I spent most of today as a caveman, thinking primarily about food and shelter to stay in character (and suffering the comments from co-workers saying it was no great strain upon me to act the part of a caveman). As a result I pondered little of great import today.
However, had I not been pursuing some Halloween fun, I doubt I could have posted anything half as insightful (and from some of the commentary, inciteful) as Drew McManus' second installment recounting his experience working with arts management grad students at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Both installments are a good read, but the second one packs a punch with its discussion of results and conclusions from his exercise. Read both for the full context, but if you only have time for one, make it the second.
Drew has lead this activity before where he has graduate students roleplay a musician bargaining committee for an orchestra. I don't know if Drew had a different scenario than when he was at the Eastman School of Music or if, as people familiar with the orchestra world, the Eastman students recognized the scenario as being within the realm of possibility. What brought the whole exercise the UW to a halt was the students' disbelief that the financial statements they were looking at had any basis in reality.
In Drew's first installation, the mock negotiation team essentially walks away from the table in disgust at the financial mismanagement and decide they are going to form their own orchestra.
In the second installation, Drew recounts his discussions with the students about how the apparently hopeless situation the students found themselves in was all too similar to ones with which orchestra musicians are confronted. Reading the entries brought back a flood of memories and emotions about a dismal experience I had working at a mismanaged theatre. Symphonies haven't cornered the market on awful decision making.
For all the disillusionment and frustration it brought the UW students, I wish my graduate training program had offered a similar class to us. As Drew says, it helps dispel preconcieved notions and allows future managers to enter the profession with their eyes open. Although, when I ended up having that exact experience, I might have seen it as indicative of how it was everywhere and quit the arts immediately.
I got a call this weekend from a company doing a survey on local radio. The purpose, I was told, was to improve local programming. I told the girl I wasn't sure I could help since I didn't listen to local radio, but rather listened to a feed from a radio station over the internet.
I am guessing she decided my answer fell in the doesn't listen to radio category because she thanked me for my time and hung up. I also assume that she was working for a company hired to conduct the survey and not for the company(ies) who commissioned it and thus had no real investment in exploring why I didn't listen.
If the purpose was to improve the quality of local programming, the next questions should be: what do I listen to, if such programming was offered locally would I listen and if not, what is it about the online feed that was so appealing?
Even if I didn't listen to any radio at all and only to my CD collection or iPod, a little discovery as to why I didn't listen to radio might be in order. My reasons might be reversible if the right station came along.
Of course, maybe they didnt really want to improve programming but had some sort of agenda they were pursuing with the survey. One of the cardinal rules of decision based surveying is never ask a question you have no intention of acting upon.
The whole incident made me think maybe I should look back at the surveys I use to see if they are still pertinent. I also got to thinking that perhaps I should also read the responses a little more closely to see if they clue me in to other questions I should be asking. There may be a single perfect survey question for determining loyalty and growth, but there are plenty of other things I want to know.
I had a bit of a cautionary lesson in the last few days about providing services to persons with disabilities. The director of our Fall student drama production was approached a few weeks ago by a student in his class. The student is studying to be a sign language interpreter and wanted to know if he could use the performance as practice.
The director and I both agreed and the student and another more experienced interpreter in his cohort have been attending nearly every rehearsal for the last 6 weeks.
I was just preparing to advertise the signed performance in our ads and press releases when the assistant theatre manager mentioned that fact to the more experienced interpreter. He went into a panic and begged us not to publicize the fact.
It turns out we misunderstood the original intent of the request which was to simply just practice. The reason why they only wanted to practice is because they feared being blacklisted for taking jobs away from professional interpreters. I pointed out that they were students practicing on a student production at a college. Technically we are taking jobs away from professional actors but no one begrudges the students' the opportunity to learn the craft.
The older interpreter having worked professionally (he was taking classes to improve his skill) in the community for sometime now was concerned that there would be trouble even if we billed the interpretation as a student effort. (Something I intended to do from the beginning under the assumption they might mess up now and again.)
My surprise at some of the stories he told me about problems people have faced in the past was somewhat mild since I have belonged to some small groups who have tended to be protective and insular. Not to make excuses for the extreme treatment to which people have been subject.
The situation did frustrate me to some degree though because we have tried to get signers before and were told they weren't interested in traveling out to our location. Here were some guys who were willing to put the effort in and they were too intimidated to do it live.
I will say I have new respect for the process people go through to prepare to sign shows. I worked at a theatre that offered audio-described performances for the sight impaired. The preparation time the describers invested seems a lot shorter than what these guys tell me is involved with signing for a performance.
