I was idly perusing a national arts job site this weekend and came across a board member solicitation for a small theatre in a major city. I thought that was interesting because an organization usually forms a nominating committee and seeks to balance the board in terms of what people might bring to short and long range plans. Though BoardSource counsels against indiscriminate recruitment, I imagined while perhaps inexperienced, they were being a little adventuresome and casting a wide net. They specified a love for theatre and preferred that the members not be theatre professionals.
Then I noticed something that made me a little wary. The cover letters and resumes were all going to the artistic director. It is something of a conflict of interest to have the people responsible for overseeing the finances and operations chosen by the person whose activities will be monitored. Adding to my unease was a check of their organization's website and 990 filings on Guidestar which revealed of the five board members, three were employees. The artistic director, managing director and production person all sit on the board. This isn't a new company that just formed and hasn't had a chance to recruit outside the handful of friends who started the venture. The organization is almost 9 years old and if their claims are true, has garnered enough critical acclaim to attract interest in serving from a decent number of people.
I checked the non-profit corporation laws for the state in which the organization is located and there is no law against such a heavy staff representation on a board. In fact, it appears only California makes such a prohibition. Don't quote me though. This type of mix is generally advised against. This exchange on Idealist.org gives a sense of some of the factors to weigh.
It initially appeared to me as if the artistic director may be trying to manipulate the selection process in order to surround himself with people who will help raise money and not challenge him. My suspicions ran so high that I was ready to name names in the post and encourage people to stay far away. However, I also considered that maybe someone advised them that their current board set up looks suspicious and they should make an effort to expand board membership if they want to attract more serious funding.
Which is not to say that next year the artistic director won't have surrounded himself with 10 yes men and women. There were some clues in the 990 and organization website that I pursued with a little Googling thatl makes me wonder how independent the other board members are. The other endeavors with which the board members have been involved makes me skeptical of any suggestion that they didn't know any better about the composition of their board.
I also have to admit there are many possible variable of which I am not aware that could explain this situation so I am not going to be outing them here. On the other hand, I am quite pleased with how easy it was for me to research the organization, the board members and the specific laws of their state dealing with non-profit boards. It is very encouraging to see the increasing ease with which research can be conducted.
Scott Walters over at Theatre Ideas had some thoughts on yesterday's post and then I responded to his entry and, if I didn't mess up my submission while running back and forth preparing my dinner, just replied to his response.
With all that thinking and writing, I pretty much figure I have done my blogging contribution of the day. Whew!
Actually, I did want to highlight a project Scott has been working on in conjunction with other arts bloggers, over the course of a number of blog entries called Theatre Tribe. This project is dedicated to finding viable way to do theatre in the changing economic/political/social landscape. Since he has been developing the concept essentially from scratch in entries interspersed over the course of several months, he has set up a central page that organizes his thoughts for easy reference. I have read some of his entries at various points though when I clicked through the headers on the central page, I realized how many I had missed. Scott presents some interesting ideas for revising the way performances are mounted and the nature of the artist-community relationship.
There are times when I find Scott's writings to be strident and in opposition with my own thoughts. But he is also very thoughtful and reflective. Which is why I keep going back.
Richard Florida, who rose to fame alongside his Rise of the Creative Class figures you should evaluate if you are living where you should be. As I read the reviews and summaries of his new book, Who's Your City?, I get the impression that it may have just gotten harder to attract the creative class to one's area.
Of course, it has always been difficult or easy without Florida saying it. But from what I read and what he talks about in this newspaper article, it seems like there is an underlying vibe a lot of places that attracts (and repels) certain types of folks. If your community doesn't already have a certain nascent characteristic, it is going to be tough to cultivate a change in that direction. There is a certain inertia to some places that will hinder efforts if local government/Chamber of Commerce, etc is trying to push things in an opposite direction with the intention of attracting the treasured creatives. He even implies an entropic influence on people drawing their values and attitudes closer to being in line with the general community over time. (Though most people who are considered the loony liberal or raging conservative probably won't ever be wholly converted short of consciously willing it.)
