When I was at the APAP conference last month, Neill Archer Roan commented that sometimes it was difficult to figure out who bloggers were. I mentioned that I tried to keep identifiable specifics out of my entries because I wanted to create an everyman-everywhere environment. When writing about my own experiences I wanted to avoid having people dismiss them as having no application in their situation because they weren’t in the same region or discipline as me.

From some discussions I have had and comments the blog has received, I think it was a good choice to make. In some cases like yesterday’s entry, I think I may have gone a little overboard. In my attempt to avoid identifying the specific discipline by using words like “field” and “genre”, I think the entry may have been confusing and difficult to read. (And why didn’t I use the vastly better term, discipline, I will never know.)

I apologize to my readers for obfuscating matters in my zeal for greater relevance. I am not going to reveal the discipline out of a desire not to be seen as pronouncing its imminent demise. The other reason I am purposely vague is to protect the identities of the innocent or at least those deserving of compassion. If you really, want to know, email me and I will tell you.

One of the moderators of the Emerging Leadership Institute I attended, Rosalba Rolon, is the Artistic Director of Pergones Theater in Bronx, NY. She spoke briefly about the organization during the institute but it wasn’t until I read her brochure that something had caught my eye that synched with the stories she told.

She spoke a lot about the support the theater had received from the neighborhood and how indebted the organization was to their neighbors for their survival. Now things are looking up and the area, formerly one of the most crime ridden places in the country, is becoming gentrified. (Apparently, there is talk of changing the name from South Bronx to Downtown Bronx to support the spiffed up image.)

Many arts organizations target mailings to zip codes with affluent neighborhoods because they are more likely to be comprised of a demographic that is inclined to attend events and hopefully donate funds. Pergones uses zip codes to cultivate a different kind of currency.

The theatre remembers to whom it is indebted and offers 50% discounts (scroll to Zip Tickets) on tickets to anyone living in zip code 10451 up until 30 minutes before a performance. At first I misread this as a type of rush ticket available at 30 minutes before the performance but this anytime prior to 30 minutes before the performance.

As rush tickets, I thought this was nice, but when I realized this was a discount on advanced tickets, I thought it was great! This goes to creating a sense of investment, value and good will in the immediate community.

And even if you don’t live in the specific zip code, the theater has negotiated a reciprocal agreement for its members giving them a 40% discount at a theater in Manhattan, one in Washington, DC and a festival in Coral Gables, FL. Maybe few will ever be in a position to redeem the discount in the other cities. Still, they have an incentive to experiment and attend while they are away from home rather than doing something else.

The immediate message to the member is that their theater is working on their behalf to give them privileges when they are away from home. The goodwill generated from that is probably more valuable than any discount they might realize while on the road.

Since I have been invoking the idea of assessing technology and only using what is suitable for you instead of jumping on the latest trend, I need to issue a mea culpa.

At various times I have suggested in my entries that organizations should have the artistic staff blog about their rehearsal experience. I still think this is a good idea. However, of the few organizations I have seen who have had their artistic staff blog, I have to say I have been really unimpressed.

Many of them start out the first couple days of rehearsals and then either come to a dead stop or don’t pick up again until just around opening night. The entries that are there are pretty predictable. They start out talking about the great group that has been assembled and how exciting it all is. Then often nothing more.

Certainly one could get more entries generated if one made it a contractual requirement and set aside time each day during which performers and the creative team were to scribe their musings. After reading the experiences of a college professor who required her classes to blog, I am not sure this is the most constructive or productive tack to take.

Frankly, the blog postings I required my students to write were just not very interesting. Those students are bright, insightful, frequently opinionated, and, as a whole, a pleasure to be around. Their blogs were not.

I imagine that if you assembled the most brilliant group of performers and artistic collaborators the world could imagine, you might find that their brilliance was less apparent in what they produced for the blogosphere.

So I take it back. If you can do it well and your audiences will benefit from it, blog away! If not, turn the creative energies toward creating a great performance.

To pick up a little where I left off yesterday.

A good part of the rest of the first day was devoted to reading literature and discussing the difference between leadership and management and how you can exhibit leadership even if you aren’t an area or department head.

The second day we were a little bit more crunched for time because it had been requested that the ELI participants attend the plenary session and super sessions planned that day. (More on them in a later entry.) One of the exercises the institute leaders had us engage in was August Boal’s Forum Theatre practice. Members of the group were given a script and scenario and then the rest of us were encouraged to stop the action and replace one of the actors to move the situation in a more positive direction. I had heard about Forum Theatre before but never witnessed it in action. It was quite an interesting experience.

Another exercise we engaged in was Story Circle (explanation starts on pg 3). This activity is often to assist with conflict resolution. We used it to talk about people who have exhibited leadership in our lives and then examine the common elements.

There were a number of observations that came out of these activities. Some members of the group felt they would put their jobs in jeopardy if they attempted to shift the direction of meetings to make them more constructive. By which I don’t mean trying to use these activities in their organization, but rather recognizing where things were falling apart and trying to shift the tenor of the conversation. Other than working very gradually and subtly, we didn’t see any solution to this dilemma.

One of the biggest issues that came out of our discussions was succession planning. Many felt there wasn’t any effort being made to secure succession in arts organizations in general. A few felt like the discussion about it in their organizations was going something like this:

Leader: OH WOE! OH WOE! WHO WILL TAKE OVER WHEN I AM GONE? THE NEXT GENERATION HAS NO DEDICATION. WHO WILL TAKE THE REINS?

Emerging Leader: me! me! mentor me! i love all this. look over here. i am energetic and excited.

Leader: OH WOE! OH WOE! ALL THAT I HAVE WORKED FOR DOWN THE DRAIN…..

To some degree we wondered if the existing leadership might be holding out for a clone of themselves when changing times required different skill sets.

After discussing the plenary and super sessions we had attended, we met with alumni of the Emerging Leadership Institute. This was apparently something that had never been done before. The alumni had been meeting earlier to discuss plans for Institute graduates.

