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You Wanna Be Where Everybody Know Your Name

July 3, 2023

by:

Joe Patti

I am not sure when Culturebot fell off my daily reading list, but the last time I referenced a post was 2014. Thankfully Artsjournal.com linked to a piece by Andy Horowitz this week so the blog is back on my radar. Andy wrote a relatively long piece about the need to focus on audience need and experience. While he has a TL;DNR summary at the beginning, the really good stuff is buried in the expanded version.

The broad strokes won’t be new to long time readers. Horowitz notes that despite the wake up call of Covid and all the money funders have provided for engagement and innovation, a lot of theaters are still focusing on legacy audiences and providing the same type of audience experiences as they had in the past.

He says arts and culture organizations need to be creating a sense of belonging and connection for new audiences. He uses a couple of personal examples. In the first, he talks about arriving in NYC and wanting to be a part of what was happening at P.S. 122, (now known as Performance Space New York), because so much great work was happening. But he couldn’t figure out a way in. Everybody already seemed to know everyone else. He started getting involved with other organizations and projects until he eventually cultivated the right relationships and started working at P.S. 122.

In another part of his piece, he raises a similar example of his 4.5 year old son changing pre-schools mid-year:

It was a bumpy transition since at midyear all the other kids knew each other; some had started “going to school” together during the pandemic. …His teachers said he might not feel comfortable onstage and might prefer to sit with us; he came home from school telling us how he wasn’t able to learn the songs or the choreography because the other kids already knew it, things like that. As the day approached, we were filled with trepidation and uncertainty. But lo and behold, when graduation day came, our little guy sat with his class, walked onstage with his class, sang the songs, did the choreography, and behaved perfectly the whole time!! I have never been more invested in a performance in my life.

He talks about how brave people need to be to take chances in so many respects, including learning new things and trying to integrate into social settings in which we don’t feel we belong. Horowitz reiterates what I have written before about creating an environment in which people can see themselves and their stories depicted and spend time with family and friends. Something I have overlooked is working to provide the sense you are among friends even if you didn’t know anyone when you arrived. (his emphasis)

I think that this is what every audience everywhere wants when they come to the theater. We want to feel like we are meeting up with friends. We want to see people we know in the lobby, we want to see people we know onstage, we want to know the person that works in the box office and the ushers, we want to know the people seated next to us and across the room in another section so we can wave to them and meet them at intermission for a drink. There is nothing worse than feeling like a stranger milling around with other strangers awkwardly avoiding eye contact, worrying about if you belong. If you run a theater and you aren’t trying to create that sense of welcome, belonging and inclusion with your audience, then you are failing them, it doesn’t matter what you put onstage.

As someone whose name is on an alcohol license, I am a little wary about encouraging people to literally replicate this exact scenario, but one experience Horowitz touts as bringing people together was a scheme in which an event made ordering a single beer as expensive as ordering a beer for 10 people. The result was that strangers organized themselves into groups to get the cheapest possible drinks they could:

I don’t remember the exact amount but a single beer was, I think, $10 and 10 beers was maybe $1? Like that. So as soon as someone got to the front of the line they immediately started talking to the people around them to get enough drink orders together to get the cheaper drinks. Never have I ever seen a group of strangers connecting and laughing and cooperating so quickly and joyfully as I did that night. I’m pretty sure that the bar was itself an art project.

Perhaps it was a lesson the TV show Cheers was teaching us back in the 80s and we just weren’t paying close enough attention.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, creativity, State of the Arts

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Interesting History of Drag In Twin Cities

June 28, 2023

by:

Joe Patti

As Pride Month comes to an end, I wanted to call attention to an interesting piece that appeared earlier this month about the history of drag performances in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area during the late 19th to early 20th century.

Despite laws prohibiting crossdressing, its use in theatrical performance was considered appropriate at the highest strata of society.

Minneapolis maintained a city ordinance against cross-dressing between 1877 and the mid-1900s, and St. Paul didn’t repeal its 1891 ordinance prohibiting people from wearing “clothes not belonging to their sex” in public until 2003. Theater allowed drag performers to evade these legalities in ways that individuals “cross-dressing” in daily life could not. Mainstream society allowed and accepted drag so long as performers were explicitly donning a costume, maintaining a “fourth wall” between themselves and the audience. It did not make these allowances for individuals not attired in gender conforming clothing outside of explicit performance, who were far more subject to policing….

…Popular “female impersonators” like Julian Eltinge, Karyl Norman and Paul Vernon performed in venues like the Grand Opera House in St. Paul and the Metropolitan Theater and the Orpheum in Minneapolis. The elitism of the venues reflected the “fashionable society” that attended. But even during this early period of drag, performers were not exclusively men; women performed and received similar acclaim as “male impersonators.” “High-class vaudeville” artists like Mary Marble and Margaret Grayce toured nationally, stopping to perform in Minnesota in 1897 and 1908, respectively.

