High Quality Experience, But Not Fulfilling

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I was reading about a recent Urban Institute study on attendance at cultural events in the Chicago Tribune today. Many of the results weren’t surprising–people go to live performances to socialize and go to museums to expand their knowledge.

What made me want to read the study more indepth was the report that “…attendees at music and dance performances, plays, and fairs were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the art.” Yet at the same time the article mentions that “…people who go to art museums, dance performances, concerts, plays, or arts and craft fairs find the experience less emotionally rewarding than they had presumed.”

I understand that quality of art and emotional reward can exist exclusively of each other, but the suggestion that people didn’t have high expectations of the quality and yet looked to have a larger emotional pay off didn’t quite make sense.

A short newspaper article can hardly explain all the intricacies explored in a 48 page report of course. Even though the article warns that the report’s author, Francie Ostrower, forms no opinions about why there is no emotional reward, I had my own theory.

My theory being-People view live performance as high art, full of meaning and power. The report of the performance exceeding expected quality is actually an expression of relief at understanding what is going on. However, there is an assumption that if one comprehends the work, one will be enriched with the meaning and power of high art. Walking out with out a profound understanding of the nature of the universe results in an emotional let down.

But that is just the theory with which I started.

In the process of reading the report-The Diversity of Cultural Participation, I picked up some other interesting tidbits.

Interestingly, many people did not go to cultural events that they say they find very enjoyable…Many people who said that they most enjoy dance had not gone to a dance performance during the previous 12 months. The same was true for plays and concerts. On the other hand, this was far less common among those who most enjoyed museums and galleries.12 These findings suggest it is easier for people to attend certain types of cultural events than others…(e.g. because museums do not require advance tickets)

-“Frequent attendees are likely to be civically engaged.” People who volunteer, go to church, belong to associations, vote.

-“Frequent attendees are more likely to donate” Not really surprising.

“Frequent attendees were more likely to have gone to multiple types of events and to have attended each type of cultural event. Thus, frequent attendance at cultural events is associated with more varied attendance, indicating that multiple art forms would benefit from increases in overall arts attendance.”

Don’t know if this result implies that it would be beneficial for organizations to pool their resources and perform at a central location thereby offering the public variety at a familiar location. Other results of the surveys show the people who attend plays are more likely to attend dance, live music, and museums/galleries.

Among the reasons people attended the arts were socialization (it will probably come as no surprise to learn that the survey found people most often attend in groups), wish to experience high quality art, gain knowledge, support a local organization, learn something about ones culture and to have an emotionally rewarding experience.

Interestingly, the more frequent a person attended, the more reasons they stated for attending.

“Frequent attendees also cited a greater number of strong motivations for attending cultural events during the past 12 months. On average, they cited 3.5 major reasons, compared with 2.6 major reasons given by moderate attendees, and 2.2 among infrequent attendees.26 This strongly suggests that frequent attendees’ active engagement in the arts is driven by the very multiplicity and variety of positive experiences they derive from the arts.”

It would seem then that whatever approach one takes in marketing and advertising performances is likely to appeal to one of the motivators for a frequent attendee. Of course, if a competitor offers a similar product in a way that appeals to more of these criteria, you may end up back on square one.

According to the report, attendance at different event types is strongly motivated by the aforementioned reasons in varying ratios so the elements that promotions highlight must change as well.

Minding your audience surveys is very important:

“Interestingly, even substantial percentages of those who expressed a negative judgment about some aspect of their experience said they would attend a similar event again.”

So you get a chance to make things better the next time around. However, there are some deal-breakers right from the beginning-

“The two negative experiences most likely to result in respondents saying they would not attend again were not liking the venue and not having an enjoyable social occasion.”

In regard to the whole emotional reward question, I think the way the Chicago Trib article was written somewhat overstated it as a problem. According to the report, people who expected to get a rewarding experience, got it. In fact, pretty much everyone got what they came for:

two-thirds of those who said that a major motivation for attending was to experience high-quality art strongly agreed that the artistic quality of the event was high. Likewise, most (56 percent or more) who were strongly motivated by a desire for an enjoyable social occasion strongly agreed that they had one; most who were strongly motivated by a desire for an emotionally rewarding experience
strongly agreed that they had one; and most who strongly wanted to learn something new strongly agreed that they did learn something. And almost all who did not strongly agree, agreed.

It made me wonder if this was another piece of evidence for the suspicion that the plethora of standing ovations today are a result of people convincing themselves they got what they paid for.

There were some variations by event type though that need consideration by arts administrators.

“Fifty-seven percent of those who attended a play said a major reason they went was that they thought it would be emotionally rewarding–but only 43 percent strongly agreed that it was.

Forty-six percent of those attending music performances said a major reason was that they thought it would be emotionally rewarding–but only 37 percent strongly agreed that it was.”

It was in terms of high quality that numbers went the other way, few people entered performance halls expecting high quality and a greater number exited feeling they had experienced it.

Since it is tough to know if the people who said they didn’t have an emotionally satisfying experience were some of the same people who had a quality experience, I can’t say if my hypothesis (which, granted was more of a semi-educated suspicion) holds any water. (Though the percentage of change in attitude on both topics is quite close.)

As poor a job as a newspaper article can do summarizing a 48 page report, my blog entry is hardly an improved transmission of all the valuable info (and I haven’t tried to be.) Give it a read! (Especially since the meat of it is only 27 pages long.)

Be Nice to Your Playwright

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I am so pleased to be finding more and more arts related blogs out there and the most recent I have come across is just great.

