Be Flexible. Play Your Own Stuff

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Due to an errant keystroke and my uncharacteristic failure to save periodically, my entry for yesterday was swallowed by the abyss. I am not sure if I have faithfully recreated my thought process but hopefully this will inspire some pondering just the same.

I was listening to the radio on Wednesday as they talked about the death of Hilly Kristal, the owner of the club CBGB and I was struck by how this man owed the success of the club to the flexibility of his expectations. For those of you who don’t know, CBGB stands for Country, Blue Grass, Blues, which were Kristal’s favorite music styles and what he expected to present in his club

Instead the club ended up as the launching pad for punk and new wave bands such as the Ramones and Talking Heads. One of Kristal’s main rules for performing at CBGB was that the bands had to play original material and not cover anyone. Part of the audio NPR played for their story included his advice that bands not seek success in copying another group’s sound.

Given that the average lifespan of a club is about 2-3 years, I wonder if CBGB owed it’s longevity to being on the leading edge of music styles (though the income from merchandising didn’t hurt.) If not for a disagreement last year with the landlord over a rent increase, the club would still be open.

I am hesitant, however, to advocate that arts organizations emulate nightclubs and change with the latest trends. Clubs are structured to take advantage of the latest trend, not to serve the community. When tastes change and business wanes, they fold up shop and often reopen after a renovation that positions them to conform to whatever is en vogue.

Even the iconic Studio 54, for all its popularity faded away as tastes changed. Though the case could be made that it owes its existence to flexibly changing with the times. The building used to be a theatre, then it was a television studio for CBS, then it was the famous nightclub and now it has come full circle as a venue for Roundabout Theatre (though it does have 2 full service bars, some things are too valuable to get rid of!)

Arts organizations trying to respond to the latest trends might change their programming from a classical focus to a contemporary one or vice versa. I can’t see too many closing their doors to renovate a black box theatre into a proscenium set up as tastes move in that direction. Or rather, those who can afford to do so probably have the resources to weather the shift until it moves back toward their configuration again.

The decision to change the focus of an organization to accommodate the latest tastes and thinking is certainly based in the environment and situation. Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre with its 56,000 subscribers (yes, that’s right) probably isn’t going to consider changing the way they do things any time soon.

There is growing sentiment in various discussions about the state of the arts that the current economic model the arts follow is no longer suitable and a change is needed. It may come to pass that arts organizations end up with a life span of a couple years and only those agile enough to reinvent and restructure their public manifestation will endure.

As cynical as it may sound, you can only serve a community as long as they value being served in the manner you offer. I honestly believe that people can tell when a company is catering to their latest whims and when the company is in it for the long haul. I believe they won’t give much thought to abandoning the first when they have grown bored and will show more loyalty to the second. However, I also believe that as life moves ever faster, that the effective lifespan of even the most sincere arts organization is going to shorten. Some companies like the Walnut Street may command intense loyalty forever but the dynamics of other communities may result in greater rates of change.

In closing, I will repeat the sentiment I have stated many times before–like Hilly says, play your own stuff and don’t look for success being derivative of other groups. Yes, I linked to a seminar where the Walnut Street folks will tell you what they did to go from 0 to 56,000 subscribers in 25 years. More power to ’em, but they can’t guarantee you can do the same in your community. Believe me, no one wishes they could more than me. It would simplify things a great deal. On the other hand, I am pretty sure a good portion of what they have to say would be of some value so I would be ducking in to check them out and figure what I could use and what I couldn’t.

Wherefore Art Memphis Manifesto?

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I went to visit the Memphis Manifesto website today to find it gone. Well, more accurately, that the account hosting the site had been suspended. You can click on that link if you don’t believe me.

Does anyone know why the site has disappeared? The physical manifesto is easily found as an Acrobat document. But I wonder what the disappearance of the site might portend. Since the impetus for the Creative 100 who met and signed the Manifesto came from Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, I wonder if this is a sign that the whole idea that cities must attract the creatives has fallen out of vogue.

The Manifesto it self doesn’t seem to be dated in anyway (in these days of fast technological development, ideas can get stale after 4 years). There doesn’t seem to be anything in there a community wouldn’t want to strive for.

So what happened? Did the dream die or has it morphed into a bigger, better concept that was only held back by the ideas on the old website?

Anyone know?

Something Vicious This Way Comes

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January 2007 its coming was foretold and a great moan of despair did issue from the people while others cheered and hailed the arrival of the dread behemoth. Many tried to scurry from its path and have just now recognized their failure now as the shadow of the mighty beast falls upon them.

Now cometh the king….

The LION KING!!!!!!

Last week the Honolulu Advertiser ran a story about the impact The Lion King, which opens in two weeks, is having on the local arts community. Back when Phantom of the Opera came to town, the seats at many theatres were pretty much empty.

Having learned from the past, many organizations started scrambling as soon as the rumors started gained credence. Hearing the performance hall would be occupied, the symphony shifted to another venue and the local school which stages a two day holiday extravaganza started making other plans. The annual Nutcracker production lucked out by having the Broadway tour end just before their scheduled performance.

