the show gave the contestants 2 hours. This isn’t just limited to performing arts. MTV has/had a show called “Made” where high school kids wanting to be basketball players, cheerleaders, stars of the Spring musical, beauty queens, lose weight, promo queen or whatever worked toward their goal for a couple months. Usually the video shot during the first 3-4 weeks consisted of the person resisting the discipline of their coach. This left 3-4 weeks at most to cram the rest of the effort in. Most had some credible results probably helped by the fact that television cameras were following them around for so long.

So what is the narrative the arts world can offer?- “You can cram a lot of training in a short time and win prizes and recognition but honestly only be mediocre or you can devote your life to excellence and barely make a living.” You thought practicing scales was boring for students before? What about now that you can become a virtuoso in six weeks? Sure eliminating one kid from your school/lesson roster a week will add drama and tension and may motivate to practice harder but it will subtract from your earnings.

I agree that we have to stop making the arts so special in regard to putting it on a pedestal. But the message that accompanies it always has to be that you can absolutely participate, have fun, find fulfillment and recognition with a little training in a short period of time so come join in. However, even given great talent to start with there is a certain level you can only attain with long study and practice.

This isn’t just true of stodgy classical music and ballet. There was an article on Salon last week about the emergence of South Korea as a power in the world of hip hop dance. The South Korean dance crews practice 5 hours a day, seven days a week because they know someone is always trying to catch up. Yet the article notes, long hours of hard work on the flashiest moves aren’t enough if you don’t truly understand your art.

“When Koreans first emerged, Americans praised them for their power moves — the highflying crowd-pleasing spins, freezes and gymnastics moves — but criticized the Seoul b-boys for lacking soul. They were thought to be mechanical, unable to rock with the beat, and lacking in “foundation skills,” such as the top-rock and footwork moves that form the historical roots of the dance.”

Even in the idealistic world of Camelot, Guenevere comes to realize it takes hard work to bring dreams to fruition. (She also realizes the hazards of youthful folly, indiscretion and why bitter half sisters of the king shouldn’t be taught magic, but at least some of that can be avoided.)

Joshua Bell, Innovator or Heir To A Tradition?

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From the “Nothing New Under the Sun” file comes the news that Gene Weingarten is pondering whether to return his Pulitzer Prize. Weigarten is the Washington Post columnist who won the Pulitizer for arranging and writing about Joshua Bell’s anonymous performance in a Washington D.C. subway station. Weingarten says he is pondering giving the prize up based on the fact it was awarded for originality and he has since learned someone beat him to it.

It seems that back in May 1930, a Chicago Evening Post reporter arranged for violin virtuoso Jacques Gordon to play incognito outside a Chicago subway station. Though he eventually drew a crowd, as with Bell, by and large no one stopped to listen and only one person recognized him. It also turned out that Bell played many of the same pieces Gordon did. I guess Schubert lends itself to outdoor concerts. Though he hasn’t played it in about seven years, for nearly a decade, Bell actually played the very violin Gordon used for the stunt.

While I have been critical of the experiment, I am not about to suggest he give the Pulitzer back. My beef is that the experiment seemed designed to maximize the opportunity to point out what philistines people are. We see enough evidence that people don’t value the arts every day without concocting situations to prove it. Just a year ago some students at Stanford University were miffed that NEA Chair, Dana Gioia, was speaking at graduation because they felt they deserved someone more famous.

The basic experiment is a valid one in my mind. It could have been used to measure when the best times for performing in myriad unorthodox locations might be as part of an outreach effort — or even a longer term change of venue. As far as I am concerned, the Bell and Gordon results just prove that subway stations are not the best place to reach people. So even if he had known about the event seven decades earlier, Weingarten would have been wise to verify the earlier results.

An additional reason why the more constructive approach would have been preferable. Weingarten notes that unlike the original which faded into obscurity after a day, his story gained feet thanks to the Internet. I honestly don’t think he knew it would become so widely disseminated. However, given it has it would have been much better if people were reading about a secret experiment aimed at serving them better rather than a secret experiment that proves what rubes people are.

Suffering Your Own Penalties

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Via Arts and Letters Daily, there is an intriguing article in Reason Magazine about how penalties for undesirable behavior can actually result in more poor behavior if people perceived paying the penalty as license to continue.

Citing a study in Science, Ronald Bailey gives the example of six Israel day cares who instituted a fee to penalize people who pick their children up late. Instead of solving the problem, this made it worse.

According to Bowles: “The fine seems to have undermined the parents’ sense of ethical obligation to avoid inconveniencing the teachers and led them to think of lateness as just another commodity they could purchase.”

The same thing happened in an experiment in Columbia. Researchers were conducting a game where people were involved with divvying up forest resources. The results of many scenarios reflected concern for the resources and other users until a situation that simulated government control fined those who overused their alloted share. People felt paying the fine justified pursuing their short term interests rather than the interests of the whole.

I tried to think of ways the arts might be providing disincentives for their audiences to act in the interests of the organization, audience or community through what they perceive to be penalties. I haven’t really thought of anything but maybe something will occur to you readers.

First thing that came to mind were the ticket fees we charge for buying tickets online or over the phone but might not charge if people come to the window. Or that we charge a lower price for subscriptions and buying single tickets before a certain date.

But neither of these things seem to create an incentive for people to buy early. I don’t think it creates a disincentive either. I think people are just busy and have changed their buying practices.

Next I wondered if holding people in the lobby for late seating hoping they, (and those they annoy when they are seated), are discomforted enough that they arrive promptly next time might have some unintended consequences. It is easy to foresee that both late comers and those seated are likely to be annoyed by the timing of the late seating interval even if it has reduced 14 potential interruptions to one. No surprise there.

It is likewise easy to anticipate reactions to policies like; No food in theatre, no exchanges or refunds, no video taping and no cell phones. Perhaps no cell phone policies and signal jammers may have caused a rise in texting, (I seem to remember jammers don’t impact texting frequencies, just voice) but even that is not unforeseen. As annoying as the glowing screens can be, it isn’t as bad as having someone pull out their cell phone and say, “Yeah, I am in the theatre. No, no, I can talk,” in the middle of a performance.

So does anyone know of a policy that was meant to control undesirable behavior that has essentially reinforced it? Drop me an email or comment below.

Art for the Obsessive Cleaner

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The technical director in my theatre has been talking on and off about putting together a photo show of all the attempts to paint over graffiti around the city. The paint the city/county/state has been using doesn’t match the color of the concrete, of course. But it often doesn’t match the paint color they used to cover the graffiti the last time around either. The result is a patchwork that sort of looks like someone took the Army’s desert camouflage pattern and blew it up on a photocopy machine. Who knew there were so many shades of institutional gray, beige and tan?

So when I saw this video with a caption of Reverse Graffiti Project on Artsjournal.com earlier this week, I thought someone had the same idea. It is actually a lot cooler. Take a look.

For those of you who don’t have the time and inclination to take a look, the artist Moose Curtis, makes stencils (in this case of plants indigenous to California) and then uses a power washer and natural cleansers to clean dirt away from concrete walls. The result is a reverse “graffiti” image that is temporary by the nature of its placement in a dirty location.

One of the first ideas I had upon taking my current position was to have a contest with local schools to create a mural on the two ugly concrete walls at our theatre entryway. The location has been likened to a freeway underpass by some. (Although people love it for the shelter the covered area affords them when it is raining.) Many dismissed the idea saying it would attract graffiti even though the blank walls have been fairly graffiti free. I am intrigued by this project and am wondering if those walls are dirty enough to allow the technique to work. Though according to Curtis, it is probably dirtier than I think.

Given that a number of arts organizations are located in or adjacent to dirt producing/attracting locations like freeways and industrial districts since the rents are cheaper thereabouts, I wonder if this might be the basis of some inexpensive decoration for unattractive exteriors.

Of course, now this this technique is being widely promoted. someone will want to make an “artistic” statement and create dirty pictures by cleaning. Yes, even clean art can be lewd.

Forget Snakes on A Plane, How About Arts on a Train?

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Thanks to the lovely people over at GrantStation, the deadlines for two interesting arts related funding opportunities came to my attention.

The first is community based grant program administered by Union Pacific. Essentially if you live west of the Mississippi River and have train tracks running through your town you are probably in a Union-Pacific community and are eligible.

The second is some what more interesting. Johnson Johnson/Society for the Arts in Healthcare are looking for programs that “promotes the evaluation and replication of promising models in order to strengthen and expand the arts in healthcare field.” The most difficult eligibility criterion appears to be membership in the Society for the Arts in Healthcare. Otherwise they are primarily interested in programs that have been in existence 3 years or longer and that can be replicated on a national level.

When I saw this, I immediately thought of a program in Brooklyn I had written about three years ago. At the time the hospital, Woodhull Medical Center, was offering inexpensive health care for artists in exchange for their performance or interactions in the wards and units. They may have expanded the program since then. In any case, I sent the grant information to Laura Colby who is mentioned in the NY Foundation for the Arts article referenced in my entry. What she helped start would definitely be a boon to artists if it were rolled out nationwide.

Hopefully some of my readers out there have some similarly good ideas or at least know of some being enacted right now.

They Shoot Dancers Don’t They?

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In one of my first blog entries I noted a speech by Chris Lavin promoting the idea that the arts be covered like sports. I still get a kick out of his suggestion that:

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 would a director take to a theater critic watching practice and asking for his/her early analysis of the challenges this cast faces with the material — the relatively strengths and weaknesses of the lead actor, the tendencies of the play write to resist rewriting?

Over in the UK, The Guardian has taken up that idea a little. They had their arts writers review sporting events and their sports writers review arts events.

Since the critics approached the events they attended from their own point of view, some of their observations were rather fun. Writing about a horse race, dance critic Judith Mackrell notes that unlike the race ballet attendees have no desire to see a dancer fall to the benefit of another ballerina.

“And if, by some horrible chance, she gets injured, she isn’t going to be put down after the show.”

Visual arts critic Jonathan Jones went to a football/soccer game and noticed that:

“Wembley is a thrill, for all sorts of reasons. There’s the architecture – the raised external ramps are like walking on a north London Acropolis, and the roof leaves a small space over the pitch, generating powerful contrasts of light and shadow.”

Being an arts person, I was more interested in what the sports writers said about their experiences. In some cases, their comments echoed those of many first time arts attendees. Rugby columnist Thomas Castaignède noted, ”

I’ve passed Covent Garden so many times, but I had no idea it was so beautiful inside. As a social phenomenon it surprised me as well – the champagne, the way the audience had dressed up, the feeling that people were there to be seen, as well as to see.”

Golf writer Lawrence Donegan went to see the San Francisco Symphony perform and exclaimed,

“…when this concert ended the audience went (and I use the following word advisedly) bonkers. This reaction shocked me, because I had no idea that people who were into classical music were also into going bonkers at the end of a performance.”

