I'd Rather Watch the Fat Kid Dance

Reviewing Your Project Proposal

2010-12-14T17:49:00.000-08:00

Okay so for the past month I've been leading a Project Proposal and Pitches workshop at the Field.
It's been really great - learning about all the projects some of the Field artists are working on and discussing with them the various aspects of Bios, Project Descriptions, Artist Statements, Imaged and Video work samples. We closed out the 4 sessions digging deep into each others final 2-pagers.
The 2 pagers were the project nuggets:
1 image representing the artist/company or project
1 paragraph artist/company biography
1 paragraph project description
1 paragraph artist statement

We asked the following questions of each 2-pager. I'd recommend asking the same questions of any proposals, pitches or even the materials on your websites.

First Read: Look for Clarity, Impact and Appropriateness for Intended Audience

Clarity: did you understand the contents of the 2-pager?
Impact: did the proposal seem important/relevant generally?
Appropriateness: if there is a particular audience or application it is meant for, does it meet their guidelines or match their previous funding/commissioning history?

Second Read: Questions

List the questions you had about the content.
Was there anything that did not make sense?

Third Read: 6 questions to ask of the content

1. From their bio, did you get a sense of their history, values and vision?

2. From their project description, did you understand what the project was?

how the audience would experience it?
who was working on it?
what support it has already from funders or presenters?
did you "see" the project in your mind after reading the description?

3. From their artist statement, did you understand the artist's need to do this project?

why do they need to do it for themselves, their artistic development, their career growth?
why do they need to do it for their audience?

4. Did you understand who the reader should/could be?

what type of person was this written for? what is their level of knowledge about the arts? or scholarship? are they more academic? are they going to try to sell your project? do they have little to no comprehension of the arts, but they do like it?

5. Did the image create complementary meaning and enhance the proposal?

did it inspire interest?
did it reflect the artist's voice and the text/ideas described?
did it make you want to see more and know more about the project?

6. Was the layout clear, pleasing to look at and complementary to the artist's voice?

is the font easy to read?
is the format clear and does it reflect the artist's own aesthetics?
did the formal aspects of the document make you want to look at it?

Actors Fund is researching the housing needs of the performing arts

2010-11-09T16:16:00.000-08:00

I'm betting in addition to protecting your intellect, you might want housing.
Fill out the Actors Fund Survey.
Get more housing.
Not quite that direct a link, but its closer a link than just sitting on your butt.

The Actors Fund Housing Development Corporation Affordable Housing On-line Survey
Are you a member of the professional performing arts community looking for affordable housing?

If so, The Actors Fund Housing Development Corporation wants to hear from you.

The AFHDC is researching the housing needs of the performing arts and entertainment community in the New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia regions.

Your opinion is vital! Between now and December 6th you can participate in a 10-minute survey to help us determine the unique affordable housing needs of all entertainment professionals. Your input, and the input of your friends, is necessary to move this project forward!

www.ActorsFundHousingSurvey.org<http://www.ActorsFundHousingSurvey.org>

If you have questions, need more info or are unable to access the Internet, contact The Actors Fund Survey Team at 212.221.7300 ext 107
For more on The Actors Fund, please visit www.actorsfund.org<http://www.actorsfund.org>

Senator Serrano, The Bronx Council on the Arts, and the Legal Aid Society are Co-sponsoring a Two-Part Intellectual Property Workshop

2010-11-09T16:10:00.000-08:00

If you are looking to protect your intellect...
this might be useful..

Two-Part Intellectual Property Workshop

Senator Serrano, The Bronx Council on the Arts, and the Legal Aid Society are Co-sponsoring the following Workshop Series for Artists, Arts Organizations and Small Businesses:

Part 1: You Made It Now Protect It: Trademarks and Copyright for Artists, Nonprofit Organizations and Small Businesses
Tuesday, November 30th
6:30pm
Longwood Art Gallery at Hostos Community College
450 Grand Concourse (at 149th St.)
Bronx, NY

An expert panel of intellectual property attorneys will explain the concept of trademarks, copyrights, design patents, work for hire agreements, and discuss how to protect the ownership of a finished work. Although the examples used during the workshop will be familiar to artists and arts organizations, the concepts learned will also be useful to nonprofits and small businesses that are not arts related.

Part 2: The Website Audit: Best Legal Practices on the Internet for Artists, Nonprofits and Small Businesses
Tuesday, December 7th
6:30pm
Longwood Art Gallery at Hostos Community College
450 Grand Concourse (at 149th St.)
Bronx, NY

This workshop is for any individual who has a website or is thinking about starting one. Learn the essentials of website management, including: Protecting your trademarks and copyrights, terms or use, implementing a privacy policy, linking, and ownership of the website.

CLICK HERE for flyer!

Seating is limited to 50 people. RSVP to ellen@bronxarts.org or (718)931-9500 ext. 24. Light refreshments will be provided.

Prelude 10 - Day 1

2010-09-30T09:18:00.000-07:00

Fun day all around. I wish we had been able to take Kevin Doyle's suggestion though and take the mics with us to The Archive Bar the conversation of course really got going once we were all there.

Thanks to the Round Table participants and audience and thanks to the Performers for such fantastic showings. Lots of music last night. Still trying to process the confluence of that within the context of communication/communitas. I'm sure Grotowski had something to say about music/singing that would land us in our UR-humanity and explain why music is such an integral part of creating a sense of shared something.

The Live Writers have started up too. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001568541102 is probably the easiest place to engage or use the twitter hash tag #prelude.

Thanks also to the Chos - those with us in person and those in voice for a beautiful writing session. I can't wait to read all the plays others wrote.

Here's the Play I wrote with the Chos. If anyone else wants to share their plays please just send them to me (morgan@lostnotebook.org) or go ahead and post them in a comment on the Facebook Fan page for Prelude.

realism can only be an experimental project

>>>>--Dy++llllll

that is the real thing that I drew

that is the title of the play I am writing

la la la la la de da
"theater is a form of singing"
"energize the familiar"

get at the D - take out the lllllllls
add them through a form of miosis and then unravel the rings around them that begins reverberating through the space
into the flowers that are sitting on my bag slowly dying or quickly decaying or moving somehow along that >>>> access.

How do you stage live decaying flowers? Is it a theater in which nothing happens - watch them for days slowly or quickly depending on how you measure the time.

And then the other character sitting here asks in the deep Richard Foreman Voice - is this true?

and I respond - no no no the question is - is this real?
and someone picks up a pencil and draws another drawing.
and the entire process comes to a halt with the music and begins again.

last night I was in the Hole.
bubble lights
curtains
the floor wasn't sticky, which is surprising
there were people with "real" jobs there being introduced to other people with "real" jobs
and to artists

there was video playing
it didn't smell like stale beer
the food spread replaced the other kind of spread that is sometimes there
the fruit was ripe and delicious
there was a little man about 2 feet tall in a seer-sucker suit - he was the smartest one in the room
he was thinking about being hungry and wanting that other little girl's wooden doggy
and how beer is much yummier than the juice his dad really wanted him to have
but that perhaps he shouldn't eat the sausage that the grown-ups were eating.

it was thinking oh man why does this little girl drag me around everywhere - it hurts my joints and my little ropes and it doesn't put to use the wheels I was built with so she could drag me behind her on the street
it was thinking I like being wood with white spots and floppy ears.

wood with spots and floppy ears
and a simple life
lugged around and loved
and tugged at by others who would want to love it too
and handed to mom when something more exciting is happening that would otherwise be hindered by the lugging of it
and put abandoned on a riser because what adult would want to lug it around
to lug a piece of wood with spots and floppy ears
that is absurd
especially one so large
adults don't lug around the absurd

pink fluffy bunnies some how arise in the brain now
pink fluffy bunnies
invisible, but you still know they are pink

"theater feeds the sick desires of the people who have forgotten god"

if the bunnies aren't visible are they real?
or are they the sick desires of someone who has never remembered god?

> interruption from my little brother> who has just realized that the supermarket is "one-stop shopping for all the crazy neo-con-lit"

and I got distracted from something about Meryl Streep (sp?) and a directive to remember a movie she was in and my three least favorite playwrights - I fail on both accounts.

watching the cursor blink and blink and blink
wishing there were more pink fluffy bunnies in the world

I haven't done anything with intention in a long time
or at least I can't remember doing anything with intention in a long time
so what does that mean for the pink fluffy bunnies?
or for god
or for writing plays
or for dying flowers
or decaying plant life
or for making live theater out of decaying plant life?
or for neo-con-literature cluttering up my grocery isles?

what happens when you have writers block in a session that is teaching you how to write?

silence
okay I can write about silence - the refusal to participate in being human, in the practice of being human, of making and sharing and breaking signs - the refusal to acknowledge other people's humanity
silence
the inhuman
inhumanity

Prelude 10 teaser for Next Wednesday...

2010-09-22T06:14:00.000-07:00

Today's challenge from Martha's "Whole" Living site: "Today, be mindful of the change of season and spend some time outdoors. Reflect on the cyclic changes within yourself as well." My addendum: and in the arts sector because with the autumn leaves comes PRELUDE FESTIVAL NYC!!! every year like clockwork.

Here's a batch of facebook posts aggregated here for anyone who missed them this morning and wants a little appetizer for 7 days from today!

Thinking about next Wednesday when we will be learning from Joyce Cho HOW TO WRITE!

joyce cho is an infestation

joycecho.org

joyce cho playwrights amber reed sibyl kempson scott adkins rob erickson karinne keithley kelly copper

Or check out the latest buzz about Trajal in the New York Times in addition to the piece he is making for the Kitchen, he is Danspace's PLATFORM 2010 Guest Curator!