Many of the alumni still felt a strong bond to those with whom they had gone through the program and some kept in touch. Unfortunately, the graduates as a whole didn’t keep in touch. At one time there was a person who put a lot of work into keeping the members abreast of each others’ activities. Once she stopped, everything fell apart.

The alumni (including the most recent batch) have expressed an interest in not only staying active on the listserv/discussion forums but also increasing the visibility of program graduates at the conference. Among the ways the graduates would like to participate are moderating panels and introducing speakers so that the same people don’t have to hustle from session to session.

Also, since participants in the institute are early in their careers and rather poor, the plan is to request some sort of break in conference fees for 5 years in return for volunteer work on the conference. The alumni that attended this year is only a small portion of those who have gone through the institute. The thought is to make it easy for graduates to continue to stay involved with APAP and the conference allowing them to expand their network of contacts and improve their leadership skills.

One of the concerns the alumni had was that the Emerging Leadership Institute isn’t perceived as important or valuable to arts organizations. One graduate was in the position to encourage and approve the participation of a colleague from her organization. She said her decision to do so was second guessed by her superiors who questioned it as a waste of time and money.

This was one of the reasons why the alumni are so interested in keeping everyone communicating. The better a resource of advice and answers the group becomes for its graduates, the more valuable attendance at the institute may be seen. This is also the reason why we want to be more visible at conferences as well.

I just wanted to observe–Like social networking sites (Myspace.com) and technology sites like YouTube, this is an example of users essentially taking the initiative to promote something they value and asking the host company for assistance in doing so. This was a theme that came up a lot during the conference–but I will talk about it later.

I should mention that despite the poor image organizations might have about the ELI, the 22 or so accepted were culled from a much larger pool of applicants. The process is fairly competitive and hopefully will become more so with alumni input.

Okay, so obviously there was a lot I liked about my experience. There were also a few places I felt things fell short. I have already submitted a written evaluation and had a discussion about all this with the group leaders so I am not telling tales out of school.

First- The application to the institute required us talk about the strengths, weaknesses and threats to our organization. I went expecting part of the conversation to include that. It never was.

According to one of the ELI leaders, they had been trying to get rid of that application for quite some time now since it did not reflect the content of the program and hoped to revamp the form for next year.

I don’t know if any sort of discussion in that area was supplanted by the request that we attend the plenary and super sessions or if it never occurs. I do think a discussion of the threats to the industry could have been valuable. I wouldn’t have been interested in an open grousing session where people laid out a lot of blame on the K-12 education system, home entertainment systems and the internet. The second day would have been the right time to have it. By then the ground rules for thoughtful discussion would have been firmly established.

But really, you can engage in discussion about threats to the industry in a lot of locations. What I think would have been really essential was an opportunity to address weaknesses in ones own leadership and how to better take a leadership role in ones current position. The environment was specifically designed to preserve confidentiality and to create bonds between participants to serve as resources for each other.

The more I think about it, the more I believe this was what many attendees were looking for. There were a lot of clues throughout the two days. Early on people specifically admitted they weren’t good at dealing with conflict. As I noted earlier, others mentioned that they were in dysfunctional environments. I went up to a person and told them I empathized with their situation based on my own history. And of course, some felt they were being overlooked as potential inheritors.

We were given some good tools and activities for dealing with conflict and affecting change when we returned to our organizations. I strongly suspect, however, that many in the group would have welcomed the opportunity to essentially engaged in a group therapy session, air their concerns and fears with colleagues and receive some advice and guidance in return.

I imagine that would have run things into a third day and even at the conference rate, it was pretty dang expensive to stay in those hotels! The whole experience was absolutely worthwhile. I am going to put some effort into making it even more so for those who follow by providing feedback and encouraging increased alumni involvement.

As I noted earlier, I was at the Arts Presenters Conference over the last week. I will be writing about the experience over the next couple days and maybe even longer. I took a lot of notes and picked up some literature I still need to digest.

On the whole, it was really a great experience. I took the opportunity to see a lot of artists and to talk to many colleagues. I debated my theories about press release writing and marketing.

I also spoke at some length to one of the APAP board members about creating discussion forums as I recently vowed to do. Of course, she challenged me to step up to my convictions and join the communications committee.

What I wanted to talk about in today’s entry was my participation in the Emerging Leadership Institute. The Institute is one of many conference leadership training efforts associated with a conference. I listed many of them in an earlier entry. In that same entry, I cited Andrew Taylor’s frustration that there are so many of these programs and none of them talk to each other.

At one point during the institute I spoke to the aforementioned board member, (who was helping to lead the institute), suggesting that if APAP was pondering conducting leadership activities regionally, they should first look to tap into the existing leadership seminar infrastructures like the National Arts Leadership Institute (NALI) rather than reinventing the wheel. I then sought out Philip Horn who is associated with NALI, asked him how things were going with the organization and told him what I had suggested.

Anyway, there were about 22 people attending the institute. Everyone was in the first 5-10 years of their career in presenting. Almost everyone was a presenter with a couple artist agents, a couple of service organizations but no artists. Apparently, this year was unusual in that there were no artists participating.

I also noticed and commented that nearly everyone was from either a university, city or state associated institution. There were few people from “independent” presenting organizations. I was told this was reflective of the general membership–it started 50 years as a university presenters organization and remains generally so. I noted this as another reason I think APAP should host open bulletin board forums. If the website is viewed as a resource for many, perhaps the conferences will be as well and attendance will diversify.

One thing I was surprised at was that the institute sessions were lead by an artist agent and a presenter rather than a professional leadership consultant. In my mind this was a strength because the leaders had a practical understanding of the environment in which the attendees were operating. Consultants tend to live in a more theoretical place. This type of objectivity is certainly useful in many cases.

In this particular instance I think the arrangement helped the group develop a trust bond with each other and the leaders much faster than if it had been lead by consultants. And lord knows, we had little enough time to waste.