Two of the sports writers were ultimately disappointed in their experiences because the unpredictability and high stakes inherent to sports was missing. Two others stated their appreciation for the parallels of mastery and passion common to both athletes and performers. Steve Bierley, a tennis writer who went to a gallery was greatly affected by what he saw.

“It should have carried a warning: This woman is deeply dangerous. I go back to the comfort of Roland Garros, though Bourgeois remained a haunting and disturbing presence. I’m still spooked.”

I thought that was great. What I really appreciated was Castaignède’s observations about seeing Tosca. I think he states the case for the value of arts attendance best. Perhaps it is because he was a top notch rugby player he was best of all the sports writers to appreciate the mastery possessed.

“I came to the conclusion that there is a parallel between what you feel during a top-class rugby match and what an artist feels on stage – and it’s not just the roar of the crowd. The people who are watching influence how you behave: they were viewing Kaufmann and driving him forward, just as they used to inspire me. I could empathise with Kaufmann’s total concentration on the performance, and the way he had to become one with the orchestra, who gave him the power to go beyond the norm. There is a physical aspect to opera, certainly; but more than that, on stage you see what in rugby we call “automatisms” – where you become conditioned to move and act by pure instinct. I had a sense of two completely different worlds coming together.”

As I noted, it is fun reading how each person filters their experience through the lens of their particular expertise so take a gander the both full articles.

Low Internet Recognition for NPAC

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Hat tip to Artful Manager Andrew Taylor for noting Doug Fox’s piece on how poorly Internet media outlets and blogs were involved in the National Performing Arts Convention.

Generally, I don’t replicate links to which prominent bloggers like Taylor have drawn attention, but I was just astounded by how few references and links a highly promoted conference like NPAC got. I don’t know about other people but I was getting emails from different sources at least twice a week for the 6-8 weeks leading up to the conference urging me to go. I had already planned to go to China so the conference was out for me. While there looked to be some interesting sessions planned, nothing struck me to blog about it so I made no references to the event.

Fox makes some suggestions for the next time around but it occurs to me that some of his points about opening access and encouraging promotion can apply on a smaller scale to our own arts organizations and communities. (Assuming people want to write about your company.)

Lots of Summer Fun In The Backyard

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If you were a canny arts administrator (or are a leader of a particularly nimble arts organization) you may have foreseen that high gas prices would be forcing people to engage in staycastioning this summer. If you don’t know what a staycastion is…well good for you. As far as I am concerned it is a sign that most mainstream media outlets don’t have any original ideas or the fortitude to resist parroting others. A staycation is a vacation you spend at home. When I was a kid that is what we called a regular vacation. To listen to the MSM, you would think it was a new cultural movement.

Fortunately, we have the Daily Show to make fun of their silliness.

My grumbling rants aside, the fact people are staying at home provides a good opportunity for arts organizations and communities in general to make citizens aware of the enjoyable resources available in the area. What better time to convince people how convenient seeing a show is during busier times of the year than when they have taken the time to slow down and look around?

So if you had the foresight to realize this window of opportunity was opening maybe you have created incentives to get people in the door or launched a campaign to make people aware of your services. If you haven’t, maybe you are as nimble enough to take advantage of this trend. Sure gas might be just as expensive next summer so you think you can wait. But people might be inured to the cost after a year and be looking to get away.

Or you could be like me and are working in an empty building as everyone takes the vacations and comp time they have earned toiling throughout the last 10 months and would be in danger of having heavy objects fall on your head if you suggested adding new programs over the summer.

Personally, I think that if you are going to have some sort of summer program, it shouldn’t be done in a vacuum. Working cooperatively with the local arts council, chamber of commerce, municipal government, etc., to make people aware of the pleasurable encounters they can have right at home just seems like the most logical step. I think attending a picnic where there is a band/orchestra/puppet show/miscellaneous performance happening as the sun sets and the baseball game wraps up embeds itself deeper in the memory as a pleasurable experience than attending a slew of First Night performances. Ah, I am feeling a little laconic just thinking about it.

Next summer isn’t really too late. I pretty much said that in order to motivate those who can mobilize this year. Start working on next summer now. See if you can get local government involved. It is a great PR opportunity for your mayor to stand up as the winter starts to break next year and say, “Hey, we know you ended up hanging around town last summer. This coming summer we are going to make you happy you did and proud of your community by offering you X, Y, Z activities in cooperation with all these organizations and businesses in our community.”

Heck, there is an election coming up. If the people in office aren’t helpful, talk to the people running against them about your idea. They can get up and talk about how they empathize with those facing high gas prices and how they planning programs to enhance the value of living in the community.

Donors With Baggage

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There was a short piece on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website about fund raising (subscription required). What caught my eye was some of the insights it provided about how people money and the act of donating it. The story cites Laura Fredricks, a former fundraiser for Pace University and Temple University, who addressed attendees at Fund Raising Day in New York 2008 last week.

Much of what I read and heard at conferences about fund raising primarily deals with strategies for developing a relationship with a donor and convincing them to support your organization. In some respects, much of the advice has been similar to what is given in regard to dating. Some of the advice is a little aggressive and cutthroat and some advocates a more practical and sensitive approach. (Of course, there is also the “be content being single” camp but that philosophy doesn’t quite work in fundraising.)

In any case the advice generally focuses on a somewhat formulaic planned approach. Just as dating tips rarely acknowledge that other people have the baggage of past dating experiences which will impact the relationship you are trying to cultivate, I rarely hear/read a similar acknowledgment in connection with fund aising.

One of the anecdotes mentioned in the story was about a wealthy developer who never gave more than $1,000 at a time to Temple. When Fredricks asked why, she discovered that even though he could afford to give more, he harbored fears about running out of money that went back to his childhood.

She recognizes that the people who ask for money like presidents and trustees also have varying degrees of comfort with the subject. “They should be treated the same way donors are—as individuals with different emotions about money—and given simple requests, she said. Instead of giving a reticent board member a list of prospective donors, Fredricks suggested starting out with the names and biographical information of two current donors and then asking the trustee to call them to say thank you.”

Back when I was fresh out of grad school I remember having a conversation with someone about fund raising. I don’t quite remember who it was but the comment was made that you couldn’t ask someone to make a large contribution of money until you had made a large contribution yourself. The idea was that if you had done so you could empathize with what motivated someone to donate that much to something they believed in and could also understand how making such a donation impacted their standard of living.

At the time a $50 would have had dire consequences on my standard of living so I really wasn’t ready to do serious fund raising at that point in my career. Some of the other advice given at the Fund raising Day in New York meeting actually revolved around this idea. One person suggested requesting large donors make the ask for similarly large gifts.

One last tip that caught my eye which might be rather difficult for some arts organizations to embrace given perennially precarious financial straits. “Don’t show your desperation, no matter how far you are from hitting your goal. You’re not raising money to keep your organization from going out of business.” Yeah, right! That little bit of advice came from Michael Margitich, senior deputy director for external affairs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The approach he said he used while at Columbia University was “he was raising additional funds to ‘maintain our level of excellence.'”

The Planes Are Alive With The Sound of Music!

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I don’t want my blog to get into a running travelogue about my trip to China so this will probably be the last entry where that subject is the main focus. I just wanted to comment on what is usually the most onerous part of my travels but turned out to be rather delightful this time around–air travel. I have to say that Japan Airlines has ruined me for all U.S. domestic flights. The food, service and entertainment even in economy class was great. I am not going to wax philosophical wondering why U.S. carriers can’t replicate it. I will just assume they have costs that Japan Airlines doesn’t and leave it at that.

The thing I will pose the “why don’t we have that” question about is the entertainment. I watched a great Kabuki piece while on the plane, the Noda version of Togitatsu no Utare performed in 2005. I had no idea kabuki could be that funny and irreverent. I was getting some glances from my neighbors because I was laughing so loudly. There was a lot of self-referential stuff, what looked to be the kabuki version of the West Side Story opening number and a Rube Goldberg contraption. To be sure, according to this article, kabuki may not have been quite so funny until recently. (Though it also sounds like it originally might have been.)

Purists probably considered the show I saw to be a dumbing down of the art form. Maybe it is. But it was a fun introduction to kabuki for an international visitor like myself who is only generally familiar with the art form. This type of pride in a national art form is what I wish there was more of on airplanes. Some might argue that given Hollywood is the center of the film world, all the films shown are, in fact, a statement of national pride.

As an arts person I am not, of course, going to be satisfied with that line of reasoning. While I am not the biggest fan of musicals, they would probably end up being the most natural choice in terms of how accessible they would be to domestic and international audiences. Given all the performers and writers contracts that have/are entering negotiation, it would be the perfect time to broach the subject of renumeration for the airborne broadcasts. If a rule bound, insular art form like Kabuki can begin to exhibit sweeping changes in their performance style, arranging to have Spring Awakening shown on a plane should be easy in comparison.

Heck, given that most people in the United States haven’t been to the theatre it would be as much an entrée to the form for the domestic audience as the Kabuki was to me as a visitor to Japan.

Chinese Philanthropy

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While I was in China, there were a lot of appeals for donations to the Sichaun earthquake relief effort on television. This came in the form of ads and what appeared to be telethon type programs. What I found interesting was that philanthropy on this scale seems to be a new thing for China. There was a program on CCTV International that was discussing this new development. While they do have video of the program on their website, I can’t get it to run so I will have to depend on the notes I jotted on the hotel stationary. I apologize for not having more details. I just happened upon the program while waiting to go to dinner so there was a period where I was casting about for a pen and pad.

The participants in the discussion mentioned that people were learning about how to give due to the earthquake. An American working for a foundation in Beijing mentioned the benefits of philanthropy. One example he gave was developing solidarity and morale within a company when employees at overseas branches donate to help their counterparts in China and vice versa.

What I found most interesting was the concept of recognition for donations. There seemed to be an unmentioned back story behind the host’s question regarding public recognition. I almost wondered if there were a lot of people expecting public recognition for their largesse and it might be sapping energy from the relief effort. The American foundation person pointed out that yes, while there were public monuments to large donors in the United States, there was a strong tradition of anonymous donation as well.

The discussion also touched on the idea that recipients of donations should be held highly accountable for the way they administered the money they received. And as in the U.S., donors should investigate these organizations and decide if the charities are using the donations in an effective manner.

There was also mention of whether China should institute an inheritance tax to provide an incentive for the growing affluent class to donate.

None of these concepts are new for the U.S. It was rather interesting to watch people begin to think about what it means to be charitable outside one’s local situation for the first time. I will be interested to see what develops. Despite all the input they can garner from the biggest and best charities and foundations in the world, I am sure the Chinese will create their own method of philanthropy, partially of necessity and partially based on their cultural values.

Back From China

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Well, I am back from China. It was my first trip to the country and I had a great time. The experience also gave me a lot to think about. There is one topic I will probably cover tomorrow if I can find where in my bags I secreted my notes. While my entry today won’t directly deal with arts management, it does cover some of the larger societal concerns arts managers face like traffic, public transportation, communal gatherings, cultural values and energy conservation/green buildings. Based on my experiences, I feel safe in claiming there will be a much greater cultural interchange between the United States and China in the near future so there might be something to learn or at least cautionary tales for those who tread the streets of the cities.