Choreographer’s Style: Mia Michael, Lili Chopra and Trajal Harrell

www.nytimes.com

What are we talking about when we talk about dance these days? Artists may say that labels don’t matter, but they do.

the TEAM's MISSION DRIFT "Burning Down Las Vegas" composed by Heather Christian

www.youtube.com

‎"Burning Down Las Vegas" from TEAM's new work MISSION DRIFT as performed at the... TEAM's benefit at Joe's Pub, April 2010. Music composed by Heather Christian, with lyrics by Heather Christian and the TEAM. A work-in-progress of MISSION DRIFT will be presented at the Ohio Theatre's Ice Factory Augu...See More

And Hoi Polloi with S. Oswald!

What do the men see

www.youtube.com

A song from ZOETROPE -- a song cycle of an invented town, with music by Alec Duffy, text by Sally Oswald and design by Mimi Lien, premiering in 2011.

Prelude 10 is here....(in web version at least - in person version coming Sept 29th!)

2010-09-05T10:17:00.000-07:00

Go check it out!
PRELUDE 10 IS LIVE!

My Curatorial Statement starts like this...

Techniques for Live Stimulation...

Back in the days of VHS, when video first began to find its way cheaply and easily into the black boxes of theater, scholars killed many trees debating the merits of and limits to what constituted “live” art. The question here, “Why does live matter?”, is not why does analog performance matter?, or why should audiences leave their TVs at home and come sit in the dark of a theater? Everything we do as human beings is inherently live; whether or not the experience is mediated by technology is irrelevant because all experience is mediated by some technology - biological, synthetic or otherwise. Instead, for us, what is at stake in “live” is a matter of perspective. Are you engaging in the experience from a position of commodified estrangement or from a position of unfettered conscious inquiry and social collaboration?

In this particular context Prelude 10’s question ‘Why does live matter?” becomes: “Why does performance that asks us to be inquisitive and socially engaged human beings matter?”

Keep reading on the Prelude site

Contemporary Performance

2010-09-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

If you don't know about it already:
go here

http://contemporaryperformance.org/

they are doing god's work

Prelude 10 coming soon....

2010-09-01T18:25:00.000-07:00

So - it awakens the beast.
finally
after more than a year dormant.
Prelude 10 is coming
and she's pissed
no not really, she's just hungry.
and she wants you all out there to come, see some phenomenal artists do their thing, make new things with some amazing artists leading activity sessions, listen to some opinionated artists argue out the most important things in life, and post about it all online to make everyone who can't be there jealous that they aren't there.
soon we'll reveal it all.
soon

Prelude 10: FESTIVAL CURATORIAL STATEMENT

2010-09-01T05:02:00.000-07:00

Techniques for Live Stimulation...

In this particular context Prelude 10’s question ‘Why does live matter?” becomes: “Why does performance that asks us to be inquisitive and socially engaged human beings matter?”

And perhaps more specifically, what techniques are the artists showcased in Prelude 10 using to stimulate us back to “live”, to help us experience the present nowness of the non-collectible ephemeral, to bring us into this community in its full diversity, to set our beliefs off kilter, to provoke us to change our world, to create fissures in our grasp on reality, and to give us the tools to - as the “Godfather” of the avant-garde Richard Foreman once phrased it - Wake up?

The first day, Communication: where exchange becomes communitas, starts from the magical ability performance has to break us out of our isolation, to teach us to interrogate shared language and beliefs, and to bring us together, if only temporarily, into a communal spirit. Interrogating the various aspects of performance as communication - i.e. exchange, communitas, community etc, seemed like a logical place to begin this year’s festival. We’ve invited the Prelude Live Writers to create a virtual space for curated and audience response. Joyce Cho are going teach us how to write in ways we’ve never considered before. Robert Quillen Camp, Hoi Polloi, Trajal Harrall and the TEAM are going to share excerpts from their latest projects. “Community theater” might not be a term used to describe any of these artists, however their work often does trigger throughts about how we relate to each other as humans, how we speak to each other, how we treat each other, and how we process events in our collective experience, and therefore also the entire cloud of issues at stake in our broader notion here of Communication.

Prelude 10’s second day, Provocation: attempts to activate overstimulated city dwellers, focuses our attention to the potential in live art for creating work that generates immediate or post facto participatory movement in its witnesses. Someone once said somewhere “the role of performance is to reflect back the world to us so that we can better understand our place in it.” However, in our post-avant-garde world, live performance has proven it is truly powerful when makes us want to change our place in it. There is a long history of activism in performance, but it seems that much contemporary work achieves its provocation, not by being overtly political in its message, but rather by subtly transgressing lines we hold collectively sacrosanct. These transgressions reveal not just overt Red state vs Blue state divisions in our society, but more often metaphysical, ontological, or visceral habits we don’t even realize are part of our everyday. The artists joining us on day 2 - the Field and their ERPA artists, HERE, Aaron Landsman, Julie Atlas Muz, Jim Findlay, Penny Arcade, and Ishmael Houston-Jones - demonstrate the diversity of provocation techniques at play in contemporary performance. Their works provoke some kind of shift in our sensibilities and encourage us in directions that are perhaps are a little more sustainable and a little more humane.

Our third day, Simulation: living the simulacra, opens up the shifting definition of “human” to explore performance in the context of the proliferation of digital prosthetics. From midi to video to social media, live has become something we put through digital processing machines as we live it. Human fully embedded in the machinery of language, machinery of reproduction, machinery of war, and increasingly machinery of life. The performances and activity sessions curated for this 3rd day are made by artists who have a knack for breaking machines, rules and our expectations in order to achieve something most of us can’t even begin to imagine. Joe Silovsky, Kimon Keramidas, Reid Farrington, Andrew Schneider, Reggie Watts and DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, like magicians and their backstage engineers - these artists use technology of all kinds to bend the boundaries between simulation and reality, to create worlds for us that trigger visceral fissures in our perceptive appartuses and teach us new ways of seeing, hearing, and engaging each other and our world.

Three days of live performance,
three techniques for live stimulation,
three different calls to Wake Up.
Enjoy the ride.

Morgan von Prelle Pecelli

Festival Co-Curator
@lostnotebook

TCG Fall Forum - fun

2009-11-10T19:08:00.000-08:00

Here are my notes from this year's TCG Fall Forum. They are a little rough and the handouts might help fill in some of the blanks. You can download the handouts here.

Note: We were asked not to share any of Rocco Landesman's commentary so I have not included the notes I took from that part of the conference - though to be honest you aren't missing anything. He seems to be kept on a rather tight leash these days, which from a political standpoint I can understand given everything that is happening in DC right now, Healthcare and Afghanistan "need" to be dominating the news cycle, not another NEA 4. But from a constitutional standpoint I find it rather problematic given the first amendment and all.

Here's a little outline so you can scroll past things you are maybe not so interested in
Pre-Conference: Strategic Financial Planning with NFF
Day 1: Unlearning 101 with Jack Uldrich & a breakout session (good skimming)
Day 1: Value, communicating value and some stats on non-profits in general with Independent Sector
Day 2: Board management with Board Source

PreConference: definitely look at the slides in the PDF handouts these notes are more like footnotes to those slides.

TCG Pre-Conference 11/6/09
Strategic Financial Planning
Assessing and Addressing Risk
Non-Profit Finance Fund

twitter search: #fallforum

triangle = ecosystem of a non-profit
1 top = mission & program
2 bottom left = capacity - staff, space, and processes
3 bottom right = capital - resources and assets
the three pull each other and shift depending on what is happening
best is to anticipate changes and try to keep the triangle balanced

NFF - does financial consulting

agenda:
lessons from history & experiences from the field
assessing risk - capital structure, exposure and tolerance
addressing risk - defining what's core, etc…

slides page 4
2008-09 recession is steeper and deeper than the other 4 that have happened in the last 30 years. According to the industrial production Index.
Recovery lag on deficits that happen during recessions can be as long as 3 years, and still does not necessarily return to pre-recession levels.
Funders anticipate that their giving levels in 2010 and 2011 will be taking the bigger hit, than 08 & 09.

slides page 6
often told to "do more with less"
funding cuts - but then anticipate increases in demand, how to serve an increase in demand, when we have less financial support to meet the costs of serving more.

slides page 7
Changes we've been making because of the last 18 months.
- look at how we lay out the season, order the programming so that build times and other things are organized to impact the budgets less (less overtime etc).
- set up three board committees - earned income, contributed income, expenses - looking at every aspect of the theater, but really predominantly reduce expenses, staff reduction, hiring freeze, did not make cuts to programming.
- look at what you charge for ticket prices - raising and lowering them

most organizations are looking at two possible scenarios
revenue staying flat
revenue being cut
a couple are looking at revenue growing

response depends on two factors:
assets and what you do
tolerance for risk

being able to access risk is about having data:
page 8 slide 2
need to have data and manage it
are you using the financial data to assess your position and make decisions?

net assets are the equity of our sector => surpluses on the income statement build net assets, deficits deplete them.
(note in nonprofit world some net assets are restricted, some are unrestricted…)

Board designated reserves: cash reserves or other....

Temporarily Restricted Assets: when they are released will they be used for CORE programs? or are the restricted assets for something you wouldn't normally do? a program you might be cutting etc?

ideal is to have at least 6 months of liquidity.
3 ways of calculating liquidity
months of cash
or
working capital
OR
**months of liquid net assets
they will likely show different results, but the third is the one NNF likes to use because it takes into account restricted $ and assets that cannot easily be converted to cash.

- even if your contributed income has been increasing:
discount your ability to rely on fundraising going forward; don't rely on what you were able to achieve in the last two years either for individual or institutional giving.

- plan your ability to respond to risk
- focus on what you do well
-
What are the non-negotiables in your budget?
- what must you do?
vs.
- what should you do?
- what do you want to do?

if you have the option to postpone capital projects, do.