One of the first major activities we engaged in was splitting into groups based on our major leadership style. One group was comprised of those who look at the big picture and storm full speed ahead toward it pulling everyone else along. Another group was the process oriented people who make sure everything is well organized and accounted for. The third group were people who took the feelings and concerns of others into account. The last group were those who celebrate every little victory and act as cheerleaders. Only two people identified themselves in this last group so they merged with the third group.

Each group was then assigned to go off and list what they felt were the hallmarks of that particular leadership style. I was in the third group and had joined it semi-reluctantly because it sounded a little too touchy-feelie, but suited me better than the descriptions of the other areas. Come to find out, most people in the group didn’t feel the category wholly defined them and that they had strong elements from the other areas. Many, like me, were very much lovers of spreadsheets and databases as decision making tools. The institute leaders are going to transcribe our notes and email them to us so I can touch on the specific elements of each style at a later date.

Briefly, my group decided our style was focussed on generating consensus and buy-in from people. It was felt that involving people in this way was important because the pay in the industry was so unrewarding. Many of us said that we knew we needed to be decisive at the end of the day even knowing that some people disagreed. A few admitted that they shied away from confrontation and these type of decisions. We felt it was important to have people like us around in a presenting environment because often artists visit us as the 35th stop on a 50 city tour and people like us work hard to make them feel safe and comfortable.

When the groups came together to discuss the hallmarks of our style, we had a little bit of a surprise. While we compared and contrasted ourselves against the other groups privately, we realized we were an amalgam with the other styles. One of the other groups, (I won’t say which) essentially dismissed our leadership style publicly generally characterizing us as touchie-feelie and really only good for organizing receptions, parties and soothing hurt feelings.

Now to be honest, a couple people in my group did admit that their boss was the yeller and their role was to motivate and organize the traumatized staff when meetings were over. That wasn’t what we saw as our primary function. For many of us, throwing parties and making people comfortable wasn’t even something we did directly but rather delegated and enjoined others to do.

After this stage of the exercise, we were asked to go back in our groups and create a definition of leadership. This information too will be emailed to me so I will address it more directly at a later time. When we got back in our group, we discussed the comments directed at our style during the session we just left. Then a number of us wryly observed we were probably the only group actually doing so. One member confirmed that before he left the other room he overheard one group launching into a discussion before all the members had assembled.

Despite the differences in our leadership styles, each group created remarkably similar definitions of what leadership was. Even though we used varying tactics to demonstrate leadership, we agreed what the ultimate product of those actions should be.

At this point my entry is getting pretty long so I will continue with my ELI experiences tomorrow.

One thing I want to say before I end is that the attendees of the institute really developed strong bonds with each other fairly quickly. I can’t speak for everyone in my leadership style group, I will say that while I can remember which leadership style group made the unflattering comments, I can’t remember who was actually a member of that group. In speaking with others from my particular sub-group at other times during the week that followed, no one ever said anything critical about any other institute attendee, much less commented that they were going to keep an eye on X because he/she was a member of “that” group.

I won’t be posting for a couple days because I am at the Arts Presenters Conference in NYC. I hadn’t posted earlier because I was using the opportunity to surprise my sister who works there and she occassionally reads the blog.

I have been participating in the Emerging Leadership Institute and been talking and listening to a whole bunch of interesting folks so I will have much to post when I return.

I have also met, albeit briefly, Andrew Taylor and Neill Archer Roan. Watch their blogs as well. This is a big conference and their experiences will undoubtably be wholly different from my own.

..and it is one of the many reasons I have a rule against quoting review blurbs provided in press packets. Contextomy is the practice of quoting people out of context. (The term caught my eye while I was brushing up on logical fallacies.) It has found applications in many arenas, but is widely practiced with movie and theatre reviews as noted in this Wikipedia article.

If you don’t like Wikipedia as a source (though most of that article is footnoted and cited pretty well) here is an article from Gelf Magazine on the subject with many amusing examples of the lengths publicists go to in order to make a dud sound great.
(Added: This article is actually the inaugural entry for a continuing series where the magazine tracks misleading quotes. Didn’t realize that when I first posted.)

I have a suspicion that this practice which is already being recognized by an increasingly skeptical audience may be approaching its final days. The difference is that in the past audiences were suspicious. Now they can access information on the web via their cell phones. As people walk out of movies and performances thinking “Geez, that was godawful, how could she say it was a cinematic tour de force?” they are going go online with their cell phones and search (reviewer) (show name) and discover that the reviewer said the show made Teletubbies look like a cinematic tour de force.

Without the drive home with a stop at Starbucks to buffer the disgust that will inspire them to go online and check things out, the distrust level could skyrocket. That is assuming people weren’t skeptical enough to check things out in advance.

And hey, if I am wrong and the practice flourishes for years to come, at least you have a fancy vocabulary word with which to impress your friends as you mutter “‘Superb and invigorating?’ Bah, it is probably just another case of contextomy..”

I heard a poem today that really electrified me because it succinctly and adroitly summarized the relationships between artist, consumer and a work. I was excited by “The Secret,” by Denise Levertov, because it points out that your perception of a work doesn’t need to be in synch with that of the creator for you to have an authentic experience.

For that reason alone I think every beginning level fine art and literature class should start with this poem. Handing it out at arts events to assuage the fears of attendees that they are stupid if they don’t “get it” would be valuable, too.

The only flaw with this is that people have to understand the message of the poem without much need of explanation. Lengthy instruction about what they are supposed to think runs counter to the whole intent after all.

The poem also talks about how revisiting a work multiple times can be rewarding. Often I wonder if people don’t recognize this about art: How there are valid reasons to read a book, listen to a symphony work, see a play, a sculpture, a dance piece many times over the course of your life.

I could go on and on for a bit talking about what great messages I see in the poem. As I said though, that is a bit counterproductive. I am including the poem below and hope if you don’t find it particularly inspiring, you at least enjoy the sentiment.

