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Seems More About Arts Production Than Gender Identity–Just As It Should Be

August 24, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

This past weekend the Macon Film Festival held one of their few live screenings of this year in my theater. (The rest of the festival content is being streamed.) They showed The Sound of Identity, a documentary about the first opera performance by a trans person in the U.S. The singer, Lucia Lucas, is an American living in Germany who was invited to perform Don Giovanni for Tulsa Opera in their 2018-2019 season. The angle they were taking is that Don Giovanni is a master of disguise and uses that in the process of his seductions.

The movie is basically what you want a film on this subject to be. Despite the PR text about Oklahoma being one of the reddest parts of the United States and the artistic director, Tobias Picker’s line in the trailer about potentially needing to resign, the socio-political elements of Tulsa never factor in. (They do have some fantastic shots of the city.) The movie could have happened anywhere, it just so happens Tulsa invited Lucas first. Similarly, the general approach of the movie was that this was a production of Don Giovanni where the lead just happened to be a trans person.

Because in fact, the movie is really about us –the arts profession. I am not alone in feeling this. I had a conversation with my marketing director and she remarked, unprompted, how much the movie was about arts administration. The biggest conflicts arise from things we deal with every day regardless of what the show is and who is performing. Their bad dress rehearsal moment is when the singer playing Leporello, a major part, gets sick and the assistant director does the blocking while the guy playing Commendatore sings the part, all of which makes it difficult for Lucas to synch up properly.

This is actually a good movie to show people who aren’t familiar with mounting a production because there is a lot of detail, but very little technical jargon. Though certainly I may be assuming a lot of shared basic knowledge from my long career in the arts.

Pretty much everything we discuss about running an arts organization is in this movie. The whole opera is dying and tickets only cover a portion of the $500,000 cost it takes to mount a production conversation occurs. (Their revenue goal was $120,000. We never hear the final tally, but sales were at ~$70,000 a few weeks out.)

Lucas and the artistic director have a conversation about how a trans person in the lead will attract a new audience and some of those they talk to say that is the reason they are attending. (With one guy it seemed pretty clear he didn’t anticipate coming back for other productions.)

There is a discussion about the need for board diversity. A representative for Tulsa Opera touts the board diversity, but the interviewer actually says he has to push back on that statement because the board of 30-50 (per the movie) has only two people of color. The representative backpedals a little saying there are a large number of homosexuals on the board.

There is a fair portion of the movie associated with promoting the production which illustrates just how much time is involved and how difficult it can be to do it well.

Between the organization and Lucas’ own drive, the singer is shown doing a lot of social gatherings. That comes up as a potential problem in a conversation with the director when Lucas says she isn’t feeling the guidance the director is giving with a particular song. The director says Lucas needs to conserve her energy and not do so many public appearances that she feels drained during rehearsals.

Lucas also prints up promotional postcards on her own dime and goes out to a park to hand them out. The artistic director accompanies her, but isn’t happy with what is happening. When they interview him alone, he says something akin to “I don’t want to characterize it as a fiasco, but it was sort of a fiasco.”

There was a moment in a restaurant that made me cringe a little where Lucas and the artistic director are eating and strike up a conversation with one of the restaurant staff. They tell her they are doing Don Giovanni and ask her if she knows the show. The staff member says she hasn’t heard of it and then Lucas says, “well here is the score.” Then they end the conversation telling her to tell anyone who asks that they are doing the opera. I didn’t feel like that exchange advanced the staff person’s knowledge or incentive to attend much at all.

Which is not to say that Lucas wasn’t able to have constructive conversations about the opera or her career because she was shown chatting at least a half dozen social gatherings. Near the end of the movie, she says she wants people to leave the opera hating Giovanni, but also loving him, but hating themselves for loving him because he represents misogyny and sexual predation in an extreme. Something like that would get people wanting to know more.

Ultimately, there is a scene where Lucas says she has been told that it is not her job to worry about how well the show is selling and has been asked to scale back her activities.

You are probably getting the sense that there is very little sensationalism about the lead in this opera being a trans person. So much of the movie is pretty run of the mill as far as productions go, but also relatable for people who aren’t in the arts world. Lucas has been a huge video game fan since she was younger. We see her playing video games while rehearsing in her room as a way to disconnect her brain. She also draws a parallel between being able to play Magic: The Gathering online versus playing in person to the experience of watching arts online being no substitute for experiencing it live in person.

There is a section where Lucas and the artistic director, Tobias Picker, are playing a Mario Brothers game where Picker talks about the challenges of his career as a composer and being married in the Supreme Court by Ruth Bader Ginsberg who is a fan of his work. The conversations between Lucas and Picker are some of the best moments of the movie.

The director of the opera, Denni Sayers, has some good moments waxing philosophical about art and celebrity–kids today want to be famous, but can’t answer when you ask what they want to be famous for when there are so many things to be involved with from politics, racial justice, environment, science, arts, etc.

As I said, the movie is really about arts organizations and the environment in which they operate. If you have an opportunity to see the movie, I think you will enjoy it. Right now it is playing a few film festivals, but the producers alluded to an ability to stream it that will be announced soon.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Always Wear Clean Underwear Theory of Management

August 19, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Collen Dilenschneider most a recent post about the factors that influence a cultural organization’s reputation. In order they are: Favorability, Mission Execution, Onsite Experience, Stability, Social Impact, Leadership, Testimonials, Business Results and Contributions to Education.

Dilenschneider starts out saying it isn’t about the Yelp/Trip Advisory reviews so I knew testimonials wouldn’t be listed near the top. I was really surprised to see that Mission Execution came in second and before Onsite Experience. My first thought was that we would need to rethinks the types of questions we were using on surveys because so few are oriented toward mission execution.