Florida talks about certain communities being suited for people at different phases in their lives and lists the "best of" in large, middle and small regions. I haven't read the book but if I were to hazard a guess, given that creatives, like all mortals age and mature in their outlooks, attracting them is probably a matter of exploiting the aspects of your community that best suit a certain demographic rather than aiming for the young and hip (unless your community is a burgeoning hip place.)
What appealed to me more than the top five list was another section of the website that poses 20 questions to help you decide what communities are best for you. This is great for me because I am young and hip in atypical ways. The strength of the place finder is that it makes you examine your criteria for your ideal community and forces you to do a little research to answer all the questions.
You plug in where you live and up to four places where you want to live. It then asks you to rate each city on typical things like economy, geography, climate, available jobs, health care, arts, schools and housing costs. But it also asks you to rank them on things like trustworthiness of politicians and business leaders, availability of technology, diversity of leadership and community and openness of the community. In the end you may discover that while you always dreamed of living in Seattle, you are better off living where you are.
I suspect the place finder might even be help people focus their thinking when they consider founding an arts organization. (Maybe the NEA or Americans for the Arts should adopt a similar tool specifically for the arts.) Even without his book being published, I don't think I would be suggesting anything earth shattering were I to say that founding an arts organization that doesn't resonate with the underlying vibe of a community is a bad idea and probably destined to result in one muttering about philistines. If communities can target the wrong group of creatives, creatives can certainly target the wrong communities.
Following a link from an entry on the Non-profiteer, I arrived at a site with a report about Non-profit leadership. The summary of the study was so similar to the Building Movement report I cited last month, I initially thought it was the same one mirrored by a partner in that 2004 study.
Come to find out this study, Ready to Lead? Next Generation Leaders Speak Out is brand spanking new having just come out this year to report a survey of 5756 members of members of Idealist.org and constituents of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services. They also held six focus groups across the country with 55 non-profit staffers who had never been executive directors.
This survey included a much larger sample size than Building Movement's (though they certainly acknowledge BM) but generally gets the same responses. People feel they need to balance their work and personal lives, they aren't terribly keen on becoming executive directors, don't feel they are being mentored or have many professional development opportunities. There are some nice charts graphs and charts on the report home page, (on the Myer Foundation website by the way), that summarize many of the results. Top two of five reasons not to become Executive Director-Don't want Fundraising responsibilities and Would Have to Sacrifice Work-Life Balance.
There were two results that I hadn't seen before that I thought were interesting. First is that 10% more people of color were desired to become executive director than whites and people of lower income were wanted to become executive director than people from middle and upper class backgrounds. I should note that a large number of those belonging to the surveyed organizations are associated with social service/justice, health services, environmental protection/justice organizations rather than specifically with the arts.
The second finding I found interesting was that people of color and women felt they needed more education and training time before becoming executive director than white men who tended to feel they were ready now. The surveyors attribute this more to the fact that more men than women and people of color hold senior positions and are being groomed to be executive director in twice the number. They believed women and people of color felt the need to be over-educated and burgeoning with experience in reaction to this.
I should point out the survey also notes that a large portion of their sample were unemployed (11%) or in the first year (43%) of their career. I do feel women and people of color need better representation, but I don't want my entry to serve as fodder for protest when the numbers are so slanted. I think this mix is fine for reporting aspirations but not necessarily for reporting the reality of a situation. For example, only 4% of those surveyed said they were being groomed to be executive director. However in a 2006 survey of executive directors conducted by the same group, "52% of executive directors reported actively developing one or more people on their staffs to be executive directors someday." The relative lack of experience in this sample needs to be taken into account when looking at some of these results.