“The Secret” Denise Levertov

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line.

I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

While revisiting some of the resource links on the blog, the title of a piece on the Community Arts Network site caught my eye- Putting Culture Back in Agriculture. The piece is a grant report for the University of Wisconsin Extension, but don’t let that dissuade you from reading it. It is not dry in the least and is very inspirational.

As a small town boy who goes nostalgic at the smell of cow manure, there were a lot of tidbits that caught my eye. The first was the vision of one of the earliest university presidents, Charles Van Hise.

“I would have no mute, inglorious Milton in this state-I would have everybody who has a talent have an opportunity to find his way so far as his talent will carry him, and that is only possible through university extension supplementing the schools and colleges.”

My imagination was also set afire by the story of John Steuart Curry

“…hired as the nation’s first visual artist-in-residence, with a job description of helping anyone on the farm – farmer, farm wife, farm youth – to paint. …he believed that everyone has the ability to paint what was most alive to him – that it was just a matter of enabling people to do so. He emphasized personal vision over technique. As a result, paintings by farmers who worked with Curry are dramatic, breathtakingly alive.”

I am sure the reality isn’t as ideal as my imagination makes it given that Curry was going around Wisconsin during the middle of the Great Depression. It is hard to imagine him being welcomed with open arms at least initially. In fact, according to the piece farmers are a little suspicious of artists in these days of prosperity (relative to the 1930s).

One of the observations the grant writers make as they report about the project is that “Rural arts groups have tended to emulate urban arts groups, and management books have suggested that nothing but scale distinguishes urban and rural arts groups. More and more, we are realizing that this is not the case.”

The writers openly admit that their initial plan of having a statewide conference where they were setting the agenda was probably wrongheaded. It was only due to having to cut back their planned activities because they weren’t fully funded that they feel they ended up stumbling on a much more constructive approach.

In the interests of brevity, I will leave it to you to read how they ended up supporting projects at four locations around the state and what the projects entailed. Some of the project conclusions that jumped right out at me came from the program at a place called The Wormfarm Institute.

Conclusions included: 1) putting ‘agri’ back into ‘culture’ is perhaps more important than putting ‘culture’ back into ‘agriculture’; 2) culture and agriculture are interdependent and this does not mean that ‘artists interpret farmers’ lives; nor does it mean artists are marketers or political mouthpieces for farmers;…

There were a plethora of valuable observations throughout the report at the other sites, including why it was better for them to have taken this route than implementing their initial conference plan. The next thing that really jumped out at me was in the “What We Learned” section.

That ‘art’ is indistinguishable from ‘culture,’ and that this is a good thing and it resonates with people. ‘Art’ may conjure up the stage, galleries, appropriate audience behavior. Even the word can leave people out; where blending creativity with food, traditions, history, meals and conversation communicates and invites people in.

This is a loaded observation for two reasons. First, because solutions to problems like the ones they had getting artists and farmers to talk to each other productively go deeper than just saying culture rather than art. The reporter writers certainly know this. Honestly, I am making this point because I have come across a number of egregious examples of late where people seem convinced they can solve their problems by shuffling terms and buzzwords.

The second reason is that the observation touches upon the whole “What is Art?” and “Art vs. Craft” debate. Yes, they seem to be celebrating rural culture more than art. But they are also saying art and culture are the same and are specifically getting artists, whom they label separately as a group from the farmers, involved in the program so they presumably have something to offer.

So then, is a loaf of homemade bread equivalent to a painting?

The debate has never been clearly resolved in my view but it can be fun to engage in from time to time. Certainly for me a loaf of homemade bread has a greater emotional and sensory appeal than most paintings. I am actually tearing up as I write this remembering baking (and eating!) bread.

Apparently, I am not the only one befuddled by Phil Cubeta’s many faceted mind. Sean Stannard-Stockton at Tactical Philanthropy emailed me a link to his blog addressing my entry on the subject last week.

My awareness of philanthropy blogs has been growing by leaps and bounds this past week. I am going to have to start a category in my links section (though I have quite a backlog of links to add at the moment. That’s what Christmas vacation is for I suppose.)

In case you were wondering what Tactical Philanthropy is, he outlines the process here and even discusses strategic vs. tactical a bit later on. He gives practical examples of the way to apply some of these ideas throughout the November entries. Some of these take the form of case studies for well-considered planned giving arrangements.

I know I seem to be dwelling on these blogs a great deal of late, but as I noted earlier this is virgin territory to me. Having only just begun exploring, it is all so very interesting and exciting to ponder.

I got a comment on one of my older entries today from a guy who has recognized that many surveys of audience participation say people often choose to attend a performance because others are going or someone else has made the arrangements for them.

Ric Mazereeuw runs Two for the Show, a site specifically aimed at getting people together for event attendance. Better formatted than Craigslist and more focussed than Meetup (though large as neither), the site allows you to connect with people with similar interests without providing your actual email address.

I am going to hazard a guess and say that the service started in Canada given that the Toronto and Vancouver pages have the most people signed up and most of the US pages are flagged “New”.

The whole behavior of depending one person to initiate the idea of going to a performance and making the arrangements is so prevelant (at least according to studies I have read) that I specifically ask on our audience surveys how we can make the process easier for the coordinators.

I also started offering a mini-group discount for groups of 8 or more and a larger one for the traditional 20+. People were actually taking advantage of the 8+ discount in satisfying numbers. I probably need to do a better job of prominently promoting it since the highest point of activity was right after the brochure mailed.

It also occurs to me that it might not be a bad idea for arts organizations to link to the MeetUp and Two for the Show sites and direct people there to find like minded with whom to hang out and attend. Last year when I participated in Take A Friend to the Orchestra, I sent out a call and ended up going with people I had never met before.