- recommend using cash flow projects with Board on a monthly basis def with finance committee, but also with entire board if institution is in difficult position.

- don't just give them numbers, give them narrative as well, verbal descriptions about what has happened/ what is going on - what came in what didn't come in and why.. etc…

**Program Economics Analysis
are there savings & efficiencies we could be creating?
what should our fundraising priorities be? what are the hardest programs to fund?
if you can identify subsidy for a deficit program and it is mission critical, then there is no reason not to run it; if there is no subsidy, then you need to reconsider it.

for grant proposals include "indirect" program costs, but for the program economics don't, measure only the direct costs to those particular projects. (AD is indirect, for example)

on the income side only include income that would go away if that program goes away.

- education programs take huge amounts of space and human time… how do you account for those in program profitability, when they might look balanced on cash…

Special Event - fundraisers vs. friendraisers
what are they, are they both, are they one or the other?

leave out inkind, though it is good to understand inkind costs

what are the impacts programatically on staff time and space time - add rows that speak to intangible costs.
weeks in space
% of time devoted to each program

marketing - make it a column itself
put it as a column or as a row depending on how you want to look at it…

add a column with proposed additions/subtractions if one expects major changes in future…

avoid over diversification in fundraising.
orgs that have two core revenue streams are more successful than ones that have more streams.
for example, it is important to do an analysis as you are applying for grants to know whether it will really be worth it in the end. ditto in all fundraising activities.

sharing costs, sharing office, offering second stage to smaller groups as "residents", offering scene shop to other theaters, joint marketing efforts, etc.

Day 1 of the Conference

Jack Uldrich - Unlearning 101 - no slides for this one
Stay open to the 800 pound guerilla walking through the middle of the basketball game, even if you are tasked with counting the number of passes happening in the basketball game.
- think about who you could be partnering with - get outside the normal partners, reach out to other corps, tech groups etc
- reconsider your assumptions about - audiences, partners, competitors, business models, traditions, and employees
- visualize the future: social media, augmented reality, virtual reality, nanomaterials, robotics
- challenge your assumptions, question the things you think you know
- what would you "never" do and then think about the implications of doing what you would "never" do
- interrogate traditions
- see things in fundamentally different ways - flip all the problems on their head, instead of asking "how can we make this faster", ask "how do we make the slowness valuable".
- who are your non-customers, how can you get them to come to a show
- constantly ask new questions
- challenge your intuition
- sometimes there isn't a right answer, things are ambiguous or there are in fact two right answers…
- small changes can lead to radically different outcomes
- don't miss the obvious that is right in front of you
- beer & diapers - sometimes two disparate things might seem counter intuitive at the face of it, but are perfect partners
- speak with non-customers, corporate partners, training programs, stage craft, problem solvers, and community leaders
- Dan Pink - book: "a whole new mind"
- be wary of experts

Breakout session 1
5 questions from Uldirch
1. How can you appeal to non-customers?
2. Where might the experts be wrong?
3. What trends (technological, demographic, social, political) might you be missing?
4. What basic assumptions may no longer be relevant or should at least be challenged?
5. Turn a big problem on its head.

answers from the group
- attract people who are affiliated with other groups to a event at which there might be a point of commonality
- develop material for the stage that has its own constituency
- provide non-customers with a forum for them to do what they want to do (rent to non theater people)
- identify who our customers are, develop the constituencies that they have beyond the theater
- unsettling audience expectations, and letting them know they are in for something different/new
- listen to the reasons why our audiences are coming into our building, it may have little to do with the actual art, and more to do with their loyalty to the venue or with a commitment to something else - ask them what value do you actually hold to audiences? (1. they wanted to be moved emotionally, transformative experience, 2. because of social obligations/opportunities)
- turn your audience members into participants
- create a happy hour before the show, open the lobby w/ a bar at 630, friends can come whether they are seeing the show or not, and then they can see the show at 8 or they can take off.
- rethink programming schedule - not just 8PM…. when we produce whatever we produce
- what are the reasons people don't come: what are the obstacles - what are the things we hold sacred, what are things they hold sacred - can you change things you hold sacred when they are obstacles to them? Can you be flexible on things?
- what does it mean to "interact"? create social time before and after, theater is supposed to be a social event - just sitting in the dark together is not social, and not interactive.
- create a "sky box" where people can watch the show either from a TV or from behind glass and can be together, talk throughout do whatever they want to in that area.
- fuck the play. we think it is really important to talk about the play, the audience isn't there half the time to see the play
- create events around the shows, that are social and have nothing to do with theater.
- building long-term relationships with these new audiences, philosophical pursuit rather than a marketing pursuit
- long-term audience projections aren't just about youth audiences, but are also about what are the people in your audiences right now going to want and be thinking about 10 - 15 years from now
- pace at which we do things, do things slowly do it retail - not wholesale - if you have an idea don't give up if it isn't perfect the first time, do it right, do it slowly, do it block-by-block and make it stick
- don't ignore the seniors / the boomer generation
- is professionalism and quality really important to the audience? or is there something else more valuable?
- create events around first rehearsal, around first reading, around first design conversations - give those firsts and audience
- teach audiences that "theater can be entertaining"
- where do we have the dialog about how the artform is changing?
- change the website to be 50% broadcast/sales and 50% audience reactions to shows (particularly in the theater, where everyone thinks they are an expert and can criticize and want to criticize it)
- make the space accessible, help them get comfortable with the facility/institution - even before they get to know the art… where do you park? where do you eat? where are the bathrooms? etc etc…
- demographics studies, take samples of the audience, don't assume you know who your audience is
- how do we afford to make the changes, to be taking up the new social media trends, or new trends in general?
- is the business model rational/do-able going into the future?
- variable, dynamic & demand pricing
- don't forget the boomers - esp if you have been around for many years - you were the theater of their youth, how can you keep them/recapture them without making it a "retrospective", but a recapture of the experience that brought them in the first place.
- biggest problems = staff burn out, understaffing - how do you create an exilherated staff? are there over-staffed areas?
- act less like a business; encourage research, experimentation and play
- get people who are on the fringe on your Board - build diversity there, radical exclusion - "the periphary is the new center"

Uldrich follow-up
Failure - leads to success - Are you creating a culture where it is safe to have failures?
Play into the Active Life Style

There was a panel discussion - I have to admit I was completely out to lunch for it. Spent my time reading tweets and looking at email.

Breakout Session 2
Value
Bill Wright: Independent Sector
- (also see the couple of slides that went with this)

as governments seek out new revenue sources, they are turning to the 501c3s to see if there are ways of getting money out of them.
- taxing ticket sales?
- denying tax-exempt status for reasons incl: because you are not giving your services away for free
- asking whether or not you are serving the "poor" or the wealthy elite
- arts groups are not "real" charities, nonprofits should "help the needy" or fill gaps in government services
-

How do we communicate the value of the non-profit sector?
- find an adaptable message framework
- goal: ensure that key decision makers support the nonprofit community in its work to improve peoples lives and benefit communities across the country and around the world
target audience: a narrow one of policy makers, media and other influentials
approach: research based message frame work that could be adapted for diverse causes and be applicable in diverse situations to help intensify support for the nonprofit community
see Value Traits for non profits handout.
most important traits to "audience" are: commitment, caring, accountability, effectiveness, efficiency, selflessness, and results-orientation - these are the traits you want to play up in communications with stakeholders.

Q? some of these are measurable, some are harder to measure - how do you deal with that?
no answer for that.
I'd say look at David Throsby's book. Economics & Culture.
but the real question I think is: HOW CAN WE AFFORD TO DO ALL THE DATA COLLECTION WE NEED TO DO?????? especially when there are so few operating grants.
I asked a similar question of Uldrich too on Twitter and he recommended I speak to Geoff Jue who knows something about something happening at IBM around this... I am going to be tracking him down.

keys to effective communications
illustrate the key values: unselfish, efficient, effective, results oriented, accountable
tone: elevated, high-minded language fails with all audiences, mix facts with emotional statements be specific and speak in plain english - talk realistically about what you do
importance of all three sector: do not denigrate government or business in your messaging - gov & business are trying to help people too.
offer collaboration and solutions, not just complaints
move from inputs to outcomes: stories can demonstrate results, talk about the people who come into contact with you and how they benefit from what you do,

"People who attend the performing arts vote more, volunteer more, and exercise more" - Dana Gioya (sp?)

TCG Conference Day 2
Board Source
good slides for this one.. in the handout packet I linked to up above.

What is the tone of the Board Room?
- More relaxed and positive because we made cuts and have more modest ambitions for this year.
- Boards need to be major fundraisers for the organization, increasing the organization's profile, acting as ambassadors,

Board's primary responsibilities
- Board should be evaluating leadership each year at the least.
- What is the job description of the exec position - the exec has opportunity to express how they felt they met those items, and the board members have the opportunity to express whether they felt the exec met those conditions, they collect the responses put it together and then discuss it all.
- important to determine at the beginning of the year what are the expectations for that person in the coming year.
- full board should be engaged in the process and part of the annual cycle
-

Be a Mission Guardian
1. recommit to the organization's mission
2. ensure all important and difficult decisions flow from the mission
3. celebrate
- put mission statement on all Board agendas so it is always present when making decisions.
- organizations that keep their mission narrow and focused are better able to show their value in their community - do not expand the mission or activities
- have audience member, funder, artist attend a board meeting and talk about why the organization is important to them, reminds the board why they joined
- what do you do to celebrate successes?