One thing I liked about the Myer Foundation website is the resource page. I will admit to only taking a cursory glance at a few of the blogs and other resources but I liked what I saw. For example, this entry on The Bamboo Project Blog that suggests using a webcam, computer and internet calling services like Skype to turn Baby Boomers retirees into long distance mentors and recording the sessions to create a mentoring library. (The use of which will require the cultivation of learning as a value among non-profit leaders, of course.)
There are also a number of links about retirement planning. The lack of which emerged as a motivating factor on many fronts in both this survey and the one Building Movement did a few years ago.
The impetus for the original entry I followed up on yesterday was writing effective press releases. It got me thinking so when I came home this evening I started looking around for tips for putting together a successful publicity photo shoot. There are plenty of guides on composing a shot but I haven't been able to find anything on how to get performers to look natural. There are plenty of groups that do a good job with their publicity shots but I have seen enough awful pictures in newspapers and on websites that I essentially consider it a moral imperative to list some sort of resource on my blog.
I have worked with any number of directors who were pretty vigilant about keeping bad acting out of their shows who seem to throw those rules out the window for the photo shoot. You get heavily posed shots where the actors are blatantly indicating their emotions-"Here I am terrified. Boy am I terrified."
The only advice I can offer is from two different places I worked. Both essentially followed the same scheme. One had the actors run through a scene and the photographer either snapped away or yelled freeze. The other had much more advanced performers and let them essentially improv with each other in character and the photographer snapped away. In the latter case, the photographer was more likely to tell the actors to keep going than to stop so he could catch something. The photographs in got cases tended to have a more organic dynamic to them.
I wonder if someone out there with more photo shoots under their belt might have a more formal list of tips for effective publicity shots. (Or knows of a source that has them.) I would think a list of cliches to avoid would be valuable as well. (Mollified person in foreground with person glaring disapprovingly behind and to the side, for example.) I did find one website talking about photo cliches but it was pretty snarky so I thought it best not to link.
If you have tips or know where to find them, let me know.
A recent conversation I had that included the state of Wisconsin reminded me about an entry I did almost 3 years ago on American Players Theatre in Spring Green, WI. Their brochure had fallen into my hands and really impressed me because the language made me just want to visit. I didn't care if I saw a show or not, they just sounded like a great bunch of people in a great location and I wanted to be there. Reading the entry over again, I still do.
I visited their website again curious if they were able to maintain their cool factor or if the brochure was just the result of some momentary made genius. The performance descriptions still seem pretty enticing. I think the more extensive descriptions are obviously better than the abbreviated versions found here. I was particularly intrigued by the subtitling of Henry IV as "The Making of A King." As far as I can tell Shakespeare never included that as part of the title. Since they are combining the two Henry IV plays into one, I assume they are emphasizing the parts that show Prince Hal's coming of age.
But really, that bit of information along with details of most of the other shows are elements that could engage me based on my status as an theatre insider. As a test of whether the descriptions would be truly enticing to a person who was not familiar with a show, I specifically looked at the language of The Belle's Stratagem by Hannah Cowley, both a work and playwright I had no idea existed. While I have to acknowledge that the details about the show fading into obscurity after being wildly popular for about a century appealed to my academic and insider side, you have to admit the following makes the show sound like a lot of fun:
Slip into the midst of a gathering of the rich and richer, old money and new. Nobody parties like the British upper crust. With names like Silvertongue, Flutter, Courtall, Villers and Miss Ogle, it’s clear this is a cheerful meat market on display. Plays like a well-choreographed dance, pirouettes into a seethingly seductive soiree of a masquerade ball, where identities are mistaken, libidos tweaked and liaisons secretly undertaken.
Mistaken identities and secret liaisons I am familiar with but I love the "cheerful meat market on display" phrase.
I will admit that writing about period pieces allows for over the top language that would sound out of place describing a modern realistic piece or even contemporary performer. What you always want to aim for when promoting a performance is not to so much describe the reality of the piece as describe the essence of the experience (preferably without using meaningless stock phrases like "what it means to be human"). That is something that can be accomplished with just about every period and genre. Not everything the American Players people have written is replete with inspiration but it is still pretty good. (And it gives me hope that improving my own writing a little more is possible.)