As I was looking at the sites I was thinking that there might be more participants if only they were advertised more. Then of course it struck me that arts organizations could help by actually directing people there. MeetUp has a page for my city but there really aren’t any arts and culture attendance groups.

If I created a group on Craiglist or got Two for the Show to make one for my city, prominently linked to it, mentioned it in my monthly newsletters and encouraged other organizations to do the same, it might get a little momentum going in the community.

Even if it only resulted in a handful of people getting together, the service is free and it takes nearly no effort to point people toward it. If you get 10 extra people coming to a show each year, you are doing pretty well for your investment.

One thing to note, MeetUp is a little different than Two for the Show in that it is structured to help people organize get togethers so starting a group there carries an expectation that you will be getting folks together and does carry a cost.

If anyone else knows of other social networking services that might be helpful in getting people together and their butts moving toward seats, lemme know!

Yesterday I linked to an entry on Where Most Needed blog detailing how to protect against donors who may renege on their pledges. Where Most Needed and the accompanying linked Wall Street Journal article talk about how it can be tricky to broach the subject of a legally binding pledge agreement lest you offend your wealthy and influential benefactor.

What they don’t mention is the possible public relations problems you might face as well. Some years ago I worked for a theatre that a well known celebrity had pledged to in return for the naming of one of the performance spaces. Unfortunately, his wife filed for divorce. Seeing large alimony payments in his future combined with some other financial troubles, he chose to discontinue his payments.

The theatre was undergoing some financial problems of its own so the board felt it was irresponsible not to pursue the collection of the pledge and chose to sue the celebrity.

The way it ended up playing out in the newspaper editorials and letters to the theatre was that the organization should be grateful for the money it had already received and stop kicking a favorite son when he is down.

This seems to be one of the trickiest points for non-profits. When someone makes a pledge, I think we would all agree they are doing it out of the kindness of their heart. (With perhaps some advice from their accountant.) I think we can all at least empathize with the point of view that if you, as a donor, run into financial problems, you are going to want to reserve the right to hold on to the money you have earned. You are probably going to feel bad about it, but you are going to see your choice as logical.

The problem for non-profits in situations like the one I mention is that people can empathize. This type of thing easily happens on the family level. You promise your child a car when they turn 18, you run into financial trouble and you find you have to tell your child that if they want to keep the car they are going to have to get a job to continue making payments. The child has to work harder or see if grandma can help with the money.

I think this might be partially what happened in the case of my experience. People in the community could imagine themselves falling upon hard times and didn’t like the idea of the theatre coming after them, even for a $100 pledge, because they made a generous gesture.

The public may have sympathy for your non-profit organization because you built based on a promise of money but there is a good chance they are going to see the donor’s decision as practical. The expectation is going to be that you will work harder and find other benefactors. The consequence of not doing so in my car example is to take the bus or bum a ride from friends. The equivalence for a capital project is tougher- scaling back activities (not easy if you don’t even have a roof on yet) or performing in other facilities.

It would be extremely important to have a good solid public relations plan in place before deciding to legally pursue a large lapsed donation. One wrong move and you can poison the well for donations from an entire community.

I am going to peer around philanthropy blogs to see if there are any detailed suggestions of how to be well prepared in these instances. I would be very interested to learn if anyone has come across any good plans or has executed a public relations campaign that preserved the communal good will in a situation where it may have been lost. (Instances where the donor reneges due to their own financial malfeasance tends to create sympathy for the deprived recipient.)

As I promised yesterday, I have a couple ideas about the direction things could go in terms of interactivity in the arts. As I had said, I think the format and perhaps physical environment in which new events might happen will have to change. I can see them happening in smaller theatres, but it is difficult to have a really interactive event in a huge hall seating 2400 people.

A couple years ago I did an entry where I imagined at one time we would be able to plug in and experience a performance from the point of view of the performer. Among the many alluring benefits might be experiencing the performance opposite an attractive romantic lead whereby you saw yourself being kissed by the person.

Since then I have come to see possibilities in other areas that are more immediately achievable. With the rise in iPod ownership these days as well as the ease of processing and projecting video on computers I don’t think it is beyond the realm of possibility that in the next few years we will see performances where people are encouraged to bring music, images and video to a show in the iPod in order to contribute to it.

It might start out simple and small with people encouraged to go online to read a single scene and then either send in music/images/video that are appropriate for that scene. At the performance the audience might see or hear the submitted material underscore the action.

In time, as technology improved and performance groups refined their technique for assessing and integrating donated material into the performance, we might see events where people enter the theatre, download their offerings at the door and see/hear material being added to the show on the fly throughout the performance.

A creative team for a theatrical work may not only include the director and choreographer but a new position of technology integrator-a person who chooses among multimedia materials within the director’s umbrella vision to support a performance with new music/images/video every night.

This is the sort of practice I think would get people deeply involved if they were excited by it. People might get enthusiastic enough to go online and read the script, check out the costume sketches, etc., in advance so they could review their iPod library and then submit something along with suggestions about where it might best be included in the show.

What would really be fabulous, given copyright restrictions which would necessitate having an ASCAP/BMI license to cover music, is if people started composing their own music or shooting photos and video to contribute to a performance. The way things are going the lines of intellectual property ownership are blurring. The idea of directors and designers owning their work is probably going to morph into a communal ownership. Might be better to tap into this energy and involve the community rather than to let them appropriate it for their own ends.

Yes, it would be labor intensive as all get out at first for all sides involved until the whole process essentially got invented. You can certainly see this type of thing coming out of the smaller experimental spaces and then going mainstream. But there is so much potential for really connecting back with audiences by giving them involvement and ownership that they may become highly interested in participating even if the final product is presented in the current passive viewing state. (Though I bet that situation evolves by itself as a by product of new efforts.)

One of the most exciting things about art of any kind is that different people see it from different perspectives. The problem we have run into of late is that the general message people get is that there is only way correct way to interpret the art you see. By involving the community you can acknowledge the validity of these different visions and even recognize that someone touched upon an option you had never considered. There are some visions you may never use like the suggestion of zombies in the graveyard scene of Hamlet.