Work more closely with your Managing and Artistic Directors
- enahance the constructive partnership with the chief execs
- recognize that the effectiveness of the board and chief exec are interdependent
- create a climate of openness and transparency
- work with the chief exec to keep staff appraised of developments
- Chair and Chief Exec should speak once per week
- have "executive session" at each board meeting: a practice of the board where the board meets in closed session, not part of the minutes with only the chief execs (can also have a second one without them)
- are the board meetings dialogs or are they just staff broadcasting to board
- ask execs what is keeping you awake at night?
Q: what three things can you and your fellow board members do now to support the chief execs during these challenging times?
- go with producing artistic director to one-on-one meetings with each board member
- board members should read the written reports
- do a "consent agenda" that board members need to read and sign off on before the meeting
- always start the meeting with the AD's report
- once per week a Board newsletter (use constant contact to do that, and use the tracking information to see who is reading the newsletter and the materials and what articles they are reading.)
- ask the Board what type of information do you WANT to be receiving?
- try to have Board meetings on the stages

Get a realistic picture of your organization
- assess cash availability if your revenue is tied to makrt fluctuations
- make sure that your cahs, investments or reserves are parked some place safe and are getting the best possible return
- check to see if you have a diversified funding stream, and if not, develop a plan to reasonable diversity
- send monthly financial statements to board members
- be clear about what is bringing in revenue
- talk to your financial advisors regularly
- It is not so much about numbers of board members, as it is about having committed and engaged board members

Think Strategically
- does a strategic plan already exist?
- position organization as useful in times of crisis
- frame questions to have broad more fruitful discussion
- ask: How do we best serve our mission despite changes in the economy?
- consider: How do you want to come out of this crisis?
- What will be the new NORM when you come out of this crisis?
- do both near term prioritization vs. long-term/comprehensive planning
- if you are in a dire crisis now, this is not the best time to do strategic planning - instead do a one-year tactical plan to get yourselves out of the crisis.
- do less with less, chose core priorities and move forward on those

- look at compensation of execs and other staff members
guidelines encouraging a 10% gap between highest and lowest paid

Create a contingency plan
- a contingency plan is a plan devised for a specific situation when things could go wrong- consider what would your organization do if you had to cut your budget by ten to twenty percent
specify your trip wires
- use a dash-board for board meetings - graphs and charts that are one-page that articulate this is how close we are, how far off we are, signal light identifying good things, vs. crisis things
- including best case scenario and worst case scenario

Step up your fundraising
- make a donation
- minimum give is perhaps less a priority than being one of the Board members largest 3 gifts each year and 100 percent board participation.
- being proactive in this climate may yield surprising results
- call on key funders to discuss your situation and reaffirm their commitment to your org's mission
- go beyond your usual suspects by considering nontraditional funding sources
- don't forget former donors
- consider increasing your own donation to the organization
- have artists call donors to thank them for their donation
- don't forget getting former board members engaged
- being on the Board is not just a status thing, it is a commitment to the organization to help, to fundraise, to volunteer, to engage and support the staff

Be Ambassadors
- serve as the voice of the mission
- speak on behalf of the organization when appropriate
- be sure to speak with one voice and with common messages
- the Board members can sometimes make stronger more effective pitches for the organization than the staff can.

Anticipate Tomorrow
- what are the stakeholder's needs for tomorrow
- shifts in funding streams
- strategy
- what does the board look like down the road

The most frustratingly short-sighted question we face right now: Is the arts essential?

2009-07-11T04:42:00.000-07:00

Okay a couple of things that are linked and I'd love feedback/discussion about....

1. Quoting: Ben Donenberg in the LA Times

I recently sent an article to a local philanthropic leader about the importance of helping arts organizations during the recession. I thought he might draw inspiration from it, but that was too optimistic.

“I don’t need inspiration,” he quickly responded. “We aren’t supporting the arts; we’re supporting essentials.”

I know times are tough and charities have a lot of demands. But I would argue that the arts are essential — and they are under threat.
read the rest of article & take the poll

These questions have been on my mind for a while now, but the article gives me an excuse to posit them again:
1. Why is the arts "essential"?

2. How do we get the arts disentangled from HHS, Environment, and other Social Justice goods, so that we don't have to compete against them for the same funding/grantors?

2. Quoting the poll in that LA Times article:

How important is saving the arts?

Very important to creating well-rounded adults.

Somewhat important, but not as important as math and science.

Not important, we should be focusing on math and technology before our students fall further behind.

This poll was as shocking to me as the response from the philanthropic leader in the article.
First of all - why is the arts being pitted against math & science? They are all three absolutely vital to education and society.

As someone who came to the arts through a rigorous early education in math and science, it consistently amazes me that others have not understood how intertwined the three really are. The basic creativity and problem solving skills required for all three disciplines are the same. The way they operate in our brain, according to neuroscientists, is the same. The progressive improvements to society that all three engender is equally the same.

If we want to have smarter math students, smarter scientists and smarter artists, they must all be learning and working together in conjunction and be supported equally in our society.

A repsonse to Culturebot re TCG Conference

2009-06-07T06:29:00.000-07:00

Recently I saw a posting on Culturebot that was a response to the twitterfeed I had running (@lostnotebook) during the conference. At first based on the title (Gauntlet Thrown) I thought it was going to be a response to my posting about the amazing work that Olga Garay is doing at the LOS ANGELES Department of Cultural Affairs.
To quote myself: "yes people you read that right - she has managed to raise 600K give or take for international artist exchange activities for LA artists - COMMISSIONER LEVIN & HONORABLE MAYOR BLOOMBERG, THE GAUNTLET HAS BEEN THROWN> What are you doing to match or compete with LA"
But this was not the case.

Instead, culturebot had written a critique of the field represented by those at the TCG conference and what he was reading in the twitter feeds...

Just sharing with the rest of you the thoughts I expressed in that response.

Dear Culturebot,

Okay so I just have to make a little response here, as it was my twitter feed that led to this culturebot blog posting.

First, while I don’t disagree with much of what you are saying in the below, I do however want to pause for a moment and in fact explain why I was THRILLED to be there, and am very very grateful to TCG for the scholarship they gave me to go (full disclosure).

The most fascinating thing I learned was a kind of paradox:

On the one hand:
It seemed to me like the main programming that TCG put together – the Sudanese group, the conversation between Anne Bogart & Bill T Jones, the future trends talk by a Board Member of BAM, the huge discussion about working with and through international context, the emphasis on including Millenials/Gen-Yers, hell JOHN WATERS as opening speaker, or – was very familiar to me, to where I come from in our little world of Contemporary Performance and Aesthetic risk taking, (so familiar in fact as I was listening to Mei Yin from Under the Radar talking about what she would do if she ran the Theater Project in Baltimore I became a little paranoid that she had been secretly having me wire-tapped!)

On the other hand:
Sitting in my Budget Affinity discussion groups (Group 3 : $1-2.9 Million) I felt like those of us from New York were speaking a completely foreign language and that became most apparent to me when Kristin Marting from HERE asked how other groups were finding ways of financially sustaining their development of “New Works”. She defined it along the lines of how we all understand it – process-based work that has the full team with sets, lights, materials, media etc in the room for what some might consider extensive periods of time. As people were answering her though, they all kept talking about playwrights. Playwrights. Playwrights.
Playwright writes.
They do a table reading.
Playwright does rewrites.
They stage the piece of literature the playwright wrote in a couple of weeks.
They open it.
In other words, it seemed to me that “new work”, heck, even “theater” for what seemed like 99% of the conference is still staging a literary artifact – something that so far as I see the world we as an aesthetic field moved beyond back in the 1910s. And this seemed to be the case when discussions about the artistic programming and development came up in all the other lunches, break out groups and discussion sessions.

I’m not sure what to make of it, but what I am left wishing TCG had had was a Plenary discussion about precisely this issue.
Why aren’t the Regional Theaters and other spaces out there making room in their programming and development work for Contemporary Performance?
- What are the barriers?
- What are the strategies to overcome the barriers?
- How can we have Contemporary Performance in EVERY venue in 3 years? (At least for a couple of weeks of programming, or a festival, or something.)

Second, the wonderful thing about Twitter as my TIME magazine is telling me this week is that the 140 character limit requires us to be concise. However, that very character limit also limits in many ways the possibilities for deep discourse (hence perhaps the fact that we all also have blogs). I was only able to be in one place at one time and as I decided to set aside my Artistic, Curatorial, and Dramaturgical interests within this broad National context which does not as I said above seem to share much in common with us folks in NY, I focused on my Development and Strategic Planning sides and chose to attend those Break Out Sessions. I say this to preface the following: I have been posting all the notes I took at the conference on line at my blog http://idratherwatchthefatkiddance.blogspot.com/. Those notes are Development/Admin heavy because those were the sessions I went to. There were many discussions about Theater in Conflict Zones, about Art in the 21st Century, about Programming and Artist Development models I could not attend. And from what I heard from folks who did, there are many folks out there in the National context who are beginning to catch on, and think about the content they produce and the ways they produce it.

What I left the conference with was a sense that all of these people care deeply and passionately about what they are doing in their various communities, in their various ways, and with their various flaws. I also left with a sense that these people want desperately to be better, better at making “theater”, better at supporting artists, better at sharing with their communities. Do they get it wrong much of the time, sure, (lets be honest though, so do we) but I wonder if an outreach campaign ala Howard Dean and the Democrats of going into their houses and politely talking to them and helping them along into the 21st century, might not be the best strategy to winning their hearts and minds over to Contemporary Performance and Best Practices in the Arts.

Mostly they are scared. They are scared of being forced to create new financial models, they are scared of this new Social Media thing, they are scared of new art forms, they are scared of risk and of failure. And that fear does not stem from stupidity or irrationality or arrogance. It stems from not understanding, feeling overwhelmed, and perhaps a healthy suspicion of the flashy latest trendy new thing. We have to help them develop a vocabulary for talking about all of these things, we have to help them develop ways of evaluating the quality of this work, and we have to help them and our selves figure out how to get audiences who share these same fears on board as well. And we have to let them help us understand where they are coming from, what their successes have been, and what their strengths are. I think there are many things we can in fact learn from them.