In an attempt to dance with the one that brung me and pay local culture its due, I wanted to mention a production we presented this weekend. One of our consortium partners re-mounted a production about the life of the last pre-Contact chief of Maui island, Kahekili. The original performance was about 10 years ago. The current production expands on the original and marks the first time the National Endowment for the Arts has recognized hula kahiko with in their American Masterpieces grant program.
I don't usually promote performances on my blog but I do feel some loyalty to culture in which I am living. Productions of this kind which expand on traditional hula performances are few and far between so I am eager to advance what I feel is a part of a renaissance in Hawaiian culture.
What I find fascinating about the story of Kahekili is the parallels to Arthurian legend. Kahekili essentially ruled 7 of the 8 major Hawaiian islands through either conquest or capitulation. Unfortunately, like Uther, he couldn't close the deal and unite all into all into a single kingdom. That fell to Kamehameha the Great who is said to be Kahekili's son. Since Kamehameha didn't live in the Maui court there is a sense that like Arthur, there is some illegitimacy attached. That is where the similarities end. Kamehameha denied Kahekili was his father and even opposed the Maui chief's conquest of the Big Island of Hawaii.
Since most of Kahekili's activities occurred prior to Captain Cook's arrival, it is interesting to see a parallel to Arthurian legend emerge. On the other hand, given that all knowledge was transmitted orally at the time, some alterations to the story to bring it in line with Camelot may have crept in post-Contact. Especially if someone was trying to validate his reign and right to treat with other monarchs and leaders.
The other reason I promote shows like this for the educational elements. During the production's tour on the U.S. Mainland, the group had to explain the difference between Hawaiian hula and other related forms like Samoan fire knives and the frenetic hips and drumming of Tahitian dance. The one indication the group had that the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau was doing a good job with their advertising was that some people were surprised by the battles portrayed in the show. They thought Hawaiians were all aloha and didn't fight.
In fact, Kahekili was incredibly ruthless in war. The district our theatre is located in was the site of a particularly infamous massacre by his armies where he wiped out all the noble houses on the island. Any nobles living here after that came from the Neighboring Islands. One of the most scenic spots on the island is the location where Kamehameha's troops drove their opposition over the cliffs during his conquests.
The production was equally as educational for local audiences as it portrays fertility, wedding and chiefly practices rarely witnessed these days. Kahekili having been eclipsed by Kamehameha, is also not a very well known figure so his story is also informative for the community. The tour is winding down this summer though there are whispers of some interest from a place in Germany. If there is additional interest, who knows what might be arranged....
I have no stake in the success of the show so if there is any interest from my readers, they should contact these folks.
No, no, no wait. The tip isn't that I am dumb, it is actually that I am occasionally reminded that I shouldn't assume a tip I am considering writing on is so self-evident and elementary that I am insulting people by posting it.
I was checking up on Chad Bauman to see how he was faring in his effort to get people to cross the Potomac River to see Arena Stage productions in Virginia. I had posted on his use of Personalize URLS to direct people from their driveway to his driveway. It appears the effort was well worth it as they "have had less than 1/2 of 1 percent of our subscribers ask for a refund."
In the same entry he talks about a practice he adopted from Repertory Theatre of St. Louis that made me thwak my head for not perceiving the logical extension of things we already do. Essentially Repertory Theatre of St. Louis and now Arena Stage have pages (click on the preceding theatre names in this sentence) containing links so you can tell your friends about a show on the different social networking sites and via email as well as bookmark the page for future reference.
This was the part that convinced me that I shouldn't think something is too simple to mention. What made me say "Duh" is the fact that while my theatre does offer people the opportunity to send email messages with a performance description automatically inserted into the message body and have a Myspace page allowing people to send event information to Myspace friends, we haven't it possible to send Myspace alerts from our organizational web page and vice versa. I figure if I missed something this logical, other people may have has well.