The cautionary lesson I referred to earlier is that offering services to people with disabilities is sometimes more involved than simply making plans and arrangements well in advance.
Of course, I also have a lot of respect for these two guys for coming out every night to rehearsal despite having no prospect of working before a live audience or given getting graded for the effort. I wish them luck. It seems like a tough career they are dedicating themselves to.
Have you ever visited a Renaissance Festival and wished you had the guts to dress up in those costumes and speaking in a faux cockney accent?
Well now can from the privacy of your own home! Sort of.
The MacArthur Foundation recently awarded a grant for the development of Arden: The World of Shakespeare. According to CNet "The idea behind the project is to produce a virtual world steeped in the rich lore and characters of the playwright's work."
The game will be a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft. Different parts will be devoted to different plays. According to the article, they are going to start with Richard III.
The grant was awarded to Edward Castronova who has famously studied the economics of online games. Arden will continue some of his work in this area and provide an arena for sociologists, political scientists and economists to study human behavior under changing situations.
But to the player these motivations shouldn't be discernable during game play. They will be there for the fun.
The game universe will be generally limited to what could be found in Shakespeare's universe. Magic will be limited to what might be found in The Tempest or MacBeth as will technology, professions, etc. Though finding Shakespearean text will empower you.
Though the intent is mostly to benefit social sciences, I wonder if playing the game might not provide good research for actors. Find out how a peasant might have really felt after spending hours of drudgery online. Want to discover real motivation for delivering Henry V's St. Crispen's Day speech? Get ye to the Battle of Agincourt. (Of course, you might be felled by dysentery on the way if the game keeps things realistic.)
Apropos of my bonus ponder yesterday, I commented on Artful Manager that a flexible view of non-profit status might not be well received by the IRS.
Lo and behold, the Chronicle of Philanthrophy has an article about how the IRS is scrutinizing non-profits more closely these days. The unit handling non-profits is still fairly small, but it is getting more personnel. They are conducting more audits than before. They have started a new program of preliminary investigations and partial audits to help clarify matters. (Check out the charts at the bottom to see how these activities grown in recent years.)
To balance the scary spectre of an audit, they have also started offering training for charities as well to help them keep their books in good shape and their activities in compliance.
Just something quick to think about. The US population reaching 300 million has had a lot of press of late. I don't know if you noticed though that the US fertility rate is only 2.1 children per woman and has been for awhile now. At that rate, the US population will hold static. We would have never reached 300 million from birth rate alone.
The population growth has been and will be, due to immigrants. So the question to ponder is, what is your organizations long range plan for serving your community in recognition of this fact?
If you have the brain power to ponder many things at once, try this for a bonus- Andrew Taylor links to an article suggesting a hybrid corporate status for non-profits. Or rather, hybrid status for corporations performing non-profit like activities.
On the whole, I think Andrew is right about needing a more flexible approaching with the tools we got. It is absolutely worth reading the long version of the article though if you feel the need for change.
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (subscription required) may have implications for arts organizations if some lawsuits and other efforts are successful.
Colleges across the country are being faced with students demanding that they be allowed to bring cats, dogs, snakes, rats, ferrets and tarantulas into dorm rooms and classrooms with the idea that they are service animals. Rather than claiming a physical disability, they are saying the animals provide "psychiatric service." (I wonder though if claiming an animal that causes anxeity in everyone around you can be considered a comfort aide.)
A few students who have had their requests denied have filed suits under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA "defines a service animal as 'any guide dog, signal dog, or other animal individually trained to do work or perform tasks for an individual with a disability.'"
Some animals are trained to provide comfort and direction to people with agoraphobia and schizophrenia by their very nature and presence. As such, they serve a passive role so it can be argued that the ADA encompasses animals that don't do specific tasks. Some groups are doing just that asking the Department of Justice to revise regulations to include such activities.
For the most part, courts have ruled with the idea that an animal must provide active service. There is at least one court that has ruled that a person could keep a comfort animal despite the no-pets clause in a rental lease.
The idea of needing animals to help one cope with all situations is spreading. Apparently people have tried to board airplanes claiming goldfish as service animals. (At least they didn't want to bring snakes on a plane!)
The instances of people needing comfort animals is not isolated either. Rutgers University "received five requests to accommodate a psychiatric-service animal in a single year — three cats, one dog, and a snake."
This is just something of which to be aware. People may start to appear at your box office wanting to attend a show with an animal that helps them cope with being out in public or even the subject matter of the performance. And it may not be accompanied by a dog in a service cape.