All this said over the next couple of days I will be posting to FatKidDancing a kind of over-view TCG Conference Just the Highlights as well as some suggestions to all of us about how to move forward. TCG will also be posting their own overview and notes I believe. Sadly they did not record and podcast the sessions – they said this was to protect the innocent and ensure open, honest dialog, without fear of it being public. TCG hasn’t quite gotten the fact that with twitter and blogs, everything is public now, but I applaud the effort to make us feel safe to discuss our dirty laundry as well as our secret new ideas.

TCG Conference Day 3 - RAW NOTES

2009-06-06T05:55:00.000-07:00

Last Day! Phew... also the eariliest...
hence the brevity on these Budget Affinity notes from 8AM!

Budget Affinity Group:
Board Members: engage them earlier in the process...
they come to early rehearsals
send them dramaturgical information about the show
let them meet the artists earlier in the season / before the season starts
make sure they come to the shows with receptions, before & after the shows
senior leadership needs to spend a whole lot more time in the lobbies etc, not just opening nights, but to give everyone more accessibility...

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Philanthropy in the New Landscape

Moderated by James Bundy, Artistic Director, Yale Repertory Theatre Panelist(s)
Vicki Reiss, Executive Director, The Shubert Foundation
Angel Ysaguirre, Director of Global Community Investing, The Boeing Company
Ben Cameron, Program Director for the Arts, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
Sharon Blake, Performing Arts Program Director, Maryland State Council on Arts

Reiss/Shubert:
How evaluation systems are changing: size, context, caliber, way in which they are serving the community, salary levels, % of funds that go into product, risk relative to resource,

- concern: the trimming down of risks taken on new work
- get a 'traveling dramaturg' someone who goes out and sees work, if the Programming directors don't have the time/resources to go out and see things...
- don't worry so much about premiers, there are ways to nurture and support new works that might otherwise be forgotten
- life-cycle, some companies should 'die', some should radically evolve...
- Shubert is violently opposed to the hand-pick investment process, open door instead, despite the fact that they only fund a small portfolio, to some extent there is just too much out there for the foundations to take on the burden of responsibly curating their giving actively
- development director salary is average 3rd behind ED & AD.
- they spend time councling POTENTIAL applicants, call them

Cameron/Duke:
things of value:
supporting artist to create & distribute new work is the most important thing
organization change: (EMC Arts for example, among others) helping groups to think innovatively about their business practices, restructuring and solving issues
powerful national system:

- if we don't have new money, allow groups to repurpose endowment
- extra cash - upping the GEN Op grants
- depth of investment more important than breadth of portfolio
- they go in five year rhythms, 2011 they will have another national conversation
- have we reaped what we sowed? we've been discussing "sustainability" rather than "vibrant" - make priority amply funded cultural vitality, instead of stability...
- risk & sustainibility have been at odds, but in fact we are in a time to take risk, radical times require radical opportunities
- Duke = equitable access to money - peer review panels vs. Mellon who pre-determines who they want to invest in and then discuss with the group what they need
- what kinds of discussions could happen about grant-maker colusion, and failure to know about who they are investing in
- evaluating gen ops 'crisis' grants, to see if it is a long-term benefit and if their general grant model should shift
- power of the press - the rest of the world has already moved on, read HERE COMES EVERBODY, Shirky - it is time for us to move on from caring about the "press" and the value of "reviews"
- where are we in the landscape and how can we diversify and enrich that landscape
- is 'creativity' something we should 'not' talk about, creativity is everywhere, - enable discipline, instead of expressiveness - in this age of 'expressiveness' when everyone has a blog and can publicly speak all the time, should we be talking about and practicing listening? in the age of 'creativity' should we be talking about follow-through and actually completing a project. Anyone can come up with a creative idea, its the people who can actually come up with the idea AND make it happen well who are rare and absolutely necessary - q. becomes them how do we teach that, how do we do this, how do we demonstrate to the rest of the world who are obsessed with creativity, that second step, that follow-through and execution value.

Ysaguirre/Boeing:
Marketing is not as big of a consideration as community outcomes (who do they sell their products too is part of that factor)
impact of econ crisis likely means future cuts in funding and or public sponsorship/branding
grants are decreasing in $ size rather than number of groups funded
WHO ARE OUR MOST IMPORTANT PARTNERS?
- cut the fat, and increase the grant sizes to those who remain, and make those increases for gen ops.
- proposals that rise to the top: MISSION, mission becomes important, and how you communicate that mission, esp to corporate officers who are often not from the arts field - you have to educate them, esp articulating the mission
- really well run organizations are also higher priority, infrastructure problems are no longer as forgivable, these are investments, you want to invest in an org that is well run, fiscally or otherwise. (operating with a surplus, or a deficit for the first time is one indicator of this)
- there is nothing more motivating than an exciting idea
- most non profits don't know why funders fund them, when we talk about building relationships it has to be more than a thank you letter - ask why they made the grant, understand their mission, what they are trying to achieve through their grant making, ask why am I different from other theater companies?, HOW DO YOU HELP A CORP FULFILL THEIR MISSION?
- they have a really good excuse to say no and cut you off, need to have a good idea, a good business practice...
- new ideas that seem to be getting most funded - SHARED BACK OFFICE proposals
- proposals that build on ideas the Corp has been talking about themselves
- aesthetic risk and fiscal responsibility are NOT mutually exclusive,
- risk tolerance - varies from institution to institution - self define risk for your mission & your context
- Bowing has both handpick investment and open applications models it depends on where they are geographically
- no one really thinks a whole lot unless you force them to, so encourage the funders to have a conversation about the grant-making process, and the burden it is placing on arts organizations - have this conversation @ Fall Forum
- "exhibiting proficiency"
- Bowing funds theater companies to increase participation in theater, look for partners who can help us do this, don't twist it to fit, don't make something up to fit, don't apply if you don't fit
- serious issue with corporations shifting towards HHS and away from the arts.
- big binders are crap: don't send 80 pages of printed materials, they don't have the office space, they don't have the time to read it, once they have invested, talk to them, talk to them
- we have to invest in arts leaders who can make the argument that Arts is not in competition against HHS & Environment, and that it too deserves funding, and find ways of configuring the Art not in opposition to HHS & Environment

Blake/Maryland State Arts Council:
SAs are getting cut
- really look at your mission, how does it serve you goals, activities, art, business and funding strategies
- MSA wants to support Gen Ops

Audience:
Q: why is the burden on the arts institutions to FIND the funders, and not the other way around? perhaps a more efficient model is for the arts institutions to make art, and the funders to seek out the groups they want to fund.
Q: one big issue is project vs. operating funding, project grants give us permission to 'spin' or 'create projects for the grant that have nothing to do with our mission'

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Plenary Session: "The Road Ahead," Andrew Zolli

Why is it so hard to imagine the future? to think about the long-term future?
Forcasts are often based on faulty models and systems and tools -
Fast moving trends get attention, but in fact slow moving trends have all the power.
Risk & Investment:
we seem to respond to threats that have a sense of immediacy despite their lower probability to actually affect us
vs. ignoring threats that operate slowly and don't have a sense of immediacty, despite their higher probability to affect all of us
- evolved to deal with crises that are personified, break a moral taboo, fit within a narrative of human relations, and happen suddenly
- not slow moving, abstract issues...
we tend as organizations to focus on fast acting threats, on people within or in competition with our org, but in fact its the slow moving issues that cascade into a phase shift, we need to pay attention to the whole system condition

Goal =
Resilience: the ability engineer your organization to maintain its core function under the widest variety of operating conditions

operate as if the next step you make is like "ballroom dancing in a mine field"
long-term agenda has to be about the creation of new forms of value in anticipation of demand that has yet to arrive, so that we receive those waves strategically (MP: Strategically Plan")

Innovative leadership best practices
- make the top accountable
- constantly place lots of small bets
- invest in employees close to teh customer
- leverage inovations outside the company
- copy existing "best practices" - but sparingly
- embrace a "cognitive portfolio" approach - i.e. different types of thinkers all conveining on the same set of issues
- systematically scan for 'weak signals' - trends that are quieter, happening slowly
- create highly differentiated partnerships

2 Trends to Watch
Demographics Transformation
- on the road to 9+ Billion
- urban is trending up rural is flattening, (NY is trending down, Lagos up though so its an interesting shift in where the pop growth is happening
- new population structures emerging (age-wize): its not a 'normal' curve with biggest population size at birth and gradual shift down to 80+: some regions have huge bell-bottom curves with most of the population under 30, some regions are flat top to bottom or even reverse, with more elderly than middle-aged and young people >>> US is tiny at very top, fat in the Boomer, and then slightly slimmer in the younger gens... : implies for us, the END of retirement. first we have all this latent human capital post 65, second we are headed towards an hourglass with biggest at 'retirement' and biggest in 'school' age section. of population.
- work, family, immigration paradoxes
work:
boomers - some will retire, some will stay working
Xers - some will be catapulted earlier than normal, some will stuck where they are because boomers don't retire
millenials -
- retirees are moving back in with their children in growing numbers (financial reasons)
- when you change the family you change consumption, you chance cultural memory, you change all kinds of things...
- wealth is still owned by the top end generations
- generation affinity skips generations - boomer & millenials, boomers give the millenials their wealth, and Xers are cut out...