There is certainly no wisdom in assuming the Myspace people only get their event information through that site. As with all things technological, I do think there is a limit to the number of modes of communication an arts organization should offer website visitors. The clutter and the surfeit of choices can be alienating.
Like the aforementioned theatres, our stated policy is that we don't store the email information. At least insomuch as we don't record any of the information in our databases. A copy of what is sent does get forwarded to my email address alone. Given the tensions I have witnessed arise from students who felt they were miscast, I wanted to make sure no one was using our system to send out messages disparaging cast members by creatively rewriting my show descriptions.
Lately, I have considered making a small alteration to our policy. Since there is usually one person who organized most of the details of any couple/group outing, I was thinking that perhaps we should institute some reward system for those who are recommending our shows to their friends. It wouldn't be a publicized program. I don't want people spamming their friends with our show information in order to get prizes. What we would do is simply contact the person and offer them free tickets or something for being so supportive of us.
The change to our policy might be something along the lines of "We will not store the recipient's email address or the content of the email in any form. We may keep a simple tally of how many times a sender as recommended a show and contact them no more than once a year to inquire on the quality of their experience."
I am sure I am missing some other logical way that will facilitate attending a performance. If you see it, speak up and submit a comment!
As something of a counterpoint to my entry yesterday on how exposure to the arts can benefit one's neurological development is this National Review piece from December in which Robert Fulford reminds us that arts exposure won't save your soul or improve your personality.
He quotes George Steiner, "'We know that a man can play Bach and Schubert and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning,'" and notes "...we also can't claim that immersion in the arts will create a lively mind. Art education has produced armies of learned bores." He also points out that artists are not imbued with any special grace as people and may possess the most vie personalities even as they produce the most engaging works we have ever encountered.
This observation is has become less true of late as an ever increasing tabloid eye on the activities of celebrities has seen art valued in the context of the artist. This isn't just a matter of actors being fired from Lost to minimize the bad press from a DUI. There is often trouble with the performance of J.S. Bach's work given a perception of anti-Semitic sentiments which may have simply been a reflection of the time in which he lived and text which he drew from. (The Gospel of John from which he derived his St. John Passion contains a good deal of derogatory content.)
What Fulford says the arts do guarantee is, "Those who give it their time and love are offered the chance to live more expansive, more enjoyable and deeper lives." It is somewhat reminiscent of the proverb about leading a horse to water since the arts only afford the opportunity of improvement. Education and religion can also prove uplifting but only if they are embraced. Likewise, exposure to the arts with the intent of developing the neurological structures discussed in yesterday's entry only becomes meaningful in someone's life if they value the experience.
On Artjournal.com was a link to this article on Science Daily about a study the Dana Foundation commissioned on the question of "Are smart people drawn to the arts or does arts training make people smarter?" For three years researchers at a number of universities have studied this question resulting in a recently released report (downloadable as an Acrobat document here.)
I haven't read the report yet. But the Science Daily article mentions some interesting findings though they repeat the Dana Foundation disclaimer that "Much of this research is of a preliminary nature, yielding several tight correlations but not definitive causal relationships. "
1. An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance and the training of attention that leads to improvement in other domains of cognition.
2. Genetic studies have begun to yield candidate genes that may help explain individual differences in interest in the arts.3. Specific links exist between high levels of music training and the ability to manipulate information in both working and long-term memory; these links extend beyond the domain of music training.
4. In children, there appear to be specific links between the practice of music and skills in geometrical representation, though not in other forms of numerical representation.
5. Correlations exist between music training and both reading acquisition and sequence learning. One of the central predictors of early literacy, phonological awareness, is correlated with both music training and the development of a specific brain pathway.
6. Training in acting appears to lead to memory improvement through the learning of general skills for manipulating semantic information.
7. Adult self-reported interest in aesthetics is related to a temperamental factor of openness, which in turn is influenced by dopamine-related genes.