I was at a meeting a couple weeks ago to learn how the tourism authority was going to promote the arts over the next year. Someone suggested that the arts organization program along a unified theme and use that as something of a hook. The same thing had been suggested at the same meeting last year. Remembering some of the problems with that idea, I was going to speak up but someone effectively removed the idea from the table.
One of the travel writers in attendance told us that the publications that commissioned stories weren't really interested in stories about themed seasons. She mentioned a number of other ways to pique interest, but said that wasn't one of them.
If that is true for travel journals, I wonder if it is true for local publications as well. Early on in the planning of our current season, we noticed that a theme of revolving around storytelling ran through it. We started promoting the season with a "What's Your Story" theme and invited people to submit anecdotes on the website. We got plenty of orders but nothing submitted. (Not terribly surprising or worrisome) But we also got no acknowledgment from any media.
Granted there isn't a real big compelling hook in the theme. I was wondering if anyone had any recent success with getting recognition for themed seasons. I wouldn't mind terribly if the media doesn't care for them. It's less effort and brainpower on my part if I don't have to come up with a common thread to bind my season to get attention.
That said, about seven years ago when I was working in Orlando, FL, my theatre was part of a cooperative effort on the part of many arts organizations to present works based around Oscar Wilde. If you put any effort in to it, you can easily arrive at our slogan- Go Wilde! The local papers did cover the effort with a feature story and mentioned the theme whenever a show that was part of the theme was being performed.
I don't know if it is a matter of different time, different place that is dictating the lack of interest in mentioning the theme. The papers in Orlando might not have been as interested in writing something up if it weren't for the fact people could get a discount by grabbing a free punchcard and going around to visit the different events.
A theme is one thing, but a theme that motivates people to buy the paper to find out where and when the next discounted performance in the series might be provides a newspaper with a good reason to report on it.
Anyone else out there have any successes or failures at promoting a themed season or series of events in cooperation with others?
Email me or comment below..
I thought I would bring up the topic of jealousy to no particular end other than the fact it exists but no one really talks about it. I am not sure I have any suggested solutions. I just wanted to throw it out there.
The jealousy I am talking about is the type felt by the staff and supporters of the lesser arts organizations toward the local or regional darling. Unless you have worked for the top dog all your life, you know what I am talking about.
Sometimes the envy is just over the choices audiences make-Why do people go to see that shallow tripe rather than attending our shows where we deal with real issues?
Other times it has to do with perception that funding is going to the wrong place--The community rallying around the financially mismanaged behemoth, securing emergency donations from the state, banks and individuals, eliminating the usual annual gifts to you.
The upshot is, you essentially develop an inferiority complex despite all your protestations about how much better your own performances are. It may keep you running lean and mean to stay competitive and thus avoids burdening the community with another mismanaged organization. On the other hand, by constantly defining yourself in relation to another organization, you can place yourself in a box of your own building and ignore opportunities for growth.
I have worked for both the top dog and the underdog. I have even worked for the mismanaged behemoth that was sucking the money out of the community. Even though I didn't have anything to do with the mismanagement and was working 14-18 hours days to make up for the staff shortage, I felt guilty about the diversion of funding from other orgs.
It is great to be the organization with the most goodwill. It is easier to rebuild goodwill having lost it than it is to generate it from the start. Individuals may defect, but a community on the whole is fairly forgiving.
A lot of it has to do with the physical and social environment the organization is in. About a year ago I cited an Urban Institute study that said there were two factors that would immediately cause a person to decide not to return to your organization again- "not liking the venue and not having an enjoyable social occasion."
A case in point- There is a newly renovated facility in town. It has new equipment, gold leaf, new marquee...the works. It is essentially a rental house and doesn't program a balanced season like I do. Since people are pretty much making their entertainment choices at the last minute, the distinction isn't apparent or important to them.
Everybody likes that place best even though there are a lot of one way streets to navigate and no free parking (and the garage next door fills up quick.) Once you get inside, the surrounding allow you to feel like you are attending an event of note. If you don't, they have a liquor license so you at least numb yourself to the lack of that feeling.
It is hard not to feel a little jealous or inferior. We once had patrons go there for one of our shows despite the fact we had mailed them tickets two weeks before that clearly had our venue name on them. If the show is any good, it must be happening there is apparently the general feeling.
What really drove the popular sentiment about that theatre home to us was an article written a month ago about the world premiere show we did this past weekend. Two days in a row, in the Thursday newspaper and in the Friday Fall Arts Review, a columnist wrote that the show would premiere at my theatre in rough form and then a refined, more formal performance would be at this other theatre.