A few notes for those going to Beijing for the Olympics. There seems to be a dichotomy between traffic laws and enforcement. There are signs everywhere warning drivers about driving while drunk, on cell phones or while overly tired. However, I didn’t see a lot of police cars patrolling. (Shanghai seemed to have a stronger police presence.) All over China a honked horn signals to the pedestrian means either get out of the way or stop and I will drive around you. The greatest sin basically seems to be hitting someone. Otherwise, all bets are off. Our bus made left turns across oncoming traffic and from the right lane and we mysteriously never got hit.

The most exhilarating/nerve racking time was on a freeway in Beijing when the bus driver started up the exit ramp, then veered left off it, then decided he was right to begin with and started backing up to the ramp again. What was most amazing was that after the first 4-5 cars behind us honked and went around us, everyone else behind us moved to the left lane long before they reached us and allowed us to back up to the ramp again.

In a number of the cities we visited there was a lot of poor living conditions with dingy housing cramped together. The parks in these cities were absolutely gorgeous though. There were large spaces with a lot of gathering areas, ponds, fountains, amphitheaters with hills and structures to climb. I am guessing the local governments realized the importance of community gathering places and invested a lot of resources in them. The parks were packed even at 6-6:30 am on weekday mornings. I wondered if the parks will be abandoned as televisions and computers become more prevalent or at least how many generations it would be before the people stopped valuing communal relationships.

Television was interesting to watch in China. There was only one English language station carried at any of the hotels at which we stayed. However, given that the state owns the cable system, it was always channel 9 no matter where we were. There was more pro-US programming than I expected including U.S. Air Marshal which seemed to have a heavy Eastern European cast and crew, and movies about the Flying Tigers. For the first 4-5 days of my trip there seemed to always be a dramatization about Mao’s rise to power.

There was also always either a Chinese opera or classical music concert on one or two stations. I can’t say if people were watching the show but the government seems to be strongly promoting these art forms. I even caught what looked to be the Chinese Opera version of American Idol with young girls competing.

Unfortunately, Chinese television seems to be quickly inheriting some of the United States’ less desirable programming like ads for breast enhancements and bra inserts. There also seemed to be a lot of snake oil being sold. From what a could tell from one series of graphics, there is a pill that will (no joking) fix your ovaries, dissolve fat and give you energy. Where American television ads make claims about the inclusion of Chinese herbs, the Chinese ads show official looking documents with the United States of America emblazoned across the top and the American flag waving in the background.

There were some areas we drove through where the town was drying their wheat on the road. A tractor dropped huge piles of wheat on the street and people manually separated the wheat from the chaff. Our bus drove around and sometimes through these piles which went on for miles upon miles and were spread out on to side streets and roofs. The people seemed happy and healthy enough at their work. I just wondered how they resolved their lives against the images of breast enhancement surgery. These dynamics are complicated enough in the U.S. When you start talking about the haves and have nots in a Communist country which is embracing some capitalist practices, I can only begin to imagine what all the implications might be.

A couple last reflections on my visit. We often hear how China is going to become a more voracious consumer of energy. From what I observed and discussed with others in my tour, China appears to be taking steps to minimize their impact. We would go into shops whose lights would be out until we walked in. In hotels, you have to put your room key card in a wall slot to get the lights to work. We only got one card even though there were two of us in the room. When we left with the card, the lights and A/C went off.

There are a lot of new roads but few cars at all traveling the freeways. (Don’t quite know why.) There is a system of diesel rationing in effect. The miles of new highways and roads are lined 5-10 rows wide with newly planted trees for thousands of miles. (All of which is desperately needed in the heavily deforested country.) While the housing is dull and blocky in a lot of places, the newer street lamps are quite whimsical. In Xingtai, the lamps looked like gracefully curved flowers with butterfly shaped solar panels.

On the whole, my impression of China is that the idea of conservation and safety is a somewhat new for them. It seems like haven’t quite developed a holistic approach yet. In some areas they have progressed past the United States and are hyper aware of safety concerns. In other areas it doesn’t seem like anyone mentioned the concept at all.

One of my favorite experiences was meeting the Chinese people. There were places we traveled where Caucasian faces were obvious rare to unknown. For some reason though a lot of people (happily mostly young females) wanted to have their picture taken with me. There were three of us out of 10-15 men who people frequently asked to have their picture taken with. (Or they thrust their kids into my lap or beside me.) It didn’t matter if I was alone or in a group. I am hardly the best looking guy in the group so I don’t quite know why. My best guess is that I closely represent Budai, the Laughing Buddah (except I have more hair and kept my shirt closed) so people felt I was good luck.

One theory, given most of us didn’t understand Mandarian, is that I may have agreed to marry some of them and they were taking my photo home to mom and dad. *Gulp*

Hopping On The Big Jet Plane Again

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Yes, I am going on vacation again. I have lost scads of vacation time for not using it the last two years so this time I am using it up.

Drew McManus won’t let me off that easy. Ever since I joined Inside the Arts, he has been holding me to all sorts of ridiculous quotas. He probably won’t even let me count this entry toward it! And then he shows favoritism lets Holly Mulcahy off with an easy schedule! 😉

I have had to promise him some inspiring entries upon my return in order to get him to let me go. Hopefully I will have some inspiring experiences while I am gone.

In the meantime devoted readers, be well!

On Man’s Spam Is Another’s Annual Appeal

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There is an interesting study about the effectiveness of email campaigns that came out recently. M + R Strategic Services and Nonprofit Technology Network published the results of their survey on the use of email by non-profits as a fundraising and advocacy tool. None of the non-profits participating in the study were performing arts related. That doesn’t seem pertinent to the results because the study is more about general behavior in regard to email than responses to specific organizations. They don’t have a lot of tips for maximizing the effectiveness of your email campaigns, but they do tell you what sort of response to expect and some guidance about frequency and timing of campaigns.

There were a couple odds and ends that caught my eye.

-They claim email is superior to social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube for mobilizing supporters but don’t offer any evidence to back it up.

-Existing email technology makes it difficult to accurately measure the rate at which people are opening email. Some email software triggers a pixel embedded in the message to record it as a read, but there is no guarantee that a human has read it. On the other hand, some programs don’t allow images to be automatically loaded so the pixel is never triggered even though the message is read.

“…we have found that up to 25 percent of the actions or clicks in response to a particular email come from people who have never officially ‘opened’ the email!”

-Open and click through (following a link in the message) rates are lowest in December and the unsubscribe rate is highest. But given the volume of appeals being sent out is highest in December, “…the number of people who unsubscribed per individual email was actually about the same or slightly lower than in other months.” Even though people are being hit hard by appeals in December, it pays to time it for the end of year as Oct-Dec was the most productive time for the study participants.

-The response rate to fundraising appeals has dropped a little, but since the amount given remains the same and the size of email lists continues to grow, the total amount raised has increased.

-More of those who choose to donate are doing so online. I would guess this is a matter of people feeling more comfortable with conducting financial transactions online.

You can download the study for free but do need to provide your email address. Even though you can opt out of receiving their newsletter, I didn’t see any promise not to sell your name to their clients.

Dancin With Myself

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Well here is one from the “Hope This Doesn’t Catch On” file. I got an email from the Orlando Fringe Festival last week promoting a Silent Rave. Essentially you show up with your iPod and dance while listening to the music you brought while other people do the same. You are literally dancing to your own drummer–at least if the music to which you are listening has drums.

They claim it is hot in Europe but the most information I can find is a Silent Rave this past April in NYC’s Union Square.

Here is some video from the event.

Interestingly enough, here is a video taken around the same time which the person decided to set to his own music. I understand that re-editing video is common practice but in this context it sort of comes off as being dissatisfied with the lack of audible music.

How prescient Billy Idol was when he made his “Dancing With Myself” video. I know the attraction of the gathering was more about the flashmob element than the actual promotion of isolating yourself in a crowd. Since NYC has really been cracking down on actual raves, driving up and deploying a sound system on the fly would have probably gotten the event shut down a lot faster because it more closely met the legal definition of a prohibited rave.

These things aside, it is a little disturbing that people are choosing to replicate an event where one insulates oneself from others. It seems something of an oxymoron that this communal event is possible because these isolating devices are ubiquitous. The fringe festival is probably sponsoring this to seem edgy and hip. Indeed, there is a lot of novelty inherent to the idea. This can be especially true if some strange synchronicity emerges between what you are listening to and how you see people around you are dancing.

But it is really in their best interests to promote the idea that you can enjoy yourself alone. Or even worse, that while at a public event you have license to act as the spirit moves you. The latter might be acceptable at a fringe festival more than a concert hall, but if people decide they will enjoy staying home more, all organizations potentially suffer.

People have a right to do what they will with their free time and aren’t responsible for keeping arts organizations in business. There is also nothing necessarily wrong with introversion. The concept may make you laugh, but I wonder if what we are seeing isn’t a sort of synthetic introversion. It just seems to me that in the past, real introverts have filled their time alone thinking and doing things. I won’t claim they have been any more productive than anyone else in advancing civilization. I am just concerned with the direction of things when people who are not nature introverts start to take on the behavior and fill the silence with iPods and text messaging.

The world needs its extroverts to conduct the interactions and exchanges of the world. While they may be real extroverted across these devices, it is as if they have hobbled themselves by removing the option of unmediated interactions. Instead of empowering the introverts by removing some of the opportunities to be socially inept, it looks like technologies are depowering extroverts.

Granted, I am not a social scientist with the training to observe and interpret these things. But I have admitted introverted tendencies. While my shopping experiences would be so much better if people would stay home, the fact that I am concerned that they are may be cause to worry. I see people doing what I did as a geeky teenager. Except I was doing it with books so I was at least getting smarter and growing my vocabulary. I don’t know if the same can be said of the situation today.

APAP Emerging Leadership Institute Applications 2009

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As has been my habit the last couple years, I wanted to make people aware of that the Emerging Leadership Institute of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ is accepting applications for participants for the program at the conference next January. The application deadline is June 30 so you have a little time to complete the relatively simple application.

The form and other information may be found here.

Those who have attended have had a good experience, myself included. I am optimistic about the future of the program as the APAP leadership seems to be taking active steps to improve and advance it. I haven’t been directly involved with these changes though I have been talking and nudging people. There is a longer term agenda that I would like to see come to pass.

If you are involved in the presenting field (performer, agent, presenter, etc.) or know of someone who is, please consider applying or encouraging someone else to do so.

Voices of the Loyal

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When you see a person quoted in the newspaper talking about a controversial or important issue, it can be difficult to develop an empathetic connection with them because the written word has an inherent insulating element about it. I have been following the travails of the Honolulu Symphony for quite some time now. I have had conversations and email exchanges with some of those involved that it hasn’t been appropriate for me to report on here.