immigration
- weather: people are moving to warm, sunny places at huge rates.
- language: we are way behind the the demographic changes in ethnicity - white caucasian in US will be the largest minority, but there will be no dominant majority.
- education: women, because of education, are blowing men out of the water, (and this is why women in major urban centers are having a hard time finding complimentary men)
-

psychology of generations
optimism, diversity, trust, participation, socialization
Boomers: highest on socialization, lowest on trust, then diversity, then participation, and optimism second highest
Xers: lowest on socialization, highest on diversity and in general lower than everyone else on all fronts
Millenials are full throttle in all directions, highly valuing all these values

Networks
we have a tendancyy to conflate that which is most novel with that which is going to be important in future - this is wrong..
- what is important about networks is that the organizational structures are shifting
- important nodes for communication channels: we have an impulse to choose: Chatty Cathy node (nodes with most links, bridge nodes (nodes between two isolated groups), : but in fact, you should look for the nodes that have not most quantity of reaches, but shortest paths to all sub-networks
- need META DATA, aggregated insights into demand at scale,
- we need to know more about what the needs of our communities are, where they are, who is looking at you etc... what are they searching for?
- ex. TOOLs, like Misnomer's AEP....
the internet is a political philosophy encoded in technology: the entrepreneurial benefits to empowering small entrepreneurs out ways the risk to doing this.
cultural implications of this for organizations - its not just a place to push content, its a place to pull, and its a place to engage in content production.

andrew@poptech.org
www.poptech.org

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Lunch: Studies about New Plays

"Theatre Development Fund’s New Plays and Playwrights Project, led by Todd London, draws on extensive quantitative and qualitative research about the experiences of more than 250 playwrights and 100 theatres across the country. And “The Gates of Opportunity: A Field Survey on the Infrastructure for New Works in the American Theater,” by David Dower and funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is a report on a tour of 14 communities and more than 300 individuals involved in the creation of new work."

notes:
- audience development is vital, i.e. creating and educating and finding the audience for the "new" forms, it is a question of risk management, these forms are high-risk, because they have small audiences.

- mid-career is a major crisis point

- form is one of the biggest barriers to getting the work produced

- look up Jeff Jones piece in America Theater; what we can learn from visual art about audience development and communicating with them

- the evaluation / quality / rigor question was brought up - how do we deal with this, talk about it, address it?
--- taste, peer pressure, financial concerns, reviews etc that have nothing to do with quality or merit are the driving factors often in choice
--- where is the "excelence" bar, it has to be also about intention - towards rigor, quality, knowledge, understanding of other work,
--- ask WHAT DOES DOING THIS CONTRIBUTE TO the overall organization? right now we focus on quantity of activity, rather than why we do a certain activity

- we need to start have more discussion about terminology as well, we can't apply them as blankets across the field, the presumption that one type of stakeholder uses a term to mean what an different type of stakeholder thinks it means is a crucial issue for the field

- product focus, audience focus, artist focus have to be three equal parts of the triangle

- cookie cutter programs and initiatives do not serve the sector well at all, the challenge is how to deal with organizations who need (funders) to deal with systems and templates

- National New Play Network: look 'em up playwrights

-

TCG Conference Day 2 - RAW NOTES

2009-06-05T05:26:00.000-07:00

Budget Affinity Group
Friday Morning... (too early)
ideas/concerns mentioned

find ways to get information out there so that people know who is doing what within a network and find ways to decrease replication, increase partnerships, and supplement each other in the things each of us does well
- do what you do well
- find other people who do other things well
- partner together to do it/more

what does "new works" mean?

put a sign in the lobby "everyone is a critic" and encourage all your audience to go home and do what they do: blog, tweet, facebook their experience, spread the word

summit for a select group of bloggers - help raise the bar of discourse, and find a way of centralizing/aggregating their reviews for audiences

free arts newspaper? print. that pulls together the writers who write about art and have been let go by the regular news outlets.

TECHNORATI.com - look up readership levels and such about bloggers

stop inviting the papers, when they start having Book Writer or Movie Critic reviewing theater to save $ - because they just don't know anything about theater.

Papers: reviews are not doing anything anymore in terms of box office (up-ticks or down-ticks) for many people. Word-of-Mouth...

stop audience members on their way out, video tape them telling you what they thought of the show, and then post it to youtube - up-tic in sales.

Marketing VS Criticism & Advocacy what is the purpose of the Review?
Criticism is necessary for artists, for advocacy, for discussion....

choose strategically 5-6 community partners who participate from the beginning of the project. - social, or other kinds of affinity with the show you are making... take them along the entire trip, get them involved and "participating' in the making of the work. Choose partners carefully, choose diverse partners.

Who are the people who NEED to see THIS project - perhaps it is not about building an audience for the Venue, it is about relying on the 'venue' audience to come when you invite them, but you build targeted audiences for each particular show/project - CUSTOMIZE audience development.

360-degree theater - full experience that is more than just seeing the show.

put a 22 year-old on staff who is fully entrenched in social media.

think about your video offerings the same way you think about the marketing: it has to be diverse to reach diverse audiences as well...
videos, podcasts that are substantive, and then also maybe the dumb funny one that shows the personality of the place...

how do you cope with the TIME it takes to keep up with the social media?
get an intern to prepare them in advance a whole block, make it their job, and then put them in your calendar so that it bings you to tweet.
advertise on craig's list for young videographers for the documentary type things and they might shoot you a two-minute thing...
don't just use the social media to send the info out... also request content from the audience.

'subscription' package - scaled to when they buy it - can buy it at the beginning of the season for whole season & get 1 ticket to each show, or 1/2-way through and get 2 tickets to each show left in season, and 2/3rds of the way through they get 3 tickets for each show left...

Dept of Labor is cracking down on intern compensation - either you have to pay them nothing or you have to pay them minimum wage and pay benefits etc. no more stipends, no housing (it is compensation),
One possible solution is finding a way to call it a scholarship? Make it into an education program, job training program, partner with University so they get credit of some kind. Intern may have to pay something for it, but if you provide accommodations etc in exchange you can offset their expenses.

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NEA LUNCH
Bill O'Brien, Deputy Chairman, obrienb@arts.gov
things discussed...
-Cultural Diplomacy/Exchange
-Artist Core
-Summer of Service (Issue an alert to volunteer)

How are we active in advocacy?

Summer of Service (Issue an alter to volunteer)
- how can we involve more volunteers? are there programs in place that can use volunteers to lift up? add value, add civic value, and be able to articulate that value better...

Artist Core
not sure what this is yet, they would like to fold in what we have all been doing entrepreneurially...

NPDP website go visit it

If you have ideas send them to...
Art Education & Artist Core send to Carol:
Carol Lanoux Lee, Acting Director, Theater, lanouxc@arts.gov
International ideas send them to Eleanor:
Eleanor Denegre, Musical Theater & Theater Specialist, denegree@arts.gov

Question regarding ties b/w NEA & State Dept.:
in general more conversation between agencies incl. State Department...and White House
Anita Decker - Government Affairs Director & White House Liaison
Yosi Sargent - Communications Director (Yosi Sargent from the White House Office of Public Liaison)
right now the agencies sometimes fund projects without even knowing they are both funding them, so hopefully there will be more communication across these agencies to increase cultural exchange nationally & internationally

Minister of Culture is still a question up in the air... perhaps there are other ways of achieving the results we want from an 'arts czar', ex. the Obama's doing Date Night at the Theater...
MP: the issue then is what exactly do people want a Cabinet Level Arts position for? is it just promotion?

The Performing Arts Alliance - advocacy group look 'em up. ADVOCATE - join them in making sure that the Arts is included in government budget discussions...

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Managing Stakeholders in Crisis
Moderated by David Hawkanson, Executive Director, Steppenwolf Theatre Company Panelist(s)
Lynn Deering, President of the Board, CENTERSTAGE
Susan Medak, Managing Director, Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Kent Thompson, Artistic Director, Denver Center Theatre Company

ideas mentioned that stuck out to me:

always be asking yourself:
what is the core of what you do
what are the artistic priorities and important you staff/board/audience

no endowment - instead an "operating initiative campaign", operating fund.
regularly find ways to reduce fixed costs
crisis opportunity to fix problems

think about scale-backs and changes as LONG-TERM decisions that affect the organization positively going forward, rather than band-aid solutions to get you through short term issue

leadership has to be thinking very far out, and start sharing ideas with staff/board etc early, among other things however long it to you to come to an idea, it will take them that long to understand/process it for themselves and get on board with you.

many small meetings with trustees & lead staff - scheduled open for handful to attend, informal discussions and getting to know each other. - not Board Meetings,- meetings/coffees etc at homes, offices, restaurants.

outsider stake holders - also try to have informal coffees/meet-ups with them and use it to talk about what the org is trying to do to trun this into an opportunity
- government advocacy
- be sensitive to the pressure sthey are under
- provide them with information, data etc that tools for them to make the case for you to their boards/committess
- but individual donors are maybe special: they want to know - are they in too much trouble? are they just fine and don't need my gift? or are they in some trouble, but they'll make it through, so they really can use my help?
- corporate folks: we increase quality of life, which attracts good employees
- but now there is a branding/sponsorship issue, want the brand attached specifically projects that are "meaningful" and not "frivolous".
- economic advantage, workforce advantage, quality of life, & art
- so how are we competing "with" the social-good activities that corps want their names on? (n.o. really had an answer for this, lots of nodding heads)

Risks & Opportunities
- toss the "balance" sheet
- instead over-view the risks and opportunities that the org is going to take...
what are risks, what can go south, what might be trouble spots
vs
what are opportunities, what might exceed expectation/go up, what can bridge the gap from a 'loss'

if people have context they will make good decisions.
manager should provide broad context for decisions we have to make.
what are you hearing in the field, from peers, etc? give your board that information, so that they understand a. you are an expert, b. your orgs difficulties & ideas are being shared/discussed by others, c. you'll be able to empower them to help you achieve the goals of the decisions

TCG Conference Day 1 again - for real this time - no "pre"s about it: RAW NOTES

2009-06-04T20:59:00.000-07:00

Okay so today is a little slimmer on the notes... not because there wasn't as much said, but just because it was a different layout / format from yesterday... oh yeah, and it was shorter...

