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Guides For Reopening Planning

June 1, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Last week I had a post on Arts Hacker featuring the Event Safety Alliance’s (ESA) Reopening Guide for live event venues. You may have already seen the guide being passed around by a lot of people. Given the times, I feel like distribution hasn’t reached the point of over-saturation. When I start seeing it more frequently than ads for the presidential campaign, I’ll know it is time to stop.

In my Arts Hacker post, I focused on the idea of legal duty of care. I had been on a webinar with Steven Adleman, a lawyer who serves as Vice President of ESA, and he addressed the concerns many people had regarding their liability if people were exposed to Covid-19 while at their event.

In addressing that, he said firstly, that if someone is social enough to attend a live event, they probably interacted with others so much that it would be difficult to prove your event was the source of their illness.

None of which excuses you from sanitizing the hell out of everything in sight and implementing diligent operating practices.

Which bring us to the ESA Reopening Guide’s statement about a duty of care. I suspect Adleman wrote it because much the same content appeared in the webinar he conducted. I quoted it in my ArtsHacker post, but feel it is significant enough to repeat here:

“As a matter of common law, everyone has a duty to behave reasonably under their own circumstances. Consequently, there is no such thing as ‘best’ practices. There are only practices that are reasonable for this venue, this event, this crowd, this time and place, during this pandemic. Because few operational bright lines would make sense, The Event Safety Alliance Reopening Guide is designed to help event professionals think through their own circumstances. In the order than one plans an event, the Reopening Guide looks closely at the health and safety risks involved in reopening public spaces, then proposes risk mitigation measures that are likely to be reasonable under the circumstances of the smaller events and venues that will reopen first.”

Even though it just appeared last week, I wrote and submitted my Arts Hacker post around May 15. In the interim, the Performing Arts Center Consortium (PACC) released their own reopening guide. It is a little nicer than the ESA guide, especially in regard to the color coded charts outlining what should be done in different phases of reopening.

I am not going to even pretend to hide my annoyance at the existence of these two guidebooks released around the same time.

It would really have been great if the ESA and PACC guides had been combined. Lest you think they were separate efforts developed independently of each other, the PACC board of advisors is listed as contributors to the ESA guide, together, in the exact same order as they appear in the PACC guide. There is no excuse that they were unaware of the separate efforts.

In the past, I would just shrug at similar duplicative efforts by competing groups. But during these times when half the day is spent trying to figure out how our organizations and/or individual practices might manifest in the next normals and the other half of the day is spent trying to understand how to keep employees/co-workers/family/friends safe in the face of uncertainty about the threat the virus poses, the need to be aware of and expend effort to track down two sources of advice contributes to the problem, not the solution.

Meeting Your Legal Duty Of Care In Post-Covid Reopening

Arts Facilities, Info You Can Use, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Keep Up Your Long Distance Relationship With Audiences

May 27, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Thanks to funding from a mysterious third party, today my state presenter consortium was able to participate in a webinar lead by Collen Dilenschneider and her colleagues at IMPACTS where they discussed the data Colleen has been writing about on her blog.

If you have been following her posts, or my posts on her posts, you know that she is currently releasing weekly updates about people’s willingness to participate in cultural events. By and large, that is what she shared today, including data from her most recent post on factors that will drive participation.

If anything her research reinforces a concept that has been discussed for years now — the programming doesn’t matter as much as the quality of the experience and relationships associated with your organization. While people will be willing to participate in an environment where they can exert greater control over their experience earlier than one where they feel they have to cede control (i.e. gardens/museums/historical sites before crowded theaters), every other factor she listed in the webinar and her post today are about relationships.

There will be data they will release next week showing that observing what others in ones community are doing now replaces government declarations about reopening by a slight margin as the #2 contributor to confidence about attending. If the general tenor of the community is open to re-engaging in communal life, people are more likely to start attending sooner.

Another big factor she mentioned in the webinar and her post today was the importance of keeping awareness of your organization at the forefront of people’s minds. If you have been quiet as a way to save marketing funds, it may prove detrimental to your ability to re-engage people’s participation in the future. Just providing content on social media or sending out regular emails with status updates is better than totally hunkering down and going silent.

Dilenschneider also mentioned that the trust you engendered when making the decision to shutdown to help flatten the curve can contribute to people feeling secure about returning. If the last impressions people had before you shutdown were that you were taking steps to sanitize surfaces and keep them safe, they will feel more assured that your decision to reopen reflects a confidence that your plans and procedures will provide a safe environment.

Obviously, not everyone will feel safe about returning at the same time and the appeal of what is being offered will definitely always be a factor, even in times when risk and reward are more in balance. The overall quality of one’s relationship with the organization will always loom large.

Audience Relations, Info You Can Use, Leadership, Marketing/PR

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Dance Got Them Through Tough Times Before

May 26, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

There was a piece on Vox today that I jumped on with interest because the title seemed to imply it was about a family run dance school applying for the Paycheck Protection Program. I should have just read the subtitle more closely. There are only a couple of sentences about their interaction with the PPP near the end of the article and the subtitle summarizes it pretty well: The bank rejected them for not having a pre-existing business relationship and now they are waiting on an application submitted through an online broker.