Other things you will use and little by little people will feel they have the capacity to understand and participate in the arts. Initial contributions may contain more dross than gold but as people feel more comfortable and familiar with the way design concepts are generated they will chuckle about the zombie ideas and make suggestions with real promise. (Of course, same qualification as yesterday, those who feel motivated to improve will do so.)

Yesterday as I closing my entry and was thinking about my promise to talk about this idea for interactivity, I knew I wanted to talk about how the great thing about art is that different things jump out at people as significant/appealing about the work.

Imagine my delight then when I received an email this morning that illustrated just that. Michael Clark at ShowBizRadio.net which features internet reviews for Washington D.C. area read yesterday’s entry and latched on to the paragraph about “Blogging on the internet is opening up new opportunities. It is allowing educated people who have never been hired by a newspaper to speak.”

The general topic about that entry wasn’t really about internet reviews. I didn’t even know I was going to even reference internet reviews until shortly after I realized what the question “How do you remember all those lines?” was indicative of. When I did write about internet reviews I was actually imagining the reviews I have read that said the show sucked when it was pretty clear that the cause was a friend/significant other had dragged someone to a romance/action/foreign film/symphony/ballet… that the person didn’t want to see to begin with.

Right after giving me permission to quote his email, Michael wrote that I must be talking about his website among others. He then continued to write a fairly long email that I haven’t had time to fully digest yet. Later in the day he sent me a link from The Guardian Unlimited dealing with the issue of newspaper reviewers vs. internet reviewers. (Though mostly book reviewers.)

I am not saying Butts In The Seats is a work of art. But what I thought was a minor theme to support my larger argument appeared to be an important point for someone else. In the next few days I anticipate we will be interacting a bit more. See, it is working already! Just as I said!

Only downside is that by the very nature of this interaction, I don’t anticipate that it will lead to us getting away from the screens in our homes which was the ideal of yesterday’s entry. But you gotta start somewhere.

For awhile now I have been pondering the 20/20 hindsight elevation of past practices in the arts as a yardstick by which we should measure the current situation. I often find fault with the reasoning, as do many others, when people start using the phrasing “if only people would do X” to propose that seats would fill as a result.

Recently though people have been using the same thought processes about behavior at arts events and I am just as uneasy about it. The example of the audience being rowdy in Mozart’s day is often called to justify why people shouldn’t be glared at when they clap between orchestra movements. Andrew Taylor had entries on his Artful Manager blog a couple weeks ago citing that people used to interact and talk more during performances before the 19th century placed the audiences in a position of being performed at.

I’m not saying that people should be glared at for clapping or that audiences should be passive receivers. I think the current situation is sitting at an extreme and needs to move toward a happen medium. I just don’t agree with wistfully looking to the past for guidance.

When I think back to the times people are evoking, I wonder how much respect the performer received. As an undergrad I did a research paper on Shakespearean actors and it was a testament to an actor’s power if he could make the audience and food vendors stop and quiet down.

I wonder how many great composers and musicians went undiscovered because their efforts were drown out by chatter in a concert hall or in a salon where they were providing background music.

It seems to me a good thing that audiences started to take a respectful posture toward artists. I do agree with the observation Taylor cites about the arts ending up being placed on too much of a pedestal. A middle ground between ignoring and enshrining needs to be found.

The fact that one of the most frequently asked questions at a play Q&A is “How did you memorize all those lines?” just proves to me that audiences are too far divorced from the arts and the process. That they marvel at memorization means they lack the tools or confidence to evaluate much of anything else happening on stage. The absence of that question would herald great things to me.

The irony is that the methodology for assessing works is fairly highly developed and thanks to the internet, becoming more democratic. When I was researching for that Shakespearean actors paper the one thing I noticed and still remember to this day was that the great actors of yore could do no wrong and could cure cancer with their inspired recitations. As time progressed the actors’ performances started to develop flaws until they became downright human. (Perhaps too much so in the case of the Barrymores.)

As time has progressed, some people have developed skills at assessing performances and were able to critique and criticize. While I think most people have an innate sense of quality, most don’t know what specifically about the performance is good or bad. People have relied on reviewers to tell them what is quality further reinforcing their isolation from the arts.

Blogging on the internet is opening up new opportunities. It is allowing educated people who have never been hired by a newspaper to speak. It is providing a forum for people who have never expressed an opinion publically. Most of what this latter group produces is godawful. And unless they are motivated to improve their technique by internal or external forces, it is going to remain godawful. They are taking the first step to becoming engaged though.

Ultimately, I think trying to go back and make the arts as we know them interactive is futile. The horse has left the barn on that one. I think it might be possible to make it more interactive, but not too much more so in the current physical environments. People have become used to the spectator format for entertainment. If they are fidgeting in their seats it is because they want their experience tailored specifically for them.

On surveys for attendance at movie theaters one of the top reasons people say they aren’t going to the multiplex is that there is too much noise in the theater. Now with a big screen TV at home, they have an alternative choice to the movie theater. Chances are there is a good bit of noise at home but they can shush the kids at home.

The same is true for experiences where you expect a lot of noise. A recent article in the local paper said attendance at the university football games has been dropping steadily while subscriptions to the pay per view for the games has been rising. People have cited the fact that it is cheaper to have a bunch of people gather around their big screen at home than to buy tickets. They also talk about the comfort and convenience of cooking at home and watching in air conditioning.

I have some ideas which I will share tomorrow about how to get people interested in leaving their homes. As I mentioned before, I think the future of live performance will be found in different physical surroundings which are more conducive to interaction. I also think the performance space and discipline may be called by a different name to avoid negative connotations that terms like “theater” might present when trying to convince people to leave their big screen TV.