First Afternoon "TREND" Session -
I attended the
TCG Trend Session: Friday @ 2pm
Donor Cultivation & Fundraising Benchmark & Goal Setting
with Paul Larson - Taylar Development

researching and cultivating individual donors - and annual fund.
(just a note - we clearly needed more than the 90 minutes we had, but it was a nice tasting.)

identifying
segmenting & prioritizing
benchmarking & goal setting - what can you expect from your donors

1. acquiring new donors
- people already in your database, but is not yet a donor, ticket buyers, subscription etc.
- note: Single Ticket buyers are not necessarily harder fundraising prospects than or less committed than subscription buyers
- people who have been to your organization at least once
- ST buyers from last two years, Subscriber non-donores from last 2-3 years
- goal? participation - $ - what? what is central goal of the drive?
- the level between $100 and $250 is a point of diminishing returns - (the worst thing is not to offer them the chance to offer more, or to offer less... most prospects have no idea what you need/want or what impact each of those levels can have on your organization
- ask multiple times, ask for specific levels, explain why you need it
- small amounts are hard to keep them retained, the $100-250 are more likely to stick with you regularly - if you are going to ask for less than $100 make sure the ask is low impact and cheap to do...
- most effective if you ask for a specific dollar amount (you can offer them the chance to give more), but make a case for a specific dollar amount, $150 pays for X, please give $150.
- this is a step towards finding the larger donors
- "ticket add ons" - online or your renewal forms - how you ask for this is important - round up, suggested amount, blank line - create a campaign for it - ex. "make our organization whole" (figure out what supplemental amount would bring their payment up to cover the full expenses - ticket costs $25 at subsidized rate, at unsubsidized rate the ticket could be $60) - get this message out, that box office only covers 30% of costs...

- snail mail fundraising is PASSIVE ask - you can't change the way you ask.... you could try two or three different types of asks to three different test groups... is there a DIRECT ASK, make sure there is a direct ask in the text somewhere, specific amount.
Paul talked a fair amount about phone-asks as if they were common-place practice, which made me wonder at first 'who the hell has the time or money to sit there all day making phone calls asking - or hiring teams of phone banking volunteers or whoever to do this?' and then I remembered two things - 1. I am surrounded by people from organizations who do in fact have development staffs or more than 1 and volunteer teams of potentially double digits, AND 2. and more importantly - if you segment and strategically target your phone asks, everyone has the time and money to make phone calls, even you tiny companies with annual budgets of $6000 out there. Heck I tell artists with no budgets to CALL their audience members when they have a show and ask them what night they are buying their ticket for... why can't they also take a day or three and sit down and start making phone calls to ask for donations?

2. retaining current donors:
- important to recognize them as past donor, at what level they have given, but don't necessarily remind them of the amount they gave because they might give that amount again, instead of giving more... give them a reason to give more - if they ask, then tell them, but don't tell them right off the bat...
- use the life time giving and buying to figure out how you are going to pursue/retain them as a donor
- Tesatura software that gives the most information
- set an increase - 10% or 20% more than last year - if you can say that your Board Members are all giving X% more, you give the general givers an incentive...
- individuals tend to trend upwards at higher rates than Board donors
- Renewal 1 - gave last year, but not before, hardest to retain
- Renewal 2 - given for two consecutive years
- Renewal 3 - given for 3 consecutive years - should be most committed
- can strategize according to amount, but perhaps by donor type (i.e. level of commitment) is better

3. bringing back lapsed donor
- number one reason lapsed donors don't give is that they have not been asked recently
- lapsed 1-5 years
- need to be strategic in what you are asking them for - they are akin to acquisition donors - you still have to make a clear case for what they should give and why - they not remember when they last gave
- lapsed 1 -
- lapsed 2 -
- lapsed 3+ -

general notes:
You have to be CONSISTENT from year to year. Inconsistency leads to lapsed donors.

Pay attention to current events / big news events - they can impact individual giving...
- try to plan around holidays & foreseen events when you can, but don't obsess about it

Online/Email asks?
- email is really just direct mail. sometimes direct mail is more effective now because people actually look at it now, and emails maybe not so much
- individualize the emails!
- adopt an artist (profile the artist, have them write about their project, and include in the ask)
- Integrate development & marketing activities, but you don't necessarily want merge them entirely, people are more likely to purchase tickets and give donations at separate times (some software engines are doing this now - TheaterMania/Ovationtix has plans in this direction in their next iteration I believe.

Once you have identified who you have in your database
Scoring - assign points based on certain activities.. weight points according to the activity's importance to org
- attending shows
- subscriptions
- donating - gift amounts, frequency
- attending events
- zip codes/ financial demographics
- wealth screening? (costs $ to do and its questionable whether it is fruitful esp without a plan on how to use it and evaluate it)
- gala ticket buyers
- where else do they go? what else do they buy?
Over range of last 3 years
DO different things with/to/for different point ranges, ask for different things from them
5 or 6 criteria
top 5% you ask for significantly higher amounts, take them aside and do something special with them

minimum ask level: 4 tiered process over the year with these people - sell them subscriptions, annual fund, thank them (build relationship), ask them again
increase "touches" to people more involved... and start to connect them slowly to personal relationships with individuals in the organization...

have a plan to nurture single ticket buyers, flex-plans etc
-might be more beneficial than subscription, just because you don't have to include the discount
-membership can be difficult because it lumps together donation & tickets/discounts and these are two different actions
-but the terminology of "member" vs. "donor" is something that might be worth thinking about...- use membership to sell "donor" benefits, package them in a way that makes them feel "more" connected... the Benefits cannot have any taxable value though...when you make a donation, you become a member....partner with your corp/local sponsors to get them to cover the costs of member package, and then help them target prospects with appropriate discounts/offers...

Assign different segments to different plans of action
ex. different people contact different categories, for higher segments have non-traditional staff members/artists make the phone calls / thank you campaign - it feels more individual when it comes from people outside the "development" line of the staff...

Benchmarking & Goal Setting
Renewal Donors - track the following information
- response rate (measures retention)
- increasing or decreasing amounts (5% more or 10% less in $)

Acquisition
- Current Subscriber Non-Donors : phone & mail = 12-18% response rate, ave $100-125
- Single Tickets : phone & mail = 6-10% response rate, ave $70-80

this is how you can set your goals (based on past information) - goal = # in database * % response rate * ave gift

Here are the notes he gave us.

Friday Early Evening Budget Session
Budget Group $1-2.9Million
these are just some of the ideas mentioned that stuck out to me..

- aggressive Pay What You Can- those who can pay for those who can't - coupled with aggressive publicity, and the box office is up 20%!

- pay plans - over the year...
giving on the board level is down

don't let board decide where the cuts happen
do help us identify where new money can come from

task forces - give people actions to do, if they can't give $
- ask people to send new patrons instead of just asking them for money?

grow your way out of the crisis - don't shrink your way into a deeper hole

add 2-3 board members at a time: "board class" who can challenge each other...

resource alliances!
collective bargaining with vendors... (Mayor Bloomber actually spoke about this a couple of months ago at a thing for NonProfits at Wagner... collective bargaining for ad space, but also for toilet paper.)

ticket prices bump up when sales reach a certain point automatically - first 20% of sales at $20, next %20 at $25 etc etc...?

TCG Conference Day 1: RAW NOTES

2009-06-03T17:59:00.000-07:00

Okay so here are the notes I took from Day 1 - or really I guess day 0?
The "Pre-Conference" in Washington DC.
TCG: ACTivate Change: Bridging Cultural Exchange and Creativity
info on entire conference www.tcg.org

There is a ton here - so good luck! (maybe good subway reading)
Also a note - if it is in quotes - it is a direct quote and I am pretty sure I got it word for word.
If it is not in quotes then it is a mixture of their words and my own words/understanding/interpretation of what they were saying... so if you want to quote people directly I suggest pestering TCG for the recordings they hopefully made and will be posting as podcasts for all to listen to.
And these are "notes" taken as I was listening - so I apologize in advance if sometimes things get cryptic, but hopefully they will be useful to puruse for those of you who couldn't make it down.
TCG is supposed to be putting together an official summing up of the proceedings sometime soon.

okay here goes:

WHERE ARE WE?
"in a box within a box floating on rubber" (Chris Jennings MD of the Shakespeare Theatre Company)- literally that is where we were as we were listening to the keynote speech - its a neat image so I thought I would pass it along... we were in the The Shakespeare Theatre Company's newly opened Sidney Harman Hall and I made one of the acoustics design guys tell me all about it at lunch. Someday we are going to have a space for contemporary performance in New York that is sonically isolated from the rest of the world! - but I am getting off track...

Morning Session

Keynote Speech: Jeanette Winterson
Notes / thoughts I thought were interesting:
"theater is a confrontation"

language barrier - because language has been parsed - the upper class having access to the rich more complex language, the rest being relegated to a lowest common denominator language of "soap operas" and cliches.

art has to get beyond the obvious - otherwise it isn't art

"art is challenging that is its nature - it tells the truth"

artist wants to be "in a place of authenticity" - as opposed to "spin"

false assumption: art is about time & money to spare

response: creative life is central to all to any life
live art is not an invention of the over-educated bourgeoisie
it is an invention of cave men - of humans in ages of hunting and gathering survival.

art is not elite, excess, luxury
"art is an expression of our human-ness both in the making of it and in our participation in it."

"art by its nature is a different value system"
"art lives in a permanent present"

"making time for art is not about spare time, its about real time"

"art is a kind of mouth to mouth resuscitation" - it gives us back the energy to make change in the world - and to face the chronic crisis of our lives, not just immediate crises.