Although the heroic dedication of the Honolulu Symphony musicians who have been playing without pay since before Christmas (they are about 7 weeks in arrears right now) is easily perceptible in writing, it seems to fall short of what I feel listening to them tell their stories.

Earlier this month, the local public radio station interviewed musicians about how they were coping. Some remained stalwart, some said things were getting tough and they had to start looking for work in other states though it killed them to do so. There is a sense that the financial difficulties and not knowing when the next paycheck will come is wearing on the musicians, even if they don’t overtly mention it. You can hear it in their voices. There is also gratitude for public gestures of support like a dentist who didn’t charge one musician for his services.

At the same time, as the musicians go through these difficulties, they are going out and performing concerts to show their solidarity with hotel workers who had been fired and then partially rehired according to some elusive logic. The musician organizing the effort notes that the same could happen to them. I wondered if it was a tacit acknowledgment of the hardball decisions made by the board and management of the Jacksonville and Columbus Symphonies. Not to mention the abrupt closures of Aloha and ATA Airlines which staggered the state last month and left thousand out of work. It is to the Honolulu Symphony Board’s credit that they haven’t been talking about closing during all this.

I should acknowledge that last week an unnamed donor made a $1.175 million gift to the Symphony. It doesn’t solve all the problems, but it helps a lot. (I also should mention that my theatre is one of those the Symphony owes money.) The interviews I linked to aired a week prior to the news of the gift and in fact were conducted a few weeks prior to the air date so the lack of certainty about the future was very real. The good news for the musicians is that Executive Director Tom Gulick is on the record as saying all the backpay, including a restoration of cuts the musicians granted under a previous administration adjusted for inflation will be paid to the musicians.

Whether this good fortune proves a temporary reprieve for symphony operations which will prove unsustainable or just the break they need to implement a well considered plan to renew the organization remains to be seen.

Ooops

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Well apparently as my windows shifted around during my recent attempts to enhance my web feed links, I accidentally deleted part of the right hand sidebar. I have tried to restore and also improve that sidebar, but I am pretty sure some blogs that I added after creating a back up copy have gotten left out. I have a good sense of what has been omitted but I am going to go back through the last 6-12 months of posts to double check and perhaps pick up a couple more that should be included.

If I am missing your blog and listed it before, let me know! Sorry about making you disappear.

Feed Changes

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A few months ago one of the readers expressed an interest in having the blog feed changed to provide the full entry instead of just the summary. Drew over at Inside the Arts did a survey and discovered that most people want a full feed instead of a summary.

As a result, I have added a full feed to the blog. You can choose the summary or full feed in the left sidebar. You can also choose the feeds via the orange icon in the navigation bar of your web browser. I haven’t figured out how to differentiate between the two Atom feeds listed there yet. But if you mouse over them, one is named atomf.xml and the other is atom.xml. The one with the “f” will deliver the full length feed.

Enjoy.

Sometimes I Feel Like A Fatherless Color

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I don’t know how it found its way to my backstage, but I came across a booklet from Apollo Design that really show the company has a sense of their customer’s needs and seek to add value to their products. They have what they term Playbooks which provide a scene by scene break down with gel and pattern suggestions of some of the most popular plays high schools and community theatres perform.

They admit that the options they offer are among the safest choices a lighting designer can make. They also can’t offer guidance about placement of instruments and intensity of light since they can’t know the needs of every theatre. But for the high school teacher who has volunteered to direct the fall play and knows nothing about choosing gel colors, the booklets can remove quite a bit of anxiety. Even if you aren’t directing any of the plays they cover, you can get a sense of how the design theory you might read in a text book has been put into practice in specific instances.

You can download pdf versions of specific Playbook sections here. As an example of the general guidance they offer, for The Glass Menagerie, the notes state:

“Smoky, red glow” – mentioned in the Amanda and Tom argument scene. The colors should not be malevolent or suggest violence. It should be a subtle indication of frustration and tension”

Another example is in scene 3 the booklet provides guidance for different colors on the fire escape, living room, bedrooms and dance hall.

Although their skills far outstrip those of the people who would use these booklets, my technical crew thought the booklets were a great idea and have been thumbing through them for the last week.

We did get a little chuckle though from their political correct renaming of Bastard Amber, one of the most often used gel colors around. It was created by mistake when a guy was trying to create a batch of regular amber. Bastard Amber ended up being generally a better color choice and more widely used than regular Amber. The two leading gel manufacturers, Rosco and Lee both have the color in their swatch books.

Apollo on the other hand calls the color Fatherless Amber. Given that they have a Dominant and Submissive Lavender, we can’t imagine they are complete prudes.

If you want to have a bit of fun, ask your tech director if you can see their gel swatch books. You can find some amusing names for colors in there. Given that Rosco and Lee have created proprietary colors that the other hasn’t been able to reproduce, you can have fun looking through both. Like some famous painters who have created their own paint shades, lighting designers have asked that unique colors be created for them and so you will find some colors named after notable theatrical folks. Be warned that there are also a lot of mundane boring colors in there as well though you will probably wonder at the contradiction of shades like No Color Blue.

Brother May I?

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Okay another cautionary tale. I swear that I am not trying to emulate Jason Heath’s wild gig stories. This stuff is just falling into my lap. The drama director, tech director and motley band of collaborators have been meeting recently and having exciting discussions about our Fall drama production. It has gotten easy to get caught up in the energy so I keep forgetting a crucial point. We don’t have the rights to do the show yet.

The show isn’t currently in print but the playwright has said we can perform it. It will be something of a coup for us–but only if this permission is communicated to the playwright’s literary agent. I have asked my assistant theatre manager to keep an eye on me to make sure I don’t forget this crucial fact and list the show in our brochure or something. He then related this great story on that topic to me.

It seems he was in rehearsals for an off-Broadway play and the producer invited the playwright’s brother to view the final dress. As the playwright was deceased, the brother administered all of the rights. After the show the brother was very critical of the directing and the casting decisions. He may have been within his rights to complain about the issues if the performance license stipulated details about how the show should be presented. But we will never know because the brother finished by pointing out that the producer never requested the rights for the show.

The producer essentially told the brother that she assumed since the brother and she were of the same race and the play dealt with issues facing their shared race, the rights would naturally have been granted. The brother refused to grant the rights and the results of many weeks of rehearsal was never seen by an outside audience.

Even with the concepts of intellectual property blurring, there were a lot of mistakes made here. Not the least of which was that you shouldn’t try performing anything in the heart of Manhattan without securing the rights even if you are smart enough not to invite the executor of said rights to your show. This is not to say you are safer flaunting licenses the further you are from NYC. There are plenty of stories of vacationing playwrights and agents gasping in horror at the liberties taken with scripts in both sanctioned and unsanctioned productions.

The assumption that blood is thicker than money or least permission was also probably ill-advised.

It is likely that the playwright wasn’t terribly specific about how his play was to be directed and cast. The brother’s problem most likely started with the fact the rights hadn’t be granted and every other little dislike became enlarged as fuel for the complaint. The guy who taught me about the presenting business talked about the same thing in reference to horror stories we heard about performers who were absolutely sweet to us. The bizarre comments we heard about probably wasn’t the root complaint but merely one of many expressions of dissatisfaction about the absence of things their riders specified should be present.

Hopefully we will be granted the rights to perform the show we want to do in the Fall so I can relate the interesting way the script fell into our hands. Not to mention how our excited, creative madmen and women manage to execute the show.

Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

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During a meeting I had today I was reminded of a series of problems I had with a group of traveling artists some time ago. I think enough time has passed that I can talk about it without revealing the identity of the group to any but the most ingenious of researchers.

One of the things I am often most anxious about when a performing group arrives is that they won’t find the arrangements we have made suitable to their needs. Following the advice of the man who trained me in the business, I am pretty meticulous about advancing a show with a road manager. I double check the details of a rider just in case personnel changes result in different dietary or technical needs. It isn’t foolproof but generally the worst that happens is the group arrives and says, “Oh, you must have the old rider,” and accommodates what is usually the lack of something minor.

I am also upfront about anything we can’t provide as soon as the topic comes up. If I suspect there might be a problem brewing with something, I send off an email confirming conversations so that I have it in writing and time stamped. In one case, I reiterated a fact in three different emails because it didn’t seem to be sinking in to the guy’s brain. Fortunately, it did before he arrived.

There was an instance where despite a lengthy conversation with the road manager the group had issues with the food, hotel and transportation after they arrived. The only thing that didn’t emerge as a problem was the technical equipment we provided. What contributed to the problem was that the agent and the road manager apparently did not communicate the information to the artists. The artists did not communicate their needs with the road manager or have them written into the contract. What seemed strangest to me was that they had been touring for years upon years and hadn’t ironed these details out. There were plenty of “you must haves” listed in the contract but a lot of basic details omitted, too.

The night before the group arrived the road manager called and said that the group would like to exercise the option I had mentioned (and expected them to exercise) a month earlier and have their rooms upgraded to suites. They would pick up the cost difference. So I scramble and as luck would have it, there are enough suites available. I am also asked to make a dentist appointment for the first business day after the concert for a group member who is having a problem with a tooth. Even more amazingly, I find someone at a dentist office near the hotel that late at night and make the arrangements during the specific time frame the performer requested.

When the group arrives, we go to the venue and I am asked to go grab food for the group because they hadn’t gotten to eat before their flight and their technical director doesn’t want them leaving the theatre. (Come to find out, they went swimming instead of eating earlier that day.) Later when dinner arrives, we discover the caterer has decided to embellish a little and stuffed the entree with crab. One of the group won’t eat it because of the crab.

Now my mother is deathly allergic to shellfish and has almost died on a number of occasions. The two questions about food I specifically address is seafood allergies because of her and vegetarian requirements because the term means different things to different people. There were no allergies of any sort mentioned. So off I go for two more meals because one of the other people decides that since I am going anyway they would rather have something else.

An hour before curtain the road manager comes and asks if I can move them to another hotel. Now note that at this point, they haven’t checked in to the rooms I upgraded for them the day before. The reason is due to a minor feature, the lack of which I revealed to the road manager a month prior. Since I had made the reservations month earlier to secure good rates during high season and a purchase order had been issued to cover the estimated cost at that hotel, there was nothing I could do.

I think they secretly wanted to stay at a specific hotel because they ended up staying there on their own dime which equaled four times the amount they would have paid for the upgraded rooms I arranged. Unfortunately, due to the fact I had canceled the rooms hours before they were to be occupied, I ended up paying for them. Fortunately, the hotel took pity on me and only charged me the regular room rate rather than the suite rate.

After the show, I discovered that instead of one trip to the airport, they had changed their plans and would now be leaving at four different times. The next day was a non-travel day for the company and all seemed well. No messages at all from the group. Still, after I went home I checked my voice mail and email regularlly for problems. Then at 11 pm I got a call at home (a number I didn’t give them) from the road manager saying the group wanted to alter their pick up times.