The rest of the piece is worth reading because it emphasizes the importance of developing relationships with your constituency. The mother and daughter running the Connecticut dance school have adults and children paying to take dance class via Zoom. (The other daughter also teaches in the school, but is on maternity leave and wasn’t interviewed.) I have talked to dance schools in my local area and they bemoan the difficulty of teaching over video. One woman says her non-touch screen video display has fingerprints all over it because she keeps trying to correct her students’ postures as she would for an in-person class.

For the CT dance school in the Vox article, they had an outstanding obligation to offer the children’s class because parents had pre-paid through June. The adult classes are run on a drop-in basis, but there is enough of a demand for both live and taped classes for that age group. According to the owners of the school, there is a lengthy social period built in before and after the formal class session where students catch up with each other.

From how they talk about the evolution of their school, it appears this sense of community developed over years of their in-person classes.

Founder Linda Freyer says,

So we started teaching adults in the morning and children in the afternoon — and the adults wanted this art form, they wanted to learn classical ballet, and they became passionate. I have adults that started, who never had dance training as children, and with a lot of work and discipline I got them en pointe. In toe shoes. They never believed that could happen! I have women who are still dancing with me 25 years later. We have gone through deaths of parents, we have gone through breast cancer, we have gone through brain tumors, we have gone through divorces, we have gone through so many life-changing crises, and they find solace coming to this ballet class.

[…]

We are such a community — I was teaching a class on the morning of 9/11, and it was adults, and people were drifting in saying, “Did you hear? Did you hear?” We were shell-shocked. And I remember one dancer saying, “Do you want to just cancel class?” We were speechless. And one of our students looked at the group and said, “Please teach us, Linda. I have a funny feeling this class will be the highlight of the next period of time.” So I turned off the news and I taught that class, and I will tell you — the gals who were in that class still talk about it.

Petra, the daughter who was also interviewed for the article mentioned she had danced all the way through college, but started a career in finance before deciding it wasn’t for her and pursued training in dance education. Petra’s story along with her mother’s discussion of adult students developing their skills to a place they could dance en pointe reminded me of a post I wrote on Lisa Mara who started a dance company for people who loved dance enough maintain their dance practice, but were pursuing other avenues as a career. The interview in Vox made it sound like the dance school had similarly cultivated an environment for adults who wished to rigorously pursue an avocation in dance.

Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, Leadership, Marketing/PR, Working In The Arts

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At Least You Can Put Your Feet Up On The Seat In Front Of You

May 20, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

There has been a lot of conversation among my peers about how to revamp our venue seating charts to comply with social distancing. Some people were seating in every other row with 3-4 seats between every single person, the latter part which seemed crazy to me.

At my venue, we worked up a plan that skipped every other row and had four seats open and four seats blocked so that families could be seated together. We found a way to set our ticketing system so that if you bought two of four open seats, it would immediately block the adjacent open seats so strangers couldn’t buy the seats next to you.

I figured it would be a month or two before any state got to the point of allowing live performance events to occur.

To my surprise, someone already put this general model into action. I was reading a piece in San Francisco Classical Voice because it extensively quotes Adaptistration author Drew McManus when I came across this bit of information:

In fact, the first test of a live-concert in the U.S. was to have taken place May 18, with a socially-distanced performance by country singer Travis McCready at TempleLive in Fort Smith, Arkansas. However, on May 12 the state’s Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, announced the state’s health department would be issuing a cease-and-desist order for the concert due to the extension of the state’s coronavirus lockdown measures.

Had the concert proceeded, it would have taken place in a hall with a capacity of 1,100 reduced to 229. The audience would have had their temperatures taken when they arrived, been directed to their seats along one-way walkways, with a limit of 10 people in the bathroom at any one time. Seating would be in “pods,” defined as “small gatherings restricted to friends and relatives comfortable with sitting together.” Each group, between two and 12 in number, would be seated together while the rest of the audience sat six feet from one another other. In addition, the concert’s Ticketmaster page said TempleLive planned to sanitize the venue using fog sprayers and would require masks to be worn by the audience and staff. The three-member band would maintain social distancing onstage but had not planned to wear masks.

Even with these limitations, the concert was sold out. Would it have been a preview of coming attractions?

Other than feeling allowing up to twelve people who didn’t regularly live in close quarters to sit together might be problematic to efforts to control the spread, I sort of wish the concert could have happened so we could start to get some tips on traffic control through the different spaces.

Since I am clearly wrong in my assumption no one would be trying to do it yet, has anyone heard of any other instances where someone has actually executed a post-Covid revised seating plan?

Update: Thanks to reader Rachel Condie who pointed out that the concert in Ft. Smith did happen after the venue challenged the governor’s order as inconsistent with the standards applied to churches. A New York Times article provides the details of their audience flow process.

Arts Facilities, Audience Relations, Info You Can Use, Working In The Arts

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