Now to be clear, Dilenschneider says this isn’t about your ability to recite your mission statement on command, but how well you have internalized and manifest your mission.

“But this measurement and its rank suggest that knowing what you stand for matters – and knowing that you take action surrounding what you stand for matters, too.”

As you might anticipate, she says many of these categories are inter-related. The perception of organizational stability is shaped by leadership and business results, the latter of which is basically financial stability.

Two of the significant observations Dilenschneider made speak to the need to always be working on cultivating a good reputation as a hedge against times of crisis. Or to metaphorically employ my grandmother’s advice – “Always wear clean underwear because you never know if you will be in an accident.”

The entities with better reputational equities prior to the pandemic seem to be faring better during it. … it seems those that had better reputation-related metrics prior to the pandemic are doing a better job keeping them for now. This may be because those institutions had already made investments in social media, for instance, and had established a reputation for engaging audiences digitally before they had to… Entities with better reputations may have similarly already been promulgating educational resources, also resulting in their coming to mind compared to entities that may be only really starting this effort now.

The web may now play an even bigger role in maintaining a positive reputation that inspires attendance. …The web – and social media, in particular – played a critical role in motivating attendance and shaping reputation prior to that pandemic. With more time spent online and fewer folks out and about, digital engagement and seeing stories from others may influence the perceptions of all of these factors influencing reputation to an even greater extent.

Audience Relations, Business Models, Leadership, Management Philosophy, Marketing/PR, State of the Arts

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Flippin’ Piece of Art

August 18, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

While I am not really plugged into the visual arts gallery/museum world, one topic I have seen come up repeatedly is the sense that the creator of a piece should realize some benefit when the price of their work skyrockets during resale. Apparently there has been some specific concern about buyers targeting the work of contemporary black artists with an intent to quickly flip works for significantly higher prices.

According to Artnet, Christie’s Auction House worked with curator Destinee Ross-Sutton to create a type of covenant placing conditions on the resale of art works in their “Say It Loud (I’m Black and Proud)” show.

Each artist will receive 100 percent of the proceeds from the sale of their work. All buyers must also sign a contract with extensive conditions. They must agree not to resell the work at auction for at least five years; if they do want to sell, they must give the artist right of first refusal; and, if they sell to someone else, they have to give 15 percent of the upside back to the artists.

I was initially skeptical about how effectively this type of agreement could be enforced. Though if Christie’s had the will to enforce it, they certainly have the clout and capacity to penalize bad faith purchasers. According to the article, the conditions didn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm of buyers and most of the pieces have already sold.

According to the specialist at Christie’s coordinating the show with Ross-Sutton, the buyer covenant will benefit the auction house by providing them with insight into sincere collectors of works by artists of color.

The project also has the benefit of giving Christie’s access to collectors it might not have met otherwise, and insight into their preferences and holdings. “We’re excited to cater to this emerging clientele as well as develop programs that specifically cater to collectors of color,” Cunha adds.

Curator Ross-Sutton sees the success of a purchase agreement backed by an organization like Christie’s as an important message to artists not to underestimate their ability to insist on similar conditions.

Ross-Sutton hopes the experience will empower artists to take charge of their careers, including by pushing their gallery representatives to implement similar sales restrictions. “Many artists do not realize the power they have,” she says. “We cannot only put the blame on these so-called ‘flippers’—artists have to be more discerning and so do galleries.

I was trying to think of a parallel situation in the performing arts. Even though the value of a performance is more variable and transitory, I am sure there is some corresponding situation, perhaps with playwrights, choreographers, designers, etc, with which this situation might have relevance, (other than the lack of representation of people of color in many of these roles), but I feel like I am suffering from a momentary lack of imagination.

Art(ist) Education, Pricing, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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A Luxury Until You Ask: “Did Anybody Feel Like This Before?”

August 17, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you probably know that my gold standard for speeches about creative practice is one made by Ira Glass.

This being said, the TED site recently posted a video of Ethan Hawke titled, “Give Yourself Permission to Be Creative” which isn’t far behind Glass. In 10 minutes, he hits all the things we talk about in relation to arts and creativity: how little it is valued; how important it becomes in emotional times; how meaningful people find it in their lives, even though they are reticent to express it.

So you have to ask yourself: Do you think human creativity matters? Well, hmm. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry. Right? They have a life to live, and they’re not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems, until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you anymore, and all of a sudden, you’re desperate for making sense out of this life, and, “Has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?”

Or the inverse — something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes. You love them so much, you can’t even see straight. You know, you’re dizzy. “Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me?” And that’s when art’s not a luxury, it’s actually sustenance. We need it.

This is the part that really caught my attention because I think it is emblematic of how people may not feel they can share the delight they have experienced in the creative process:

My great-grandmother, Della Hall Walker Green, on her deathbed, she wrote this little biography in the hospital, and it was only about 36 pages long, and she spent about five pages on the one time she did costumes for a play. Her first husband got, like, a paragraph. Cotton farming, of which she did for 50 years, gets a mention. Five pages on doing these costumes. And I look — my mom gave me one of her quilts that she made, and you can feel it. She was expressing herself, and it has a power that’s real.

He bookends his talk by acknowledging that being creative often involves the risk of looking foolish. But he also says that as humans, we find it is one of the easiest, most natural things to start doing, especially as children. We see/hear something and are moved to start singing, percussing, or dancing in response to it. We might express our affinity by re-creating and recreating (one of the best pair of homographs in English) something through our play.