That was about the end of the troubles, fortunately. If I recall, the performance was great. The audience loved it and had no clue what was happening behind the scenes. The one thing I appreciated was that they let the road manager do all the talking. Maybe it was because they didn’t like confrontational situations. But I was glad that as I drove them to the hotel I didn’t book, they didn’t try to explain themselves. They kept thanking me and my staff for all we did and talked about how grateful they were. I grinned and bore it while looking forward to their departure thinking all the while that if they were really grateful, they would stop making my life a living hell. Revisiting a frustrating topic while driving would probably not have been a good idea so I was just as happy to have them ignore that elephant in the room.

Were I to offer any advice to people starting out and those who have been lucky enough not to have a couple days like these. This was one of those fluke occurrences that transpire despite your diligent efforts to address issues well in advance. In fact, good advance planning allowed the situation not to get worse. The night of the performance everything that I would usually wander around checking on was completed by staff and volunteers doing their jobs. That left me the time to address these problems without overtly freaking out. Following this incident, I am sure I annoyed the next few road managers coming through on tour to no end double and triple checking their requirements. But I guarantee you that everyone has been happier that I have wanted to be better safe than sorry.

Not As Bad As Reported

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For those who have been eagerly awaiting a post on the implications of the chicken dance at weddings on the greater culture as a whole, I am sorry to disappoint you, I didn’t gain any insights while at my sister’s wedding. I don’t even think they played the chicken dance, much to my relief.

I did have a brief conversation with my other sister’s mother-in-law who founded a social service non-profit and is approaching retirement in the next 18 months. I asked her about the succession planning she was doing since that has been on my mind of late. Pretty much every element mentioned in the reports from the Myer Foundation and Building Movement held true. It was interesting to actually speak to someone about these trends having read so much about them.

In her organization, the budget was about $200,000 too small to necessitate having the type of person on staff who would be groomed to take over. None of the other people in senior management positions want to take over so her board will have to look outside to replace her. She also commented that since most people only stay with an organization 5-7 years, there hadn’t been a lot of opportunity to cultivate someone to succeed her. I was grateful to learn that in general, she didn’t really question the commitment of emerging leaders in her field to the work.

She had taken a seminar on Founders Syndrome which she had found quite valuable. She talked about having that problem with her board when many of the original members left. (The organization is going on 25 years old now.) She admits that her agency will probably have to deal with at least an off-shoot of this problem when she leaves. Some of the staff have said they are too old to get used to working with a new boss and will leave when she retires. While this will leave one less person who will resist the inevitable change a new executive director will bring, it also removes some of the institutional memory from the agency.

As with many of those in the aforementioned reports, she wonders if she can afford to retire as planned on what she has saved given the recent changes in the economy.

I don’t often get the opportunity to speak with people in the non-profit field outside of the arts at any length so it was interesting to hear so much of what I had read verified. When I read reports, I often forget that the trends being reported are cumulative of many respondents and that every element doesn’t apply to every organization out there. While my sister’s mother-in-law faced many of the challenges outlined in the reports I have read, her agency hasn’t experienced them all. Those they have encountered haven’t been as big a cause of concern.

Goin to the Chapel

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People are getting married and I will be attending. Posting shall resume upon my return.

Perhaps I will have some great insight about arts administration while doing the chicken dance at the reception.

Fitting Ass Ears On Another Bottom

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I have been participating in some interesting exchanges lately. The drama production class produced a pretty dark adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Lab Classroom this semester. I wasn’t too keen on the show in principle because it was set in a dance club and an organization in town had just finished their 3rd revival of Romeo and Juliet set in a strip club. I was annoyed that it was so derivative when so many other options available.

Taken on its own, it was pretty good. There were some inventive moments. For example, since the playwright decided the rude mechanicals didn’t have enough time to rehearse and learn lines, he has them present a silent butoh version of Pyramis and Thisbe. The students did a good job creating the club atmosphere by having officious bouncers at the door, black lights in the stairwell and a half-hour pre-show of the characters dancing in the club. The pre-show lent itself especially well to establishing the Helena-Demetrius-Hermia characters and backstory.

In any case, the show sold out every night of the extended run. The director started thinking it would be great to do it on Mainstage setting up platform seating around a playing area on stage rather than having the audience sit in the permanent seats. The playwright and I are both against the idea because the dynamics of the show will be entirely different. Instead of the cramped quarters and low ceilings of the Lab classroom, audiences will be watching a show surrounded by the wide open spaces of the wing space on the sides and the 70 feet of air in the fly system overhead.

To create the same ambiance, we would have to have everyone come in through the loading dock roll up door at the back of the theatre, build a hallway through the shop into a room we constructed on stage. At a certain point it seems strange to build a theatre inside your theatre. Even still the relationship of the audience to the actors and to each other is going to change. The small basement space holds 75 people which translates to two rows of 12 chairs on three side of the playing area. The director is talking about serving an audience of 300. Even if the performance was done fully in the round, that is 75 people in each direction. This increase in both the width and the depth of the seating area changes the size of the playing area and reduces the sense of tension and conflict.

Of course, part of the endeavor would be to create an entirely new production that had its own character rather than to recreate the elements of a past success. Though as the playwright pointed out, each revival of the aforementioned Romeo and Juliet adaptation was worse than the one before. Granted, they didn’t have the benefit of our superb production team. The adage about not being able to enter the same river twice probably is a good caution when considering your motivation for reviving a show.

The date proposed for the revival is Fall 2010 and a lot can happen in the interim. Perhaps both the playwright and I will feel less strongly about the topic a year from now when the time comes to decide such things. I don’t talk a lot about the decision making process I go through here on the blog. I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to record some of the considerations that have come into play. It will be interesting to me to see how I view things next year and 18 months hence if the decision to perform it on our mainstage is made.

Malignerers Will Be Shocked

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Given the dearth of conductors with the celebrity grade gravitas to attract audiences, the Detroit Symphony is trying out a replacement in the form of a robot made by Honda. Asimo, as the robot is known is said to be a strict task master and citing a perceived lack of discipline among the musicians, has ordered them fitted with electrodes in order to monitor when their focus is about to waver. When the brain waves associated with an imminent change in focus are detected, a mild shock will be automatically administered to the musician. Asimo will also have manual control of the system and has stated he hasn’t ruled out its use as a general disciplinary tool.

Ah, it is a pity these stories didn’t come out around April 1st!

While the robot is conducting and the technology to detect a loss of focus before it occurs does exist, they are independent of one another. Initially I was going to suggest the brainwave monitoring for orchestra/ballet/opera audiences to ensure their attention throughout. When I came across the robot story though, the idea of it torturing the musicians was much more fun. Frankly, given some of Jason Heath’s gig stories, a sadistic robot conductor may not necessarily be far fetched.

Seduce A M.B.A. Today

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Via the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required, I believe) is a story about a study of M.B.A. student perceptions that the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education conducted. Some of the results reveal some attitudes that non-profits, especially those focussed on social and environmental issues, might find heartening.

From the Chronicle article,

“Students seem to be saying that they really want to have careers with a positive impact on society, but they’re feeling like they can’t do that in mainstream business,” said Nancy McGaw, deputy director of the institute’s Business and Society Program. “There’s a disconnect there.”

Among those surveyed, “Only half of the 2007 respondents think that their personal integrity figures largely in corporate recruiters’ evaluation of them as a potential employee.” About 80% believe they will be faced with a situation that would challenge their morals and values and about 90% said they expected they would look for work elsewhere if they encountered that situation. Less than half said they would voice their objections.

This report might be a wake up call for non-profits to become more involved in recruiting M.B.As. They can provide graduates with a situation that embraced their values, provided an opportunity to make a positive impact and made them feel they could speak up rather than quit when faced with moral quandaries. I had taken a little poke at a CareerBuilder.com article a couple weeks ago for implying the grass might be greener in non-profits. One of the motivations CareerBuilder mentioned that I didn’t necessary find fault with was achieving ends by questionable means. Given that this is something MBAs imagine they would quit in order to avoid confronting, this could be one of the stronger selling points for non-profits.

Though the students are just as concerned about renumeration and work-life balance as anyone.
That factor will always need to be addressed.

I am making an assumption indirectly that non-profits are not actively recruiting MBAs given the fact that the students don’t feel that sociopolitical knowledge is valued by recruiters and that good social and environmental practices aren’t anything more than good public relations opportunities rather than integral to the value of the company and bottom line. Reading the survey results, much of this appears to be due to the way the training in their program is conducted. So it may take some lobbying of MBA programs to effect some changes in addition to showing up on career day.

All The Kids Know It Is More Fun To Sit In the Back

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There is a great illustration (in my mind as least) for why arts people need to value learning and be cognizant of what is happening elsewhere in a story out of Orlando. It seems the Orlando Opera Company and Orlando Ballet have decided to try to bump their subscribers out of the balcony and into the more expensive floor seats in an attempt to make that area look fuller and increase revenue.

The subscribers are none to happy and are resisting. Just like the subscribers at the Honolulu Symphony did when the balcony seating prices were both raised and that section closed until the floor section was filled. Just like the subscribers at the Boston Symphony Orchestra did when that organization increased balcony seating prices by 80% in one year. Both Honolulu and Boston backpedaled and admitted the increases were ill advised. I suspect the opera and ballet in Orlando may end up doing the same.

Fortunately, the Orlando Philharmonic hadn’t received the advice the opera and ballet did about changing the pricing structure or this entry would make it seem like orchestras were the only ones making this poor decision. Or at the very least, weren’t doing a good job presenting this new policy to their audiences. I am not sure there is a good way of making such a large change in one year’s time palatable without investing a whole lot of time and money in the campaign.

The Orlando Sentinel article mentions that the opera and ballet had received the results of a study. I wonder who did the study and how they came to the conclusion that subscribers would tolerate this in acceptable numbers. I could believe a study that found people would tolerate a price increase of X amount over what they are paying now. Likewise, I could foresee people grumbling but generally acceding to moving their seats to the floor for the same price if they were told it was a cost saving measure. (Don’t have to pay the ushers for the balconies, perhaps.) It would be a sneaky way to get people out of the seats and raise the prices the following season when you reopen the balcony due to demand. People would probably be rather angered at such a move when it emerged a couple years hence.

I would be rather incredulous at a study that found it would be productive to both displace subscribers and place them in a situation where they were paying more than the previous year. (If anyone knows of a case of the decision succeeding, I would love to know!) I would ask to see the research that back that up and if it didn’t include a fair sampling of my ticket purchasing base, I would be rather skeptical. In other words, I am wondering if they even talked to anyone in those seats. (Or researched how similar decisions played out.) I don’t expect any of them would have answered yes to a question that flat out asked if they would be willing to give up their seats so some extensive communication of the rationale would need to transpire. Which would be a pretty good opportunity to gauge the most effective way to communicate the rationale.

There are obviously too many factors of which I am unaware to make a real judgment about why the decision was made. I feel secure though in stating that their case doesn’t appear to have been communicated well.

