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The Space Is The Thing

March 30, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

So if you have been following my infrequent postings about the site specific work we are developing, The Celebrity Project, you know that I have reveled in the role of telling people to think big rather than to limit their vision and mused on the wisdom of having a set performance space rather than moving audiences around.

Now we are 10 day out from the performance and plans really need to bow to practicality over idealism. One of the biggest changes since last I posted on the subject in January is that we have really consolidated our performance spaces. Because we are getting rain more frequently now than we did even a month ago, we have moved performances to a more sheltered central area. Most of the show is still outside, but out of necessity, the audiences won’t move between performances spaces because there is less room to maneuver around.

We are still going to split the audience between different stages, but instead of the audience moving to a new stage, the actors will flip between them. There will be some activities they will witness in common in the area between them and a final piece in the theatre. It will certainly be great fun, but the change had us scrambling a little in the administration office.

Our original concept was to have the program book be a large fold out “map to the stars” that people would use to get from stage to stage (though mostly cued by ushers and performance guides). Now that people aren’t moving from stage to stage, the design has to be changed a little.

The other problem is that our press release played up on the star map concept promising people that they would get one but warning that there would be guards present to make sure they didn’t wander off in search of a star’s possessions to sell on Ebay. It was all sort of fun and tongue in cheek. Unfortunately, the release went out before anyone told me that part of the show had been scrapped. I made a slight retraction when I sent out a little update note letting people know they could attend the show without concern about the rain.

Because the action is now in a more confined space, albeit still outdoors, I had to ponder some of the same concerns about traffic flow and crowd control. In our tech meeting today, I asked that alterations be made in the staging of one piece to draw people away from a potential choke point rather than congregating there. I also asked that the cast members guiding people in pivoting to another performance area not wear masks. They can be a little disconcerting and we want to avoid people pausing as they approached the cast member while those behind moved forward to see what was happening.

Now that things are becoming finalized the assistant theatre manager and I will start attending some dress rehearsals to figure out our front of house procedures and evaluate any other problem areas. I will have to remember to get some pictures to post here before it is over.

Audience Relations

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Dance Baby, Dance

March 29, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

While there has been increasing doubts raised about the benefits to intelligence and development from exposing children to Mozart and other classical music in the womb and as infants, a new study suggests that humans may be predisposed to dancing. In the experiments conducted, infants started moving spontaneously to the beat of different musical genres. (Beat rather than melody seemed to be most important.) The babies smiles more often when they were able to synchronize their movements with the music.

I guess the kids on American Bandstand instinctively knew what mattered when they declared a song had a great beat and they could dance to it.

This study just confirmed what I already suspected. Both my nephews jiggled and wiggled to music since before they could crawl and bounced and bopped around as soon as they could get to their feet. A friend’s son went to Chinese New Year celebration in February. While he was frightened by the Lion Dancers, he was apparently entranced by the dance itself because he kept watching YouTube videos. Then he would stand out on the porch and bounce up and down and simulate the drum beat with his voice. His father bought him a little lion costume and drum. Now whenever I am over, he grabs the costume and drum and does a dance for us. Actually, judging from the state of the poor costume, he dances more frequently than when I am around.

What I would really love is if someone does a study which finds out if kids who continue spontaneous dance type movements throughout their first five years end up with better coordination and lower body strength. Actually, I imagine there might be benefits to discerning spatial relationships and cognition as well that could be studied.

My ulterior motive is to motivate parents to no only have their kids listen to music, but also provide them freedom and encouragement to get up and move. I figure an environment that gives kids permission to even informally participate in another form of creative expression is good for the arts in the long run.

Art(ist) Education, State of the Arts

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I’m Banging The Drum For You

March 29, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

Last Friday, Kenny Endo’s agent told me that she had been contacted by a number of organizations that wanted to have him perform based entirely upon my entry about his performance.

I really appreciate the confidence you have shown in my recommendation of his skill and the overall quality of the show.

The agent also said the inquiries were for the specific performance I had with Kenny Endo and Kiyohiko Semba. I don’t blame you, of course. But apparently they hadn’t made any plans to get back together in the next year.

I took advantage of an email from Kenny’s wife today to include a pitch to get the band back together in my reply. No guarantees, but I figure the more people ask, the better a chance they will organize a tour in the next few years. In the meantime, as I said at the end of my entry, Kenny’s shows easily stand on their own and he is adept at collaborating with diverse performers.

General Musings

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Who’s Auditing The Auditors?

March 24, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

Credit where it is due, Peter Hansen of NJPAC posted a link on the Performing Arts Administrator’s group on LinkedIn about the £2.3 million judgment entered against former London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) General Manager Cameron Poole for financially defrauding that organization.

Even though it was supposed to take 4 people to issue a check, Poole was able to take advantage of operational distractions to perform all the required functions himself, included forging countersignatures. The executive director, Tim Walker, admits some negligence on his part, but is amazed that not only did he and the board not catch it, but the auditors from Deloitte missed it on three separate audits. LPO is currently pursuing a negligence suit against Deloitte.

It raises the question of whether you can really be certain you have proper controls and diligence in place. Deloitte missed, or at least didn’t comment on something that became apparent to Poole’s successor in a couple weeks. Four of the biggest accounting firms in the country never made a sound about the suspicious nature manner in which Bernie Madoff financial reports were generated. (An entirely separate issue from the strangely superior returns his fund was generating.)

One would think that after Arthur Andersen’s accounting arm lost credibility following the Enron scandal, reducing the Big Five accounting firms to the Big Four, greater attention would be paid. But I think people may attribute more competence and honesty to organizations of great size and prestige than is warranted. Even on the non-profit front, I was aware of a number of scandals in the United Way, but I had no idea that there has been large scale mismanagement and embezzlement at four or five locations and alleged smaller scale fraud at over 20 others. One of the Spanish members of the LinkedIn group cited a case similar to LPO’s at Barcelona’s Orfeó-Palau de la Musica Catalana where the general manager embezzled millions of euros (some stories I have seen claim 23 million in over 30 years).

The piece I linked to above about the United Way claims “The nonprofit world has accepted that multi-million embezzlements are a cost of doing business.” As much as I am dismayed by the idea that making great efforts at due diligence may not guarantee security, I would hope no one hiring me would do so assuming there was a good chance I will make off with some of the money.

There is a price for lack of scrutiny when people begin to lose faith in you. About a year ago, there was a piece in the Washington Post about 21 Washington DC area non-profits withdrawing from the local United Way, which had been the subject of one of the larger scandals, in favor of another emerging charitable organization.

I am encouraged by the news that it didn’t take long for Poole’s replacement at the LPO to notice something was strange. It means that misappropriations can be spotted with a little healthy scrutiny that makes no personal judgments about the individual holding the books when you ask to see the raw data rather than the summary reports.

Still, most of us don’t have three weeks to pour over ledgers sorting through it all. So the real question becomes, how do you know you can trust your auditor to be meticulous enough on your behalf? I am sure I could find editorials about how the big firms are so big and so motivated to process as many audits in a year as possible, companies aren’t getting the competence and effort they deserve. I am also pretty sure that laziness and incompetence afflicts the small operations as well as the big ones.

There was an argument back during the Enron scandal that rotating accounting firms would help avoid the conflicts of interest that develop over a long term relationship and cause auditors to look the other way. That was countered by the idea that is wastes a lot of time and money when you have to get a new auditor up to speed about the way your business runs.

I am pretty much on the side of rotating. I don’t think most arts organizations and non-profits in general are so big that it will take too much longer to explain their operations to a new group every few years. That way you avoid any conflicts of interest and lack of rigor.

Fundraising, Leadership

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