According to the article, there was some uncomfortable intersections with blackface performance during this time. There is an implication that some of the drag depictions might have feed into similarly offensive stereotypes regarding gender.

It wasn’t until drag started to move to nightclubs and the illusion of the fourth wall was increasingly dissolved that the practice of crossdressing began to raise alarms socially.

By the 1930s, drag was written up in newspapers more as the cause of police raids than as a performance notice. Police interfered not so much due to the content, but rather because of the interaction between performers and audiences. Police told Variety that acts contained “nothing obscene or immoral in show … but (we’d) like it stopped anyhow.”

Despite police raids and attempts to close down established and widely popular shows, drag performances continued and became more diverse.

As the 1940s progressed, drag was not exclusive to white performers. Minneapolis’s Clef Club catered to Black patrons and featured Black performers, such as the singer Alma Smith and drag artist Carroll Lee, and the 1950s and 60s brought acclaim to Black drag artists like Stormé DeLarverie, Dodie Daniels and Don Marshall, featured in the Jewel Box Revue.

Audience Relations, State of the Arts

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Not A Good Sign When People Are Googling How to Shutdown A Non-Profit

June 27, 2023

by:

Joe Patti

In a sign of an alarming possible trend, the For Purpose Law Group blog cites an observation by the CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits that (my emphasis):

….an “ominous sign” is that “… the most popular page on NCN’s website for the last few months has been an article on how to shut down a nonprofit.” It’s a “kind of burnout at the highest level …. Leaders are beyond fried,” explains the head of the nation’s largest group of nonprofits. “They’ve been trying to hold things together with baling wire and chewing gum.”

The full piece goes into depth about the factors at play, prime among them are decreases in philanthropy in the face of increasing inflation and compensation expectations.

On the arts side, we are already seeing this manifest with the closures and layoffs by major arts entities. This week the Brooklyn Academy of Music announced layoffs and shortening of their season of programming. A couple weeks ago, the Center Theater Group announced layoffs and the closure of the Mark Taper Forum. Earlier this month, the Public Theater announced the end of the Under The Radar Festival.

There are grumblings on social media about unsustainable business models, but the fact is everyone is pretty much using the same general business model as these places are. Last week I wrote about how Oregon Shakespeare Festival is experiencing a similar crisis, partially due to a heavily restricted endowment.

People who know theater history know these shifts in business models have occurred before. But we have the comfort of hindsight to know how the transition transpired so that theatrical practice continued. But when you are experiencing the transition, you don’t know if things are evolving toward a format more suitable to the times or heading to extinction.

Business Models, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Culture May Often Be A Pawn, But The Importance Transcends

June 26, 2023

by:

Joe Patti

So in an illustration of the importance of the exercise of soft power, the U.S. has agreed to rejoin UNESCO and pay back dues to the tune of $600+ million. The US stopped paying dues in 2011 when Palestine was included as a member and the Trump administration decided to have the country withdraw entirely in 2017.

The U.S. return to UNESCO is meant to blunt China’s growing influence in the organization.

Undersecretary of State for Management John Bass said in March that the U.S. absence from UNESCO had strengthened China, and ”undercuts our ability to be as effective in promoting our vision of a free world.”

He said UNESCO was key in setting and shaping standards for technology and science teaching around the world, “so if we’re really serious about the digital-age competition with China … we can’t afford to be absent any longer.”

[…]

A UNESCO diplomat expressed hope that the return of the U.S. would bring “more ambition, and more serenity” — and energize programs to regulate artificial intelligence, educate girls in Afghanistan and chronicle victims of slavery in the Caribbean.

While arts and culture are unfortunately subject to a lot of politicization and you never want to be in a position where the only reason someone starts paying more attention to you because their rival is, the fact is, culture is a powerful asset both locally, nationally and internationally.

Having traveled around China, they very publicly cite the UNESCO Cultural Heritage designation for many places you might visit. Seemingly more so than any other place I have visited, even given that their millennia long history has provided many candidates for the designation. Since a cornerstone of China’s identity is tracing the length of their cultural lineage, it would make sense there is a focus on doing a good job of promoting any acknowledgement.

Likewise, UNESCO has expended great effort in cataloguing a lengthy list of intangible cultural heritage which encompass knowledge, practices, crafts and skills specific to communities around the world. For them, the acknowledgment of the importance of the preservation, practice, and transmission of this heritage is no less vindicating.

Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, State of the Arts

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