Joshua James’ Daily Dojo is a working, living playwright’s view of what a working, living playwright has to go through in that line of work these days.

I started reading his November 8 entry where he discusses his frustration (quite entertainingly) with the way directors/actors/etc feel scripts are just a starting point to do their own thing.

Come to find out, this long entry is just the latest entry in his “Talkin’ Smack About Theatre” series. Two other entries (Hey, What’s That Guy Doing In a Dress and Hey, What’s That Guy…Part Deux) give actors, directors and others advice about how to get the most out of working with a living playwright (and how to work with other people in general.)

The other entries in the series are a rant on how so much Broadway is a cover of someone else’s work (ie adaptation, revival, etc). I haven’t had a chance to read the cover entries yet, but the “Guy In A Dress” entries, while long are a lot of fun to read.

The titles come from Joshua’s experience showing up at a theatre to find a character in a dress because he is “making bold acting choices.” He does a great job exploring the friction behind the necessity of remaining true to the playwrights intent and choices and the urge artistic people have to explore the opportunities the material presents beyond the limits the playwright set.

He acknowledges that some of that exploration can be illuminating for the author too–provided he is consulted and included at all. He also shares a number of anecdotes where the playwright’s name shouldn’t even be used in association with the work because the changes blatantly run counter to what he/she was trying to achieve.

Again, he presents it all in an entertaining manner –writing dialogue and presenting courtroom testimony accompanied by parenthetical sidebars of advice– all the while making his argument/plea for empathy/compassion/cooperation/consultation with playwrights.

Death of Curiousity

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I responded to an Artful Manager post today commenting on how I didn’t see the harm in taking pictures of stage sets on backstage tours even though technically it is copyrighted work because it at least showed people were excited by what they saw. I noted that I would worry if they weren’t entranced by an experience with theatrical illusion up close since it would mean there was one less thing they saw value in the arts experience.

As I finished writing, I realized that I had probably unconsciously channeled the sentiments of an article I read this weekend care of Arts & Letters Daily. In an article on Triangle.com, J. Peder Zane discusses the surprising lack of curiousity students seem to have these days.

“…such ignorance isn’t new — students have always possessed far less knowledge than they should, or think they have. But in the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing, far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. As one of my reviewers, Stanley Trachtenberg, once said, “It’s not that they don’t know, it’s that they don’t care about what they don’t know.”

I actually mentioned this article to my technical director today and he told me he could see it happening in his stage craft class. He had a gurney with a sheet over what appeared to be a body next to where his students sat yesterday and not one of them lifted the sheet to check it out.

Part of the problem is that there is so much to know these days about everything, even the mundane, that people are forced to specialize in gathering information on specific areas. As a result, people are primarily interested in learning more about topics that are immediately useful and discard anything else.

Without social pressure to be well-rounded, people are becoming less so. Because so much information is available so easily and quickly, there is no need to worry about not knowing until the need is imminent. Want to impress a girl with your knowledge of the controversies surrounding who actually wrote Shakespeare’s works? Check out the Wikipedia entry and take a side trip to collect some sonnets to whisper in her ear.

This sort of trend should be of concern to arts organizations. Where there might once have been hope that as young people matured, they might suddenly decide that it would be valuable for them to engage in visual and performing arts experiences and might one day come a knockin’, there is a danger now that they will never consider there is any value in doing so.

NALI And Friends

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Back in early September, I wrote about the National Arts Leadership Institute and Andrew Taylor commented “that he continue[s] to be frustrated by the disconnection of leadership initiatives in the arts.” This was based on the fact that there are many such institutes and few of them talk to each other so they end up inventing the wheel over and over again.

I decided to take a look at just how many there were out there and what they were offerings. I have to admit, while I didn’t doubt Andrew, it soon became clear as I searched that I could have continued far longer than I had.

Mostly I focussed on leadership training institutes that seemed to be focussed on offering sessions at conferences so my brief research doesn’t include programs like the Kennedy Center’s Institute for Arts Management which offer longer term internship and fellowship programs rather than an attempt to offer one day seminar type classes.

The Theatre Communications Group straddled both world offering the mentor/internships of the Kennedy Center along with institutes in conjunction with conferences.

Every conference I could think of seemed to have its own institute. I can see why Andrew Taylor felt there was a lot of duplication that might benefit from merged efforts because the list of topics covered is essentially identical.

First of course, came the Southern Arts Federation’s National Arts Leadership Institute.

The Western Arts Alliance has their own. (Since they hosted a NALI session, perhaps they are thinking of merging their offerings with them.)

-Arts MidWest professional development offerings.

Arts NorthWest has them at conference and sends them on the road through Washington and Oregon

And of course, the granddaddy of them all-Association of Performing Arts Presenters offers some learning..

Like Theatre Communications Group, the national organizations for the other performing arts also offer institutes at their conferences-Dance USA, American Symphony Orchestra League, OPERA America

Americans for the Arts also holds sessions at their conferences. Alas, their Arts and Business Council’s Arts Leadership Institute is only available for arts leaders in NYC.

When I found the leadership institute for the Alliance of NY State Arts Organizations, I realized I could probably find a similar program in nearly every state and decided to stop there.

Merging all these programs into a single national program most likely isn’t the answer since certain regional organizations have strengths the others don’t. (Western Arts Federation seems to have a strong research bent, for instance.)

Some consolidation that saw conferences hosting leadership institutes generated by one of a handful of regional or national organizations (who co-ordinated syllabi to some degree with one another) might in order to ensure quality and uniformity.