8. Learning to dance by effective observation is closely related to learning by physical practice, both in the level of achievement and also the neural substrates that support the organization of complex actions. Effective observational learning may transfer to other cognitive skills.
The Dana Foundation lists suggested directions for research given what has been learned thus far near the bottom of their research summary. To read the list you would think they hadn't many any progress in the research at all which is probably indicative of just how little study has been devoted to the ways art shapes our neurological processes.
Something that really surprised me comes up in the video of the presentation of findings. Michael Posner of the University of Oregon talks about how liking a particular art form, be it visual arts, linguistic arts, movement arts and music, was independent of other art forms. In other words, an artist is not particularly inclined to like arts in general but rather only find one particularly appealing. He seems to say there are structures in the brain that develop which are aligned with certain activities that exist prior to exposure to information or experience which would predispose someone toward that subject based on how developed those areas of the brain are. There is overlap in many areas, but there is enough separation to make one's interests independent of each other.
The other important element, Posner says, is an openness to the experience. You need to be open and have certain existent neural pathways to begin developing an affinity for an experience. (Unfortunately, the video has no time index that I can reference for you.) One thing he briefly mentions that made me concerned was the idea that attention needs to be sustained over a long period of time. He talks about this in connection with young children and the fact that kids acquire many of their skills by essentially engaging in repetitive play over a period of time. My concern was based on the general shortening of attention span as people seek constant stimulation from portable technology. I worried about people not cultivating an interest in the arts which will actually indicate a possible lack of important sections of the brain. (i.e. dance skills are connected to observation.)
The one bit of solace is that many kids are more interested in playing with boxes and keys on a ring than they are with what came in the box and maybe likely to develop their brains despite all the things that distract their parents and older siblings. Though it won't be long before they replicate the behavior of their family members and friends. It should also be noted that the formation of these neural structures isn't necessarily happening only in children. One of the people in the video admit that there are brain structures developing throughout one's life whose purpose scientists aren't necessarily certain about.
But this is only a small part of the study and even the research presentation. My plan is to take a more indepth look at the study soon.
It has been a busy couple days here at Butts In the Seats so I have brief offering for folks to ponder.
An illustration about how technology is changing our expectations and how tough it can be to keep abreast of the changes. When I was at the Arts Presenters conference in January I overheard people on no less than 5 occasions express a sentiment along the lines of "If only we could figure out how to use text messaging to promote our shows."
My assumption was that the difficulty people were facing is that you can only send about 160 characters via SMS and it is pretty tough to make your case and provide your contact information in that short a space. Given that many cell phone users pay per text message, they might tolerate one text message from you but sending multiple ones as a modern day Burma Shave advertisement could cause quite a bit of ill will. But since most young people don't view email as a their primary communication tool vs. texting, figuring out how to best use it is important.
I mentioned this problem in an email to Drew McManus and in his reply he essentially pointed out that with the abilities of the iPhone, the SMS format is probably going to be abandoned soon. Not everyone may buy an iPhone, but the features it contains will generate an expectation that new phones contain similar abilities. Since the iPhone does support email, perhaps that will become a valued form of communication with young people again.
But rather than re-emphasizing the use of existing channels of communication, I have a feeling we will see arts organizations scrambling to replace email blasts with distributed videos that are perhaps tailored to deliver different appeals for the same performances to various age or interest groups. The fact that the iPhone web browser doesn't support Flash images which is an element of many webpages but does have a special YouTube video player is pretty telling about the areas Apple expects to be important in the future. Steve Jobs didn't put 3.5 inch disk drives in the iMac because he didn't think that was the direction things were going. Now, even if you do have a 3.5" drive on your computer, do you use it?
But this just goes to show how quickly technology moves. It wasn't that long ago that we started seeing research that most young people eschewed emails for texting. Now just as arts managers start to think about how they can tap into that trend, a change in the favored communications channel seems likely.