If you haven’t run into this new trend in hiring, you may find this interesting as a sign of things to come. If you have ever sat on a search committee, you know that sometimes some folks divert from the rest of the group in their assessment because they didn’t like something about the way a question was answered.

Apparently, other people recognize this situation as well and have sued companies suggesting that some committee members were prejudiced against them due to their appearance, the ethnicity suggested by their name, their voice, etc,.

To stave off any accusation of subjectivity in the hiring process, companies are trying to make committees stick to strict criteria in hiring. I recently had to adhere to these new standards in a search we did.

What the Human Resource office is having us do is not only submit questions for them to review but also the answers we expect. For each question we have to suggest a five point answer, a three point answer and a one point answer. This leaves a little bit of gray area between answers for people with experience sets you didn’t anticipate that fall somewhere in between.

Now I will admit, the Human Resource folks have been pretty good in the past with weeding out irrelevant questions. For example, if you are a rental house which has broadway shows, opera, ballet, rock and country concerts come through every year, where on your scale does person who likes broadway and rock, doesn’t care for opera and ballet and likes some country acts rate? Will these answers really offset years of intensive experience? And do you really think this answer will have any bearing on how good a job someone does focusing lights?

While it is annoying to have people scrutinizing your answers now as well, I guess it does help to clarify what you value in a candidate when you rate what answers make a person more valuable to your organization than others.

What this process doesn’t allow is the awarding of extra points to people for unanticipated answers that are discovered in the course of an interview. Most of the committee might ignore the mention of a kid friendly attitude, but the education director might latch on to it as a positive sign for a newly implemented mentoring program. The candidate is therefore more valuable to the education director and might rate higher if not for the rigid guidelines of scoring.

The other danger is that this process rewards having all the right answers. I was once on a search committee where I thought the most promising candidate was spouting a little too much of the latest jargon and theories, but was pretty good for the most part. Almost everyone rated him high based on his answers, but one guy was skeptical in the face of what he admitted were strong answers.

His suspicion lead to some specific questions of references and others that revealed a person who talked a good game but wasn’t very substantial (and perhaps a little deceitful) otherwise.

In a system that placed a heavy value on scores only in an attempt to be objective, I wonder if his intuition would have been heeded. If it hadn’t our company might have ended up trying to find a way to get rid of an undesirable employee which is a lot tougher than not hiring him.

I apologize for falling down a little on my entries last week. My writing suffered a little from the need for crisis management and the onset of a cold.

The cold still has its teeth set in me so I am going to tend toward some lighter observations rather than deeper musings. Mainly, I thought I would share a little bit of my experience this weekend because the confluence of events is a reminder of just how interesting live performance can be.

We were just entering the final weekend performing Mary Zimmerman’s The Arabian Nights (great play) when we got word that the woman who does the opening lines of the show was rear ended by a large truck and taken to the hospital.

The difficult decisionmaking process involving the director, choreographer and I discussing whom to replace her with throughout the play was made even harder by one of the actors. She took it upon herself to decide who would be the replacement, discussed this among the other actors and called the fight choreographer and asked him to come in to re-block the scene.

A cautionary tale I guess against casting people who REALLY want to be the assistant director.

The other thing that happened was that we got a review that was something of a mixed blessing. It was the best review we had gotten from this particular critic ever and was especially gratifying given that the shows reviewed in the paper the day before were awful. We had gone to great lengths to warn the public via various media that there are mature themes in the show and make it clear there the tales of Aladdin, Sinbad or Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves were not included.

Alas, the review talked about how much great fun there was for kids in the show in the story of Abu Hasan’s fart. This was echoed in the newspaper’s Saturday theatre round up. Apparently he felt this mitigated the sexual content and graphic violence that bookended the story for an hour before and hour after.

We did have people walk away from the box office with their children when we warned them and a few people who asked for refunds after thinking better of their decision while awaiting the start of the show. To date we haven’t had any complaints about the content.

My last little observation is about the fart joke. The story about Abu Hasan is that he eats a lot of chickpeas and then lets loose a great fart at his wedding. Mortified, he goes to India for 7 years and then returns thinking no one remembers him. As he passes a woman and her children, he hears each one asking when they were born. Most of the answers are mundane but to the last, the mother answers she was born the year of Abu Hasan’s great fart.

Funny, yes, but not worth note, eh? As far as I can tell from my research, the story has been a part of the 1001 Arabian Nights collection since before the European translations. What is interesting though is that it bears a striking resemblance to a supposed true story about the Earl of Oxford and Queen Elizabeth I recorded by John Aubrey in his Brief Lives:

“When the Earl made a low obeisance to the Queen, he happened to let go a fart, at which he was so ashamed that he left the country for 7 years. At his return the Queen welcomed him and said, “My lord, I had forgot the fart”

I am just interested in the origins of the story and the direction it travelled. Certainly, fart jokes are universal but these are so similar that I wonder if Aubrey made it up or was repeating an anecdote he had heard originating in the Arab world. Likewise, I wonder if the story moved with merchants to the Middle East and got incorporated into the collection of stories there.

It may seem silly to wonder about such picayune things, but it is upon these sort of musings that books and plays get written.
(Though if someone knows the true story, I wouldn’t mind having my romantic notations dissolved.)

About a month ago I was at a meeting of arts people hovering on the edge of a conversation discussing the creation of a consolidated database of arts attendees or some sort of limited sharing of lists.

My first thought wasn’t about jealously guarding my list from their greedy grasping hands. There are quite a few people with whom I wouldn’t feel threatened sharing my list.

My initial concern was that have I gone to great pains to assure my ticket buyers that we will not sell, trade, etc., their information. There is such a concern about spam, phone calls and identity theft, that audiences need a high degree of assurances about the use of their information before they provide it to you.

In fact, we often have people who have signed up on our mailing list sheet in the lobby at intermission upset that it is still out at the end of the performance. Considering there is no information that can’t be acquired from the phonebook, their fear is a little irrational. It is difficult to steal someone’s identity with their address and the added information that they attended a show at the theatre. People usually feel a little silly when I point out the reality of this.