Art, The Government Prescription Program

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There is a piece on the online journal, Spiked from Frank Furedi decrying the English government’s prescriptive use of music in their sponsorship of the Music Manifesto. My first thoughts were that this is what comes from positioning the arts as having all these benefits when asking for money. This is further evidence that the authors of Gifts of the Muse in saying the arts were ill served emphasizing these elements over the intrinsic value of the arts. I also thought that it should come as no surprise that governments would be employing music to advance an agenda. This has been happening for centuries from the Medicis to the current day where popular music is used to sell everything from cars to presidential candidates.

Perhaps I have been exposed too much to commercially motivated music, but I had a difficult time envisioning music as a vehicle for seeking and serving Truth. Perhaps it is the lack of this connection to Truth or my inability to see it that can be attributed to what he cites as “impersonal force of the market impinged on the development of art and culture.”

My initial cynicism about his complaints aside, there were a number of observations he made that I hadn’t really considered. For instance, he notes that by valuing who will be attracted by the experience over the art itself, “what really matters is the audience rather than the music that the audience listens to. The question of who sits in the audience, rather then what they hear, shapes official thinking on music today.”

I have seen this myself. Every final grant report I fill out regardless of whether it is privately or publicly funded asks me how many K-12 students were served. Many ask about the racial make up of the audience and if my program was designed to serve specific races or K-12 students. Some ask how the programs reinforce family values and self-sufficiency. I am occasionally tempted to ask how a particular government policy is actually reinforcing these things. The arts shouldn’t necessarily be looked to in order to patch what has been rent.

I do think that arts organizations should be paying attention to who is attending. I am happy not to have to break down my audience into all sorts of demographics for my grant reports. One should always be assessing who is attending and how they are receiving it. Though the identity and number of people attending shouldn’t form the sole measure of success.

One of the toughest parts of Furedi’s complaint to tackle is the idea of accessibility equating to dumbing down. He criticizes music classes.

“Instead of providing an opportunity for pupils to study and learn about music, ‘music-making opportunities’ are often about involving kids in playing around with digital media and pretending to be djs…But frequently the ‘music-making’ approach is praised because it allegedly removes the ‘barriers’ that prevent children from ‘making music’.”

and suggests that the real elitists are,

“the educational and cultural establishment who have so little faith in the ability of children to appreciate and learn about classical music. Their anti-elitism is a populist gesture designed to flatter ordinary folk and reassure them that not much is expected of them.”

The question that emerges in my mind is how to structure an introduction to theatre, music, dance and art to people whose experience with these disciplines has come from movies, television, MTV and Photoshop? Are the activities you intend as a bridge between these experiences and the creative/performing arts underestimating your audience or does it provide necessary context? A contributing factor to activities that do indeed dumb an experience down is the receipents may not view the relevance in the same manner you do. So the bridging activities become the whole program rather than just the initial steps of a larger plan.

For example, does all the art and literature about the transitory nature of life have the same poignancy for people who can create and destroy a visual representation with a touch of a button? How do you cultivate an appreciation for an artist’s technique in mixing colors or composing music when there is software that will correct those flaws? How do you instill a desire for preservation in someone whose criteria for doing so is based on the amount of room left on a memory card rather than what ever quality of composition is apparent on the tiny digital camera or cell phone screen?

I don’t doubt that you can cultivate appreciation and understanding of art in people amid all of these influences. But if they don’t feel it to the same degree or manner as you and your contemporaries do, you may never move beyond a certain point and allow them to develop a more sophisticated understanding. On the other hand, if you don’t take into account that people experience the world differently than when you were their age and proceed to present the discipline in the same manner it was presented to you, you risk alienating people with your insensitivity and general cluelessness.

What is the balance then between presenting an accessible context that is intellectually challenging? It is easy to say that is your goal and just as easy to be diverted from the plan by what seems to be a general atmosphere of anti-intellectualism.

Hey You, Why Aren’t You At The Concert!?

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I came across a link last week to a study the League of American Orchestras did. The freshness of the referring page and the fact that my monitor resolution didn’t require me to enlarge the pages too much initially hid the fact that the story came out in January 2004. Thinking it had been published in 2008, I was wondering why Drew McManus and the other bloggers at Inside the Arts hadn’t picked up on it already. For awhile there, I was excited that I might actually be scooping them on their segment of the arts.

Even given the time that has actually transpired since the publication date, the article, Stalking the Culturally Aware Non-Attender, is quite pertinent. One of the toughest groups to survey is the non-attender so the results of any survey of these people are highly valued. And they should be given that it is difficult to find people who don’t attend who are willing to respond. It isn’t as simple a matter as going out during a performance and asking why people aren’t at the show. (Though that does seem like a good place to start now doesn’t it?)

While the results of the survey the story covers are in relation to orchestras, the lessons learned can be applied universally. The median age of these smart, aware people tends to be lower than those actually attending which makes them valuable for that reason alone. They believe they would enjoy attending a concert, but never get around to doing so. Some of the reasons are advertising design which is intimidating to those not in the know (though theatre advertising gets higher points.) Though to be fair, some of the most accessible methods of communication suffered from perception. Said one person who didn’t know orchestra’s had websites, “I mean, they’re playing 18th-century music. I guess I never thought they’d need
a web site.”

In addition to being uneasy about how to dress and act, the Non Attenders are also concerned about not understanding the performance. It isn’t just a matter of not having the experience and vocabulary to comprehend what appears to be a dense, complex work, but also not being as enraptured by the work as everyone else seems to be.

I think this is an important distinction especially in relation to music. In most people’s general experience, not understanding music is not an impediment to enjoyment. Getting lyrics wrong is practically a rite of passage. Listening to music in a foreign language is quite commonplace and the unfamiliarity of the tongue not terribly distressing. Perhaps it is the attendance format combined with lack of reference points, but it appears people tend to feel more at sea attending a symphony. I cite the format as a contributing factor because even if a contemporary foreign language music performance is in a concert hall, there is often an opportunity to groove along with the music and establish a connection that is pretty much not an option in the presence of an orchestra. Or at least the glares will be quick in coming if are feelin’ it enough to roll your shoulders and wiggle a little in your seat.

The article notes that one of the most important groups to an orchestra are the people who initiate the excursion. Though the percentages may be different, this is true for all the arts disciplines. There are always a few who get the ball rolling and organize the outing for rest of their group, even if it is only one other. Making this task easy for that person can go a long way toward filling the seats.

A sidebar that appeared within the article directed me to a website the League has set up to make people more comfortable with the attendance experience. This is something I have been a proponent of so I was glad to see it. Meet the Music helps you find a League orchestra near you. It also offers advice about approaching your first attendance experience. Among the things I appreciated about the site was that while they instructed you not to clap between movements, they also tell you to ignore the people who shush you if you do and acknowledge it is only recently that the practice of not clapping at that point has emerged. I also liked their advice about how to listen to the activity while the musicians warmed up.

The biggest fault I would find with the website is that it’s existence isn’t widely promoted. It has been around 4 years and this is the first I have heard of it. I took a look around at the websites of the members in 15 states and few people include a link to it or anything like it in their education or ticket purchasing sections of the site. In some cases, it is the less prominent orchestras in a state which do a better job linking to the site or have a similar FAQ that is easy to find. The NY Phil and San Francisco Symphony though both have FAQs that were either modeled after or the models for the guide on the League site. (I am having a real hard time finding something on the Philly site though.)

Wonder of An Empty Theatre

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I have to admit that one of my guilty pleasures when working in theatres is giving tours. It is probably because I don’t have to give them often and so don’t become bored with the process. I am a bit of a history buff so I tend to learn all I can about the facility in which I am working.

The interior of the Asolo Theatre in Sarasota, FL was once the interior of the Dunfermline Opera House in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland and was built there by Andrew Carnegie. When I was working there many moons ago, I had the pleasure of giving a tour to the then current mayor of Dunfermline who was visiting the U.S.

Today we gave a tour to a school group that visits once a year as part of their tour of all the theatres in town. I have to confess, I look forward to their visit and actually called them about 6 weeks ago to find out when they would be coming. To make something of a double confession, in doing so I wasn’t so much committing my time as my technical director’s. He typically handles the bulk of the tour with some comments thrown in by myself. Mostly, I just follow along and listen.

Don’t get me wrong. I can do an interesting tour too. I have been a big proponent of having science classes come through because a theatre is a great practical example of physics employing counterweight systems, electrical calculations, additive and subtractive light, lens, load bearing construction that has to move, etc. Whenever someone asks what they have to learn math or science for, the reason can often be found in the theatre. I have spoken to some classes on these topics.

But as for the theatre itself, the technical director has been with the theatre for over 30 years so he knows all the stories and nooks and crannies. He has all the great stories to tell as the budding arts students ride the pit elevator down 20 feet and climb to the grid 70 feet above the stage.

Technology wise, our theatre is woefully behind the times but some of the most exciting parts of our tour are not technology dependent. I think one of the reasons why this school keeps coming back here year after year is because we are taking them to places they usually don’t see and telling them great stories about what it is they are looking at. Again, this springs from the TD’s love for his job and his facility. The stage was completely bare and lit by work lights. When we got to our lab classroom space, the always ready to ham it up students ran the small lighting board and instrument hang through its special effect paces. But that was at the end of the tour after plenty of pictures had been taken and questions had been asked about our big, empty space.

The technical director’s ability to keep a group engaged with few bells and whistles reminds us where the true source of theatre’s appeal is. Perhaps some might say it follows that his job isn’t really a necessary part of the transaction. I would counter that it is his mastery of this very concept that has allowed him to create minimal sets that evoke much more with the meager production budget he is allocated. (Well, that along with heroic recycling efforts.)

I am not waxing so sentimental as to claim the look in the kids’ eyes are all the thanks I need. I am proud of the theatre and like to show it off, however. I have been in and out of theatres so much I forget what a novelty it is for most people to be able to climb around and place their hands on things. I talk about so many problems and challenges on the blog I wanted to celebrate the wonder people can experience in an empty theatre space.

Wherein I Send You Reading Elsewhere

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I am working tonight (and tomorrow night for that matter) so I don’t have much time to write. I do want to take this brief opportunity to direct you to Ken Davenport’s blog, The Producer’s Perspective. As a producer of off-Broadway shows he has some great insights into the business in NYC like how to get your show produced, how much a risk it is to produce on Broadway, what does a press agent do, and the importance of having those who sell your product believe in it (and why that is tough to accomplish on Broadway).

Since he also takes a look at the implications of policy issues like today’s entry on what the universal health care program being touted by the presidential candidates may mean for Broadway.

I had actually gotten an email from one of his assistants a year or so ago inviting me to see Altar Boyz in New York, but I didn’t know he had a blog (maybe he didn’t at the time.) I have to give credit to TheatreForte for turning me on to his blog with their tireless efforts at indexing arts related blogs.

Job Satisfaction Guaranteed?

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CNN.com had a piece from CareerBuilder.com about the top 10 job prospects for Non-Profits. The growth numbers they cite apply to “advocacy, grantmaking and civic organizations field and administration is still the place to be salary wise.