What lead him to write that? Well the company performing the show was thinking about renting this other theatre to do school outreach performances. They asked the facility to hold the date. The facility put it up on their website calendar, but because it was tentative, there was no time or prices listed and the description actually listed outreach activities. The company ultimately decided not to do the performance, canceled the date and the web listing came down 7-10 days after it went up.
The artistic director of the dance company theorized that people couldn't imagine why anyone would want to premiere a show in my venue and rationalized the details from the scant evidence available.
In the end, since I sold out, the stories had no negative impact on me. There may be some who decided they would wait for the show to appear at the other theater who are going to be disappointed or confused when they show up since someone else has rented that date.
I really don't think I am so much in competition with shows at the theatre as I am with the general perception and aura of prestige that surrounds it. Little by little I am trying to create an identity for us and carve out our little niche. While there are a lot of people who think the 8 mile drive to my place is WAAAAY out in the hinterlands, there are people who live even further out who think the 8 mile drive to my general neighborhood is civilization. There are fewer of them, but they deserve to be served too.
Mostly, I want to concentrate on keeping nimble and out of a box of my own construction. I don't have a lot of advice about constructively dealing with envy to offer, but avoiding self-constraint seems like some small wisdom.
Okay, I am just going to toot my horn a little here, as under deserving as I might be. On the other hand, I would be a little hypocritical to talk about how theatres should blog about their activities and not mention some of my own.
This past weekend we held the world premiere of the contemporary opera I had mentioned earlier. I was pleased to have generated so much buzz about the show it was sold out before the time the entertainment section stories and public radio story came out on Friday. The woman doing the public radio story called me the day before it aired asking how I suggested she close the story given the fact we were already sold out.
Fortunately, the work is playing in two other cities in the state and plane tickets are super cheap due to a fare war because we were fielding a heck of a lot of calls on Friday and Saturday.
Now that my performance is over, I have no financial interest in the show or any interests at all other than the compulsory playbill listing of my facility as the development and world premiere location.
Out of pride though, I do want to promote it a little bit more to the world in general. The company is looking for a US tour and a Japan tour. Japan is wild to consume Hawaiian culture and I am noticing more and more Hawaiian cultural performances showing up in season brochures.
I would also like to promote the show for the simple reason that it will help a local artist remain a viable employer of local performers. As I noted months ago, the state essentially exports its artistic talent for lack of opportunities.
So, if you are looking for an interesting contemporary cultural piece and would like to learn more about Naupaka: A Hawaiian Love Story, here are a few links to the stories-
Honolulu Star Bulletin, Honolulu Advertiser (has video footage from rehearsal), Hawaii Public Radio broadcast.
And you can always contact me as well. After the stories get put into the archives, I imagine I will be one of the only sources of additional information along with Tau Dance Theater.
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Kerry Sopher at Brigham Young University comes clean about his love for ballet and how he employs it in his lectures. This self-taught dancer uses ballet moves to illustrate diplomatic relations throughout history.
"...the glaring flaws of Roosevelt's New Deal policies dissected with the help of a series of deftly executed entrechats...a re-creation of the tension surrounding the Bay of Pigs crisis by remaining en pointe for as long as possible (20 seconds on a good day!)... To the strains of Stravinsky's joyfully martial Rite of Spring, I performed an athletic, 15-minute-long, tightly choreographed celebration of the war on terrorism...I found this performance to be so emotionally and physically exhausting that I was forced to end the class 30 minutes early, right there on that high note."
It is an interesting story in its own right and an a fairly novel approach to integrating the arts into other subjects. I have never been a real big fan of interpretive dance, but I have to admit that the moves he applies to the various historical occurrences seem appropriate. (Especially his pas de deux with a nervous student to illustrate Anwar el-Sadat's suspicions of Menachem Begin.)
I also have to empathize with him over his mortification at being snickered at the first time he used dance to illustrate his point in class. To have had the guts to do it in the first place, much less to screw his courage to continue after the laughter from the back of the room is commendable.
I actually went to Ratemyprofessor.com to check him out and see if any students had any comments about the dancing. From the ratings you can't tell he is anything but a real good teacher. That is probably as it should be. His use of dance is as a illustrative tool to help students learn and not some out of context indulgence or eccentricity.
A little bit of incredulous griping today.
With all the discussions and advice we get about keeping our organizations relevant in our communities, refining our marketing approaches to be more efficient and using technology to meet the expectations of our customers, I often wonder if Tams Witmark Music Library either doesn't get it or is just complacent from their success.