Which is not to say that we don’t handle information with which a person could steal someone’s identity. We are very careful about getting proof of ID before handing out credit card receipts at will call. Even if people act a little irrationally about their personal information, it only goes to show how important protecting it is to your relationship with them.

But back to the mailing list issue.

When I am signing up on a website that collects information, there is often a opt in/out box where the company asks permission to share information with their partners in order to offer the widest range of options and the best customer service.

Now I don’t buy for a moment that I will benefit from whatever their partners have to offer. I wonder if a similar approach could be applied to ones patrons though– “As an arts lover we would like to offer you information on the widest range of activities in town. May we share your information with other arts organizations?” I guess as an arts person, I would have a less cynical view of that approach coming from a theatre than I do when my credit card company uses it. I don’t know how the average patron who already gets appeals from a theatre, the United Way and college alumni association around year end might see it.

I was wondering if anyone had dealt with the issue of sharing names in the last year or two. Did you ask your patrons if you could share the info or did you just do it? If you did ask, how did you go about doing it? Did people know in advance that you might share their information?

When you did share your list, did you place stipulations on its use? For example, one brochure mailing and then the list is destroyed so that the only way to capture the information is if the person buys a ticket. I once had a condo association give me a list with the provision that they send it directly to my mail house who had signed a promise to immediately destroy the disk.

If you did share the list with such restrictions, did your partner abide by the rules or did your planted address get appeals and mailing beyond what you had agreed to? (Common trick when sharing lists is to add the names and addresses of employees with a low public profile or friends/family members who have agreed to help you keep an eye on how the list is used.)

I had a bit of a cautionary lesson in the last few days about providing services to persons with disabilities. The director of our Fall student drama production was approached a few weeks ago by a student in his class. The student is studying to be a sign language interpreter and wanted to know if he could use the performance as practice.

The director and I both agreed and the student and another more experienced interpreter in his cohort have been attending nearly every rehearsal for the last 6 weeks.

I was just preparing to advertise the signed performance in our ads and press releases when the assistant theatre manager mentioned that fact to the more experienced interpreter. He went into a panic and begged us not to publicize the fact.

It turns out we misunderstood the original intent of the request which was to simply just practice. The reason why they only wanted to practice is because they feared being blacklisted for taking jobs away from professional interpreters. I pointed out that they were students practicing on a student production at a college. Technically we are taking jobs away from professional actors but no one begrudges the students’ the opportunity to learn the craft.

The older interpreter having worked professionally (he was taking classes to improve his skill) in the community for sometime now was concerned that there would be trouble even if we billed the interpretation as a student effort. (Something I intended to do from the beginning under the assumption they might mess up now and again.)

My surprise at some of the stories he told me about problems people have faced in the past was somewhat mild since I have belonged to some small groups who have tended to be protective and insular. Not to make excuses for the extreme treatment to which people have been subject.

The situation did frustrate me to some degree though because we have tried to get signers before and were told they weren’t interested in traveling out to our location. Here were some guys who were willing to put the effort in and they were too intimidated to do it live.

I will say I have new respect for the process people go through to prepare to sign shows. I worked at a theatre that offered audio-described performances for the sight impaired. The preparation time the describers invested seems a lot shorter than what these guys tell me is involved with signing for a performance.

The cautionary lesson I referred to earlier is that offering services to people with disabilities is sometimes more involved than simply making plans and arrangements well in advance.

Of course, I also have a lot of respect for these two guys for coming out every night to rehearsal despite having no prospect of working before a live audience or given getting graded for the effort. I wish them luck. It seems like a tough career they are dedicating themselves to.

Just something quick to think about. The US population reaching 300 million has had a lot of press of late. I don’t know if you noticed though that the US fertility rate is only 2.1 children per woman and has been for awhile now. At that rate, the US population will hold static. We would have never reached 300 million from birth rate alone.

The population growth has been and will be, due to immigrants. So the question to ponder is, what is your organizations long range plan for serving your community in recognition of this fact?

If you have the brain power to ponder many things at once, try this for a bonus- Andrew Taylor links to an article suggesting a hybrid corporate status for non-profits. Or rather, hybrid status for corporations performing non-profit like activities.

On the whole, I think Andrew is right about needing a more flexible approaching with the tools we got. It is absolutely worth reading the long version of the article though if you feel the need for change.

Okay, I am just going to toot my horn a little here, as under deserving as I might be. On the other hand, I would be a little hypocritical to talk about how theatres should blog about their activities and not mention some of my own.

This past weekend we held the world premiere of the contemporary opera I had mentioned earlier. I was pleased to have generated so much buzz about the show it was sold out before the time the entertainment section stories and public radio story came out on Friday. The woman doing the public radio story called me the day before it aired asking how I suggested she close the story given the fact we were already sold out.

Fortunately, the work is playing in two other cities in the state and plane tickets are super cheap due to a fare war because we were fielding a heck of a lot of calls on Friday and Saturday.

Now that my performance is over, I have no financial interest in the show or any interests at all other than the compulsory playbill listing of my facility as the development and world premiere location.

Out of pride though, I do want to promote it a little bit more to the world in general. The company is looking for a US tour and a Japan tour. Japan is wild to consume Hawaiian culture and I am noticing more and more Hawaiian cultural performances showing up in season brochures.

I would also like to promote the show for the simple reason that it will help a local artist remain a viable employer of local performers. As I noted months ago, the state essentially exports its artistic talent for lack of opportunities.

So, if you are looking for an interesting contemporary cultural piece and would like to learn more about Naupaka: A Hawaiian Love Story, here are a few links to the stories-

Honolulu Star Bulletin, Honolulu Advertiser (has video footage from rehearsal), Hawaii Public Radio broadcast.

And you can always contact me as well. After the stories get put into the archives, I imagine I will be one of the only sources of additional information along with Tau Dance Theater.