I was rather amused at the opening lines of the piece-

“Do you feel your contributions in the workplace are overlooked? Are you consistently swamped with work at the office, but still feel empty when the week ends? At the end of the day, are you ashamed of what you’ve accomplished and how you reached the end result?”

Except for the bit about how you reached the end result, I think I am safe in saying that even non-profit people feel this way about their jobs. Though for non-profit people, the shame at the end of the day is more over how little you have accomplished in relation to what needs to be done.

Working in non-profits bestows no special grace that eliminates these feelings but they certainly may be offset with a greater feeling of satisfaction than you had in your for-profit job.

Just in case you are curious to compare some salaries, CareerBuilder also did a list of the top jobs in 10 industries back in February.

The Way It Used to Be

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We (meaning bloggers and various and sundry arts writers) often talk about how the arts attendance experience was a lot less like the staid and proper process of sitting in a dark room facing a stage. However, other than a few generalizations, we didn’t have much to offer in the way of concrete specifics.

Or at least that has been the case here at Butts In The Seats.

Fortunately, blogger and arts critic Terry Teachout comes to the rescue with an article about the good old days in Commentary this month. Since he addresses piano concerts people who perform or attend such concerts probably have a better idea about some of the things to which he refers. It is clear to the general audience that things were a little looser by today’s standards. There was more embellishment and improvisation even from the composers themselves.

“…British composer Charles Villiers Stanford heard Johannes Brahms play his Second Piano Concerto, he observed that the composer ‘took it for granted that the public knew he had written the right notes, and did not worry himself over such little trifles as hitting the wrong ones. . . . [T]hey did not disturb his hearers any more than himself.'”

Liszt apparently had a urn placed in lobbies and would sit at the piano reviewing the suggestions placed within by audience members and would chat with them between pieces. Audience members, for their part “…thought nothing of applauding not merely between movements, but in order to pay tribute to a particularly well-played passage in the middle of a piece.”

It is dishonest in a sense to talk about “how things used to be” because the reality was that these gentlemen were the popular musicians of their time and everything Teachout cites is no different than attending a contemporary music concert today. Musicians improvise on their own work knowing that the audience is aware of the more perfect version produced in a studio but don’t care that they aren’t playing it exactly like the album. The audience will applaud during the opening notes of the song, after the solo and will sing along. Unless you are the only one singing and are out of tune and drunk, no one generally cares.

Teachout says he is not encouraging a raucous free for all, but a general loosening of some aspects of the experience. I am familiar enough with classical music to be certain, but I imagine I would agree with him. I wouldn’t necessarily want people walking through the aisles hawking oranges while I am watching Shakespeare. The language is so complex and delicious that you need to devote a bit more attention than you would at a Mamet play which, truth be told, has a complexity and deliciousness of language of its own.

It doesn’t take much effort to imagine someone associated with an orchestra would say the same thing about the product they offer. It may have been popular entertainment at one time, but it does require more attentiveness to appreciate these days.

The Secret Lives of Theatre Managers

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My picture was in the paper this Friday for an extra-curricular activity I engage in. It had been taken a few weeks ago so when someone mentioned they had seen me, I discounted it. Since then I have been congratulated and razzed by everyone from co-workers to my dentist.

As I was leaving work this evening, the assistant theatre manager said I should put the photo up on our website to humanize the organization a little. I dismissed the idea because the organization isn’t about me and the goofy poses I take while not at work.

As I drove home, I started having second thoughts. People don’t support organizations, they support and donate to people. That is one of the reasons why I generally make a short curtain speech enjoining people to turn off their cellphones, pointing out the fire exits and telling them what a wonderful time they are about to have. I could record this stuff but the human element is eliminated. Certainly having someone in the lobby to congratulate, complain or petition that they can recognize helps with audience relations, too.

But do they really care about what I do in my off time? My supermarket was posting banners showing how different employees were working in the community as volunteers. Presumably this was to influence people to identify more closely and positively with the supermarket as a community entity. My staff and I are pretty much wrapped up in our jobs at the theatre and hardly have enough time to generate the same credibility.

Those banners struck me as a little manipulative anyway. As with everything, humanizing yourself has to be done correctly for the community. I don’t know how well it did in Milwaukee, but I thought the video the Milwaukee Symphony did for the opening of their season worked well in this regard. They filmed concert master Frank Almond talking about the upcoming season as they follow him around his house. What really worked for me was that they had his daughter dancing and twirling around the living room and zipping across the back deck on a scooter. It made me comfortable listening to him talk about his violin and the music he was going to play. The video made me feel like I would be able to understand and feel something from the music being played during their season.

It would really be great if they would let me twirl around in the aisles like Frank’s daughter.

I am not quite sure if the dynamic between my organization and community is one where learning about the hobbies of the staff will positively influence our audience’s perception of us. More to the point, I am not sure if I want my audience having a relationship with my private life.

Skeptical Eye on Board Recruitment

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I was idly perusing a national arts job site this weekend and came across a board member solicitation for a small theatre in a major city. I thought that was interesting because an organization usually forms a nominating committee and seeks to balance the board in terms of what people might bring to short and long range plans. Though BoardSource counsels against indiscriminate recruitment, I imagined while perhaps inexperienced, they were being a little adventuresome and casting a wide net. They specified a love for theatre and preferred that the members not be theatre professionals.

Then I noticed something that made me a little wary. The cover letters and resumes were all going to the artistic director. It is something of a conflict of interest to have the people responsible for overseeing the finances and operations chosen by the person whose activities will be monitored. Adding to my unease was a check of their organization’s website and 990 filings on Guidestar which revealed of the five board members, three were employees. The artistic director, managing director and production person all sit on the board. This isn’t a new company that just formed and hasn’t had a chance to recruit outside the handful of friends who started the venture. The organization is almost 9 years old and if their claims are true, has garnered enough critical acclaim to attract interest in serving from a decent number of people.

I checked the non-profit corporation laws for the state in which the organization is located and there is no law against such a heavy staff representation on a board. In fact, it appears only California makes such a prohibition. Don’t quote me though. This type of mix is generally advised against. This exchange on Idealist.org gives a sense of some of the factors to weigh.

It initially appeared to me as if the artistic director may be trying to manipulate the selection process in order to surround himself with people who will help raise money and not challenge him. My suspicions ran so high that I was ready to name names in the post and encourage people to stay far away. However, I also considered that maybe someone advised them that their current board set up looks suspicious and they should make an effort to expand board membership if they want to attract more serious funding.

Which is not to say that next year the artistic director won’t have surrounded himself with 10 yes men and women. There were some clues in the 990 and organization website that I pursued with a little Googling thatl makes me wonder how independent the other board members are. The other endeavors with which the board members have been involved makes me skeptical of any suggestion that they didn’t know any better about the composition of their board.

I also have to admit there are many possible variable of which I am not aware that could explain this situation so I am not going to be outing them here. On the other hand, I am quite pleased with how easy it was for me to research the organization, the board members and the specific laws of their state dealing with non-profit boards. It is very encouraging to see the increasing ease with which research can be conducted.

Other Ideas

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Scott Walters over at Theatre Ideas had some thoughts on yesterday’s post and then I responded to his entry and, if I didn’t mess up my submission while running back and forth preparing my dinner, just replied to his response.

With all that thinking and writing, I pretty much figure I have done my blogging contribution of the day. Whew!

Actually, I did want to highlight a project Scott has been working on in conjunction with other arts bloggers, over the course of a number of blog entries called Theatre Tribe. This project is dedicated to finding viable way to do theatre in the changing economic/political/social landscape. Since he has been developing the concept essentially from scratch in entries interspersed over the course of several months, he has set up a central page that organizes his thoughts for easy reference. I have read some of his entries at various points though when I clicked through the headers on the central page, I realized how many I had missed. Scott presents some interesting ideas for revising the way performances are mounted and the nature of the artist-community relationship.

There are times when I find Scott’s writings to be strident and in opposition with my own thoughts. But he is also very thoughtful and reflective. Which is why I keep going back.

Are You Living Where You Should Be?

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Richard Florida, who rose to fame alongside his Rise of the Creative Class figures you should evaluate if you are living where you should be. As I read the reviews and summaries of his new book, Who’s Your City?, I get the impression that it may have just gotten harder to attract the creative class to one’s area.

Of course, it has always been difficult or easy without Florida saying it. But from what I read and what he talks about in this newspaper article, it seems like there is an underlying vibe a lot of places that attracts (and repels) certain types of folks. If your community doesn’t already have a certain nascent characteristic, it is going to be tough to cultivate a change in that direction. There is a certain inertia to some places that will hinder efforts if local government/Chamber of Commerce, etc is trying to push things in an opposite direction with the intention of attracting the treasured creatives. He even implies an entropic influence on people drawing their values and attitudes closer to being in line with the general community over time. (Though most people who are considered the loony liberal or raging conservative probably won’t ever be wholly converted short of consciously willing it.)

Florida talks about certain communities being suited for people at different phases in their lives and lists the “best of” in large, middle and small regions. I haven’t read the book but if I were to hazard a guess, given that creatives, like all mortals age and mature in their outlooks, attracting them is probably a matter of exploiting the aspects of your community that best suit a certain demographic rather than aiming for the young and hip (unless your community is a burgeoning hip place.)

What appealed to me more than the top five list was another section of the website that poses 20 questions to help you decide what communities are best for you. This is great for me because I am young and hip in atypical ways. The strength of the place finder is that it makes you examine your criteria for your ideal community and forces you to do a little research to answer all the questions.

You plug in where you live and up to four places where you want to live. It then asks you to rate each city on typical things like economy, geography, climate, available jobs, health care, arts, schools and housing costs. But it also asks you to rank them on things like trustworthiness of politicians and business leaders, availability of technology, diversity of leadership and community and openness of the community. In the end you may discover that while you always dreamed of living in Seattle, you are better off living where you are.

I suspect the place finder might even be help people focus their thinking when they consider founding an arts organization. (Maybe the NEA or Americans for the Arts should adopt a similar tool specifically for the arts.) Even without his book being published, I don’t think I would be suggesting anything earth shattering were I to say that founding an arts organization that doesn’t resonate with the underlying vibe of a community is a bad idea and probably destined to result in one muttering about philistines. If communities can target the wrong group of creatives, creatives can certainly target the wrong communities.

Wait, Didn’t I Just Read This?

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Following a link from an entry on the Non-profiteer, I arrived at a site with a report about Non-profit leadership. The summary of the study was so similar to the Building Movement report I cited last month, I initially thought it was the same one mirrored by a partner in that 2004 study.

Come to find out this study, Ready to Lead? Next Generation Leaders Speak Out is brand spanking new having just come out this year to report a survey of 5756 members of members of Idealist.org and constituents of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services. They also held six focus groups across the country with 55 non-profit staffers who had never been executive directors.