The company administers the rights to some of the biggest classics in musical theatre. They send out a catalog every year and I am amazed at how unappealing it makes their shows look. Most of the photos are from the original Broadway productions back in the 1960s and 70s.
Yes, it is nice to see what Julie Andrews looked like in her late 20s when she was in Camelot. But the dated costumes and hairstyles just scream "this is staid show with nothing to offer your audiences in 2006" every time I get the catalogue in the mail. I have seen and been a part of these shows and it makes me cringe when I think that people will be turned off from producing them because of these godawful pictures.
The only saving grace I see is that they don't have these awful pictures on the website. (There are almost no pictures at all.) So between Broadway revivals and seeing/participating in productions, people will have a positive enough impression of the shows that they don't need images to help them make a choice when they visit the website.
I am sure the catalog works for the company just fine but I wonder if business might increase if they solicited images from even good amateur productions with which to update their catalog.
One thing that is depressing is that the catalog is that by putting in pictures of the original casts, the publication bears witness to the fact that there have been so few great original musicals produced in the last few decades.
Berlin's Deutsche Oper decision to cancel Mozart's opera Idomeneo because it may enrage Muslims has gotten me to thinking about the implications.
Artists have often skirted controversy and many venues have cancelled performance under public pressure. These things are not new. Likewise, artists have frequently come under death threats as have the audiences who attend the works. Back in the late 80s/early 90s I had to go through a metal detector and a pat down because a production featuring Vanessa Redgrave had received bomb threats in response to her views on Palestine.
While you should never be in danger of being slain by someone at anytime in your life, as an artist or attendee, you recognized the threat to yourself by others by advancing ideas or choosing to be present at a performance. Just as your car should never be subject to damage, you recognize by driving during rush hour someone may hit you intentionally out of road rage.
What concerns me is that people will harm oblivious, uninvolved individuals within 10 miles of them for something occuring 3000 miles away. The opera is, of course, worried about problems locally because Germany has many guest workers from Islamic countries. Their decision is being made in the context of the violence and slaying for from Rome in response to the pope's recent comments about Islam. I am afraid people will see the effectiveness of the ploy in cowing people and use the threat as a means of shutting down something they have never seen but have heard enough about to get whipped into a frenzy over.
For example someone in California upon hearing that the Vagina Monologues promote a lesbian lifestyle and is the primary instrument by which young girls are brainwashed into a homosexual relationship may decide to blow up a bookstore in a California town selling the script when Oprah announces on her show that she is sponoring a huge production in Chicago.
The fact that people thousands of miles away who probably have no knowledge of or opinion on a show could be endangered is frightening. The idea that artistic choices one makes might need to be altered out of concern for people half the world away from a production gives one a lot of pause.
The questions and decisions may start out attached to religious beliefs but there is nothing to stop people from employing the tactic with economic and ecologic ones. If you don't back down to pressure now, you may rob the tactic as a viable tool for the future but end up shouldering the blame for injury and death for people today.
The argument that if we can put a man on the moon why can't we X is a logical disconnect because all that proves is that a different group of people possessing different skillsets were able to solve a different problem.
So too will people probably discover that what worked to influence decisions globally for a different group for a short time (because I think people will eventually become inured to the threats) won't be effective for them in another arena.
But it won't stop them from trying and people most likely will be hurt in the process of discovering how ineffective the tactic might be.
I have to attend one of the final rehearsals for a show going up this weekend, but I wanted to do a quick entry on something I learned today.
Shannon Daut, Director of Programs for WESTAF (Western Arts Federation) spoke to my booking consortium today about various benefits we will accrue by our state rejoining WESTAF. Our consortium was already receiving some financial support under a couple of their programs that didn't require the state to be a member so we were familiar with a lot of what she said.
One of the things she did tell me that came as a sort of surprise was that for granting purposes an underserved community could be one that wasn't served by the arts well at all as well as one that was underserved by a particular discipline. As an example of the latter, she mentioned that Denver where WESTAF is headquartered was underserved by dance.
What is necessary for the granting process is to make the case for why a community is underserved citing data be it historical trends or census data. One of the other criteria for the grants is that the arts organization be engaged with what the community wants. You can't just seek financial support to bring Jethro Tull in because they never tour your part of the country unless there are a lot of people who want to see the band.
According to Shannon, if you have plans to present an group of an underserved discipline in proper proportion to the demand of your community, you have a fair chance of receiving support even if your community is renowned as a hot bed for other disciplines.