Many of the other performing arts organizations are experiencing ill effects already. Said one theatre manager “It’s scary, terrible. We moved up our production (from an original October play date) hoping to avoid overlap with ‘The Lion King.’ In retrospect, it would have made little difference…”I keep hearing ‘We bought our “Lion King” tickets and we’re broke,…'”

One group has seen a rise in season subscriptions and other has seen a drop though they attribute that to getting their brochure out late. One group is hoping to fill the house by offering what the Lion King can’t–alcohol during a performance. The group plans to perform two shows in cabaret style and offer a standard drink with the show.

A number of those quoted in the article thought their might be a trickle down effect with people getting excited enough by the show that they would buy ticket to the local performances some time in the next two years. There was no mention if theatres saw a surge in the years after Phantom.

I wonder then if it is wishful thinking as one of those optimistic about a trickle down is also quoted as saying most of those who attend the Broadway series aren’t regular theatre goers. The intent of his sentence was to state what I am sure is his mistaken belief that those who enjoy musicals at his theatre won’t join non-attendees in exhausting their discretionary income at The Lion King.

He also inadvertently points out the reason why his theatre probably won’t enjoy a significant attendance increase from trickle down in the near future– most of the people attending the Lion King aren’t disposed to attend live performances. If people there were a trickle down effect from attending a Broadway show, the regional and local arts scene would be exploding as a result of all the bus tours motoring their way to Broadway and Las Vegas.

For most of those attending, The Lion King is an infrequent treat they give themselves and their family. Even though they could all attend a local performance for what a single ticket to the Broadway show costs, that isn’t part of their regular practice and may never be unless they know someone in the cast.

So how do things stand for my theatre you wonder? Well we haven’t gone on sale yet because we are just making last minute tweaks to a new ticket system. My first show doesn’t open until a month after The Lion King does. This might not work in my favor since the buzz about the Disney show will probably reach its apex about that time and fuel additional ticket sales.

Unlike those who were interviewed for the newspaper article, my theatre doesn’t produce Broadway musicals so we are at least offering an alternative to that. Our season is also weighted with more shows in the Spring. Now whether there is going to be a enough disposable income around after the Lion King and the holiday season are finished is anyone’s guess.

As much as I criticize the trickle down view as naive, there really is no other way to approach the situation but to be optimistic. Doom and gloom isn’t going to help. Finding the ways to pitch your strengths over your competition is standard business practice. In some ways, we local arts organizations aren’t in much different a position than video game manufacturers who face a competitor rolling out a new console just in time for Christmas. Often they time the release of some new exciting game to show the value of the established game systems. We each have to figure out what our version of that practice will be.

Good Acting and Voice Skills Wanted, Will Provide Body

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Second Life is getting a lot of buzz these days as the medium through which people will interact and perhaps get their entertainment in the future. Political candidates have offices and give speeches there. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra will give the opening concert of their season there next month motivated by the desire to be the first to do so.

But I heard something today that is motivating me to keep my eyes and ears open for some other alternatives. A student who has had a long association with the theatre came in today and announced she was going to move to Spokane, WA in January to work for Cyan Worlds, creators of the Myst games.

She has been playing Myst Online for sometime now and decided she was going to visit the company this summer. She apparently told them she was coming, when she got there she announced she was going to work for them. Judging from the number of pictures she got with the founder and other employees, they did nothing to dissuade her ambitions. (It also doesn’t hurt that they are advertising for the job she wants.)

I was mostly amused as she talked about her visit. (“The woman in this picture doesn’t know it yet, but she is going to hire me.”) But my ears really perked up when she mentioned that the reason she liked the game was that it was like theatre and performance art. Every month a new chapter in the story is introduced by the game staff to drive the plot forward similar to a TV series. In the interim, the players work together to perform tasks and solve the puzzles for which the Myst games are famous.

I won’t pretend to know much more about the game beyond what I have read online. A couple things I did come across got me thinking that the dynamics of the game might have some lessons for the future of performing arts.

First of all, while players will have the ability to influence the storyline and submit created content, the game administration still retains control of how things proceed. This is in contrast with games like World of Warcraft where there is almost no attention paid to the plot. Second Life allows people a great deal of control over the environment to the point where people are developing and selling real estate in the virtual world. However, that control also equates to the ability to vandalize and destroy property which has been purchased in real dollars at some point in the process.

User created content may be all the rage, but as Andrew Taylor pointed out back in May, there are a lot more people are watching the content rather than creating it. At this point there is still a large majority who want to see well made content (or at least videos of people making fools of themselves) and don’t necessarily crave a high degree of control from the experience.

Live performance in the future may come to mean interacting with virtual avatars of performers. Acting may regress a little. Since appearance will be a function of good design and rendering, the most highly paid actors might be those who have good voices and improvisation/acting skills necessary to interact with people rather than those who look good.

It would be a sort of reversal of the emergence of talking films where people who looked good but had bad speaking voices found themselves out of a job. You have to look no further than Tony Jay who wasn’t a bad looking guy but had a gorgeous voice. He got a lot more work as a voice over artist for cartoons and video games than for his physical presence so it is not tough to see that the real money for performance may soon be in having a good voice and a sense of drama.