This survey included a much larger sample size than Building Movement’s (though they certainly acknowledge BM) but generally gets the same responses. People feel they need to balance their work and personal lives, they aren’t terribly keen on becoming executive directors, don’t feel they are being mentored or have many professional development opportunities. There are some nice charts graphs and charts on the report home page, (on the Myer Foundation website by the way), that summarize many of the results. Top two of five reasons not to become Executive Director-Don’t want Fundraising responsibilities and Would Have to Sacrifice Work-Life Balance.

There were two results that I hadn’t seen before that I thought were interesting. First is that 10% more people of color were desired to become executive director than whites and people of lower income were wanted to become executive director than people from middle and upper class backgrounds. I should note that a large number of those belonging to the surveyed organizations are associated with social service/justice, health services, environmental protection/justice organizations rather than specifically with the arts.

The second finding I found interesting was that people of color and women felt they needed more education and training time before becoming executive director than white men who tended to feel they were ready now. The surveyors attribute this more to the fact that more men than women and people of color hold senior positions and are being groomed to be executive director in twice the number. They believed women and people of color felt the need to be over-educated and burgeoning with experience in reaction to this.

I should point out the survey also notes that a large portion of their sample were unemployed (11%) or in the first year (43%) of their career. I do feel women and people of color need better representation, but I don’t want my entry to serve as fodder for protest when the numbers are so slanted. I think this mix is fine for reporting aspirations but not necessarily for reporting the reality of a situation. For example, only 4% of those surveyed said they were being groomed to be executive director. However in a 2006 survey of executive directors conducted by the same group, “52% of executive directors reported actively developing one or more people on their staffs to be executive directors someday.” The relative lack of experience in this sample needs to be taken into account when looking at some of these results.

One thing I liked about the Myer Foundation website is the resource page. I will admit to only taking a cursory glance at a few of the blogs and other resources but I liked what I saw. For example, this entry on The Bamboo Project Blog that suggests using a webcam, computer and internet calling services like Skype to turn Baby Boomers retirees into long distance mentors and recording the sessions to create a mentoring library. (The use of which will require the cultivation of learning as a value among non-profit leaders, of course.)

There are also a number of links about retirement planning. The lack of which emerged as a motivating factor on many fronts in both this survey and the one Building Movement did a few years ago.

Stilted Smiles

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The impetus for the original entry I followed up on yesterday was writing effective press releases. It got me thinking so when I came home this evening I started looking around for tips for putting together a successful publicity photo shoot. There are plenty of guides on composing a shot but I haven’t been able to find anything on how to get performers to look natural. There are plenty of groups that do a good job with their publicity shots but I have seen enough awful pictures in newspapers and on websites that I essentially consider it a moral imperative to list some sort of resource on my blog.

I have worked with any number of directors who were pretty vigilant about keeping bad acting out of their shows who seem to throw those rules out the window for the photo shoot. You get heavily posed shots where the actors are blatantly indicating their emotions-“Here I am terrified. Boy am I terrified.”

The only advice I can offer is from two different places I worked. Both essentially followed the same scheme. One had the actors run through a scene and the photographer either snapped away or yelled freeze. The other had much more advanced performers and let them essentially improv with each other in character and the photographer snapped away. In the latter case, the photographer was more likely to tell the actors to keep going than to stop so he could catch something. The photographs in got cases tended to have a more organic dynamic to them.

I wonder if someone out there with more photo shoots under their belt might have a more formal list of tips for effective publicity shots. (Or knows of a source that has them.) I would think a list of cliches to avoid would be valuable as well. (Mollified person in foreground with person glaring disapprovingly behind and to the side, for example.) I did find one website talking about photo cliches but it was pretty snarky so I thought it best not to link.

If you have tips or know where to find them, let me know.

Le Bon Strategem

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A recent conversation I had that included the state of Wisconsin reminded me about an entry I did almost 3 years ago on American Players Theatre in Spring Green, WI. Their brochure had fallen into my hands and really impressed me because the language made me just want to visit. I didn’t care if I saw a show or not, they just sounded like a great bunch of people in a great location and I wanted to be there. Reading the entry over again, I still do.

I visited their website again curious if they were able to maintain their cool factor or if the brochure was just the result of some momentary made genius. The performance descriptions still seem pretty enticing. I think the more extensive descriptions are obviously better than the abbreviated versions found here. I was particularly intrigued by the subtitling of Henry IV as “The Making of A King.” As far as I can tell Shakespeare never included that as part of the title. Since they are combining the two Henry IV plays into one, I assume they are emphasizing the parts that show Prince Hal’s coming of age.

But really, that bit of information along with details of most of the other shows are elements that could engage me based on my status as an theatre insider. As a test of whether the descriptions would be truly enticing to a person who was not familiar with a show, I specifically looked at the language of The Belle’s Stratagem by Hannah Cowley, both a work and playwright I had no idea existed. While I have to acknowledge that the details about the show fading into obscurity after being wildly popular for about a century appealed to my academic and insider side, you have to admit the following makes the show sound like a lot of fun:

Slip into the midst of a gathering of the rich and richer, old money and new. Nobody parties like the British upper crust. With names like Silvertongue, Flutter, Courtall, Villers and Miss Ogle, it’s clear this is a cheerful meat market on display. Plays like a well-choreographed dance, pirouettes into a seethingly seductive soiree of a masquerade ball, where identities are mistaken, libidos tweaked and liaisons secretly undertaken.

Mistaken identities and secret liaisons I am familiar with but I love the “cheerful meat market on display” phrase.

I will admit that writing about period pieces allows for over the top language that would sound out of place describing a modern realistic piece or even contemporary performer. What you always want to aim for when promoting a performance is not to so much describe the reality of the piece as describe the essence of the experience (preferably without using meaningless stock phrases like “what it means to be human”). That is something that can be accomplished with just about every period and genre. Not everything the American Players people have written is replete with inspiration but it is still pretty good. (And it gives me hope that improving my own writing a little more is possible.)

Ruthless In War, Benevolent in Peace

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In an attempt to dance with the one that brung me and pay local culture its due, I wanted to mention a production we presented this weekend. One of our consortium partners re-mounted a production about the life of the last pre-Contact chief of Maui island, Kahekili. The original performance was about 10 years ago. The current production expands on the original and marks the first time the National Endowment for the Arts has recognized hula kahiko with in their American Masterpieces grant program.

I don’t usually promote performances on my blog but I do feel some loyalty to culture in which I am living. Productions of this kind which expand on traditional hula performances are few and far between so I am eager to advance what I feel is a part of a renaissance in Hawaiian culture.

What I find fascinating about the story of Kahekili is the parallels to Arthurian legend. Kahekili essentially ruled 7 of the 8 major Hawaiian islands through either conquest or capitulation. Unfortunately, like Uther, he couldn’t close the deal and unite all into all into a single kingdom. That fell to Kamehameha the Great who is said to be Kahekili’s son. Since Kamehameha didn’t live in the Maui court there is a sense that like Arthur, there is some illegitimacy attached. That is where the similarities end. Kamehameha denied Kahekili was his father and even opposed the Maui chief’s conquest of the Big Island of Hawaii.

Since most of Kahekili’s activities occurred prior to Captain Cook’s arrival, it is interesting to see a parallel to Arthurian legend emerge. On the other hand, given that all knowledge was transmitted orally at the time, some alterations to the story to bring it in line with Camelot may have crept in post-Contact. Especially if someone was trying to validate his reign and right to treat with other monarchs and leaders.

The other reason I promote shows like this for the educational elements. During the production’s tour on the U.S. Mainland, the group had to explain the difference between Hawaiian hula and other related forms like Samoan fire knives and the frenetic hips and drumming of Tahitian dance. The one indication the group had that the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau was doing a good job with their advertising was that some people were surprised by the battles portrayed in the show. They thought Hawaiians were all aloha and didn’t fight.

In fact, Kahekili was incredibly ruthless in war. The district our theatre is located in was the site of a particularly infamous massacre by his armies where he wiped out all the noble houses on the island. Any nobles living here after that came from the Neighboring Islands. One of the most scenic spots on the island is the location where Kamehameha’s troops drove their opposition over the cliffs during his conquests.

The production was equally as educational for local audiences as it portrays fertility, wedding and chiefly practices rarely witnessed these days. Kahekili having been eclipsed by Kamehameha, is also not a very well known figure so his story is also informative for the community. The tour is winding down this summer though there are whispers of some interest from a place in Germany. If there is additional interest, who knows what might be arranged….

I have no stake in the success of the show so if there is any interest from my readers, they should contact these folks.

Technology Tip- I Am Dumb

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No, no, no wait. The tip isn’t that I am dumb, it is actually that I am occasionally reminded that I shouldn’t assume a tip I am considering writing on is so self-evident and elementary that I am insulting people by posting it.

I was checking up on Chad Bauman to see how he was faring in his effort to get people to cross the Potomac River to see Arena Stage productions in Virginia. I had posted on his use of Personalize URLS to direct people from their driveway to his driveway. It appears the effort was well worth it as they “have had less than 1/2 of 1 percent of our subscribers ask for a refund.”

In the same entry he talks about a practice he adopted from Repertory Theatre of St. Louis that made me thwak my head for not perceiving the logical extension of things we already do. Essentially Repertory Theatre of St. Louis and now Arena Stage have pages (click on the preceding theatre names in this sentence) containing links so you can tell your friends about a show on the different social networking sites and via email as well as bookmark the page for future reference.

This was the part that convinced me that I shouldn’t think something is too simple to mention. What made me say “Duh” is the fact that while my theatre does offer people the opportunity to send email messages with a performance description automatically inserted into the message body and have a Myspace page allowing people to send event information to Myspace friends, we haven’t it possible to send Myspace alerts from our organizational web page and vice versa. I figure if I missed something this logical, other people may have has well.

There is certainly no wisdom in assuming the Myspace people only get their event information through that site. As with all things technological, I do think there is a limit to the number of modes of communication an arts organization should offer website visitors. The clutter and the surfeit of choices can be alienating.

Like the aforementioned theatres, our stated policy is that we don’t store the email information. At least insomuch as we don’t record any of the information in our databases. A copy of what is sent does get forwarded to my email address alone. Given the tensions I have witnessed arise from students who felt they were miscast, I wanted to make sure no one was using our system to send out messages disparaging cast members by creatively rewriting my show descriptions.

Lately, I have considered making a small alteration to our policy. Since there is usually one person who organized most of the details of any couple/group outing, I was thinking that perhaps we should institute some reward system for those who are recommending our shows to their friends. It wouldn’t be a publicized program. I don’t want people spamming their friends with our show information in order to get prizes. What we would do is simply contact the person and offer them free tickets or something for being so supportive of us.

The change to our policy might be something along the lines of “We will not store the recipient’s email address or the content of the email in any form. We may keep a simple tally of how many times a sender as recommended a show and contact them no more than once a year to inquire on the quality of their experience.”

I am sure I am missing some other logical way that will facilitate attending a performance. If you see it, speak up and submit a comment!

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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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