The Bionic Theatre Manager

by

I have been away for a few days, thus the lack of postings on my usual schedule. My thoughts have not been far from arts management though so I offer up the following article on the dearth of qualified theatre managers which appeared in the January 2007 American Theatre. The article was scanned and posted by Brooklyn College so some portions of the text may not be completely legible.

Jim Volz echoes the concerns I heard at the Arts Presenters conference regarding succession planning. The primary aim of the piece is to examine the academic and non-academic paths to executive level leadership of theatres. There are a lot of people worried about the lack of highly skilled leaders coming up the ranks to replace those who retire or are lured away.

The shortage of savvy, experienced theatre managers is evidenced by the number of long time managing directors of flagship regional theatres…who have been recently been recruited away or have played musical chairs with other theatres. Oftentimes, there’s a demoralizing institutional toll (that’s seldom talked about) when management leaders leave their theatres; this definitely has a snowball (or avalanche) effect on the board and the remaining personnel…

…Tired of the turnover and dealing with what many consider the “two-headed monster,” many boards turn to an already beleaguered artistic director to run the whole show.”

While sexier areas of acting and directing lure many people of a theatrical bent away from management, the elements Volz and many quoted in the article blame for the shortage of quality managers is that other profit and non-profit endeavors promise better pay and quality of life. Though managers are hardly alone since actors, directors and technicians all experience the same scenario.

A debate that appears throughout the article is whether academic training is necessary for success. Like the Bionic Man I allude to in my title, people can’t decide what needs to be implanted by others to make you strong and what muscles one can develop by oneself. Everyone seems to agree that practical experience is an absolute. There is an implication in the comments of some (perhaps due to the way they were quoted) that academic training may not be necessary at all.

My personal view is that formal classroom training in legal matters-contracts, accounting, human resources– can avoid a lot of serious trouble in the future. Formal training in personnel relations and conflict resolution practices can avoid a lot of heartbreak and resentment in a field where high pressure, long hours and low pay can breed a great deal of both. I can speak from experience that instruction in writing and graphic design elements won’t make people into good writers. But unless you are possessed of talent and discipline, you probably won’t be offered a paid opportunity to hone your skills with experience.

It only makes sense that if you were teaching someone all these skills, you would place it in the context of theatrical practice with courses on that very subject. There is a high likelihood, after all, that a theatre manager may wear the hats of marketer, bookkeeper, personnel director, programmer and graphic designer. So in my opinion, an academic program with opportunities for good practical experiences can be a real value for a fledgling manager.

One thing that many in the article agreed upon is that managers of the future need to be possessed of management skills and artistic vision. Given that the article mentions managers don’t have the time to mentor subordinates or even each other and the report on the field that Neill Archer Roan presented to Arts Presenters said that managers rarely found the time to review and assess articles on the latest research and theory, the only place a manager is likely to acquire these skills is in a formal training program.

In reality, the proficiency that really needs to be acquired is flexible thinking. As students were taking classes to master the classes of an academic program, they should be constantly challenged to assess emerging situations in arts, entertainment in the world as a whole. The act of evaluation should be second nature by the time a student emerges from a program.

While I obviously think people should possess solid training in all the skill and knowledge areas I mention above, John McCann of Virgina Tech is singing my song in the article when he is quoted as saying-

“Today’s focus is preparing folk to manage and lead yesterday’s organizations…The solution, McCann believes, is to “focus more on leadership competencies and less on functional management training-challenge young potential leaders to be creative, intuitive and open to new ideas.”

Your Acting Is A Little Transparent

by

Just this week I was thinking back to an article I did an entry on back in 2004 where MIT students were trying to create a system whereby the Miami Symphony would be conducted by a hologram of a conductor standing in Germany. Unfortunately, the article I linked to back then is no longer available. But I was wondering whatever came of that effort.

Today via Artjournal.com there is an piece on Discovery News about how an actor in Orlando, FL and actors Canada both performed onstage in Illinois via the wonders of the internet. The Floridian and Canadians appeared on screens and not as holograms, but it looks like technology and practice might be moving in that direction.

This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. Back in June I did an entry about Play On Earth, an effort which had actors on three continents interacting with each other. “An object hurled in Singapore flies halfway round the world and hits a character in Newcastle,” reports a Guardian article.

Who knows, by the time the technology to create viable holograms is developed, efforts like the two mentioned here may have changed the whole dynamic of live performance — not to mention the definition of what constitutes “live.”

Technology Tip-Virtual Townhall

by

By some serendipity while I had my car radio scanning stations, I heard a story about a company offering the opportunity to hold massive conference calls.

A company called TeleTownHall uses voice over internet protocol connected to their technology to enable you to call up to 30,000 people in seconds. When people answer, they are asked to hold the line if they would like to participate in a townhall meeting. According to the website, 30,000 calls yields between 4-6,000 participants.

The service is marketed mostly to politicians and business executives, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see how it could be used to solicit feedback or survey your community in order to discover how you can better serve them. You can also limit the calls to patrons and donors or similar membership groups.

You can keep control of the thousands of voices you have invited via a web interface.

A Web-based control screen enables the VIP to see the name and location of every person they are speaking with, and to invite each person to ask a question or to raise a concern. As dialogue begins, everyone can hear both the VIP and the selected speaker. In addition to this feature, the VIP can choose to pose questions to the entire group, and tally the answers that the audience gives via touchtone response on their telephone keypads

When it is all over, you receive a report of who participated, who answered the survey questions and what the results were.

They bill the service as being affordable but given that their primary clients have people donating $1500.00 at a time pop, that may be a relative term. There is no mention of what their rates may actually be. This may be an exercise arts organization can do periodically as grant funding for surveying allows.

There Goes the E-Neighborhood

by

If you are thinking about buying a plot of land in Second Life or creating a presence on Myspace.com, you may want to ponder your approach and consider what value doing so might have.

Okay, so a Myspace account is free, not much too lose. But there are always issues endemic to every new communication channel to be mindful of when making forays.

Via Artsjournal.com comes this article about the growing resentment against corporate presence in Second Life. Stores have been vandalized and destroyed and avatars of people shopping in the virtual versions of some corporations have been shot.

Granted, this type of thing happens all over–sans the bombings and shootings–whenever something goes from having niche to widespread appeal. Quoth the article:

“It’s a path well-worn by SL’s online ancestors, from The Well, a proto-online bulletin board community founded in the ’80s through chatrooms, message boards and networking sites Friendster and MySpace. Early adopters shape the community as they wish, then have no choice but to stand by and watch it endlessly reshaped by the chaotic deluge of new users – some troublemakers, some commercial exploiters – that flood in as it gains popularity…

“That’s how it’s always been with these spaces,” Walsh says. “The new come in, the old get disgruntled and move on.”

This is something of a similar sentiment echoed by a 17 year old, (who started a blog at 12. She is an old hand at online interactions), in a New York Magazine article about the fluidity and openness of the younger generation’s identity online. (An interesting read if you want to gain insight into the emerging rules.)

I ask if she has a MySpace page, and she laughs and gives me an amused, pixellated grimace. “Unfortunately I do! I was so against MySpace, but I wanted to look at people’s pictures. I just really don’t like MySpace. ‘Cause I think it’s just so