Q&A
1. comment from an artist from Colombia -
despite years of internal warring - she read a recent study that placed Colombia towards the top of 'happiest' nations - and she thinks it must be because art (esp music) has such a central place in their lives.

2. Winterson's response to someone else
"thankfully, God is religion-proof"

3. comment from audience member
Belgrade- people defying curfews in 1999 - to see art - because it was the "only way in the midst of all this chaos that we could maintain our sanity"...

W's response:
two bags -
1 = time & money
2 = life & death
where is your problem?
art is in #2 bag

4. Question from audience
what is the place of "bad art"?
is the act more important than the result?

W's response:
'there's no such thing as good art or bad art - there is just art or not art
art "does"
a good test of art - is that it goes on speaking long after any contemporary relevance is passed.
the thing is to expose ourselves to as much stuff as possible - it gives us a way of developing our own critical faculties - to determine whether or not it is the "real thing"
its the self-regarding mediocrity that gets in every one's way.
you can't know too much, have read too much, seen to much
start with the stuff that has stood the test of time and build your own understanding and critical eye from there... don't listen to anyone else...

5. W's response
keep doing good work
don't apologize for it
there is no debate about whether or not art is "important" - it is "important" period.
its not an optional extra
believe it is central and absolutely necessary to a civil society, to a cultural society
you can have no ambivalence about this

"anybody who works in the arts and says they don't have time to go to the theater needs to get another job"

Teresa Eyring's take away -
its not the creative economy
its the "creative continuum" - connecting people across all kinds of strata
(creative continuum is a term W used.)
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Next Up:
Cultural Exchange
Opening Panel Discussion

AEA Kathryn Lamkey's "brief"
changes in the use of media - between AEA and its bargaining partners
theater is a "live medium"
- it is difficult to translate into other media
- and yet how we sell theater and promote it now involves new media
- but we have sister unions (SAG & AFTRA(?)) who's jurisdiction is media
- not recording - now calling it "capture"
- need to be able to get media for public relations, for sales, tours etc. from beginning of process to end result
- media package - allows the capture of some rehearsal, backstage, and production itself for use in public relations - in exchange producers pay a media fee to actors.
- changed because they realized that the productions that did not use AEA performers had access to better promotional media because they didn't have the same limitations.
- media can be used for website materials, festival etc applications
- still some limitations
- recognizes that these are techniques necessary for theaters to keep earning income and receiving grants and employing actors

- also short engagement touring agreement - national for "economically challenged" groups... not yet ratified, but they are working on it.

Frank Hodsoll - Resource Center for Cultural Engagement... "brief"
Has been increasing support in - Cultural Diplomacy at the State Department (& Defense Dept)
Lobbying effort to get the funding up to $25 million - starting w/ Americans for the Arts
- RCCE is meant to be a web hub for knowledge and collective practice
- nature of public exchange, best practices, opportunities, best partners, funding

- (in a previous incarnation FH had a film-makers exchange program)

to communicate with him further about these things..
- fhodsoll@verizon.net
can't find a website for them though ... so not sure how to give you reader types more access to what they are putting together... sorry!

Damien M. Pwono's "brief" from Aspen Institute's Global Initiative on Culture and Society
- cultural diplomacy: misunderstood often as an instrument of propaganda, how can we rethink cultural diplomacy and create a new path for its development
- global convening to look at cultural diplomacy
- a cultural diplomacy master's program
- culture "on the move" - a new trend of cultural institutions having satellites throughout the world...
- this year they will be in Spain Sept 15 - theme "Culture & Security"
aspencdf.org
- culture can be a bridge and it can be a "bullet"
- cultural dimensions of global security - the issues of ethnicity & identity based conflicts, civil liberty abuses in the name of culture...
- security of art & culture circuit, how art can prevent conflict or heal after conflict
- security of artists and of cultural institutions becomes a necessity because they are part of national / human security
- cultural diplomacy and creativity
- also part of the discussion is going to be about resources & about dance diplomacy

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Break-out session B
"Navigating Cultural Exchange"

Philip Hinberg (PH) from Sundance Institute's Theater Program (Moderating)

no one anticipated the number of people wanting to participate in the international rack - indicates perhaps a "movement" towards international exchange across the arts in the US.

Olga Garay (OG) from LA's DCA - where she started an international exchange program
Cultural Exchange International
- grant from Durfey? Foundation - 150K, City double matched it - total up to hopefully 600K with the rest of the partners ("Dutch, who will fund anything that looks like art") - more partners who are excited because they are not used to Americans having $ to do art. Americans never have $ to send artists abroad, or to bring internationals to US. There is a perception that the Host country has to pay for US artists, and the Native country has to pay for Internationals to come to the US. She is trying to change this with this new program.
yes people you read that right - she has managed to raise 600K give or take for international artist exchange activities for LA artists - COMMISSIONER LEVIN & HONORABLE MAYOR BLOOMBERG, THE GAUNTLET HAS BEEN THROWN> What are you doing to match or compete with LA?

Melanie Joseph (MJ) from The Foundry Theater
international work is simply natural to art making
- its not a movement (MP i.e. not an economic model)
- the lean in you get when you sort of get it, but don't quite get it - reason not to subtitle...
- World Social Forum
- what do individual artists do in the crossing of borders?
- The Foundry - commissions, develops, produces work from scratch
- interested in individual artists who go out into the world and make the connections themselves and then bring them back to producers...

Daniel Banks (DB) from DNAWORKS among many other things
consciousness of what is "international" and what is "national"?
What he does through DNAWorks
- directs all around the world various projects
- works with emerging artists, devised & hiphop theater to think about leadership training and community development
- takes artists into non-art environments and work with people in that community
- remove artists from the institutional realm of art, and back into the community, social structure of the people in the community
- is this therapy? or is it meaningful artistic engagement in opposition to commercial chattel call art?

PH wrap up of introductions...and what he is doing at Sundance.
American artists were suffering because they were not being exposed to international art and things happening outside the US borders.
East Africa 5-year initiative

Q&A Discussion
PH: Cultural Diplomacy
players in this world -
artists (artist initiated?)
institutions
funders
government
- what is the relationship amongst these players?

MJ:
not necessarily artist lead/drive
- no individual artist support in this country really - likely more institution driven.
- but the artists should be the leaders, otherwise "we don't have anything to produce", some weight of that leadership potential should sit with the artist.

OG:
federal government = Bizzaro world, right now, there is a window in though.. look at Obama's arts platform (from campaign) there is wording in there about needing to send more US artists abroad, in order to increase their range of experience and cultural diplomacy... we have to change the dialog now, because that window is there -
Robert Sterling Clark study - looking at percentage of funding that goes from funders to international projects - less than 1%.
Artists have continued to do the work at their own expense, and it is wrong that the vital cultural exchange is happening without institutional support.
Her program was viewed as a 'boondoggle' - for mamby pamby artists to go on a vacation junket... - she parallels it to public works research where they send water plant folks to other countries to research how they do water treatment...
It can't just be about Arts Education.
In the presenting world - international exchange has been a vital part of things, now everyone else seems to be catching up...

PH:
Travel and cultural exchange cannot be cut when budgets get cut, especially if it is a core value of the institution.
How do you answer the question: why is travel necessary? why is cultural exchange absolutely necessary? why is exchange with local diasporic populations not enough?

DB:
Speaker's Bureau? State Department Grants.... not yet a protocol for how art gets made, in a way that could fit in to the speaker's model (when someone is brought over to speak at something).
Theater without Borders - what does it mean to be a parachute artist? what is the integrity and moral responsibility in being a parachute artist?
- WHEN ASKED GO. because even a day can make a difference in the lives of those you make art with...

Q/A/Comment from audience:
1. go on a research trip first - before you bring the theater there - do exploration first, then make... takes between four & five years to make a piece.
cultural people as "non-state actors" - not just terrorists...

2. issue with taxation & visas - be careful - there are all kinds of fun things that can become really problematic hurdles.
- takes 2 years to make shows for the people she works with
- question: are we looking for the exotic in our cultural exchange? or are we looking to share and create similarities across boundaries...

3. trans-national
in many contexts the national borders are imposed and don't necessarily reflect divides between people on the ground including artists

DB:
there is a sub-sector of the art world actually collaborating on-line via social media....this helps overcome visa, borders, and funding limitations -
MJ: America is behind in this... its been happening in other countries for years..

MJ:
it takes years to actually make a work.
and how do we support the work for those many years?

FH (from opening panel discussion Center for Cultural Research) -
yes they want artists, institutions are easy to find, artists are harder...

PH:
How do you measure success when you are doing international collaborations? esp. when it is a long tail project.

4. hurdle: language barrier - English to English...
also - avoid cliches - that US has money but no culture, world has culture but no money - instead focus on the personal need - why do you go where you go.

5. beyond your "pathetic impossibility excuse for artistic expression"
what do you do for the community over there... don't go just to "score"
when you go just to take from them, just to make your work, you are abusing them, and the people who are financially supporting your trip/work.

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had lunch with Dijana Milosevic and Philip Arnault and a number of other lovely people.
we discussed all kind of things including
- a reservation about this notion of "cultural diplomacy" that some have, is it state art? i.e. is it more than being an extension of state ideological expression? can it be benign, is "cultural exchange" a safer/less potentially controversial term.
- why do we do cultural exchange/like to take our work internationally? is it just part and parcel of being an artist? is it the only viable economic model for art? is it because there is something inherently valuable about going abroad? or is it just because you have to meet this person - they are interesting, and they happen to be over an ocean, so what?
- government funding models - National Funding, Regional Funding, City Funding - which is a better strategic use of our time to go after?

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Afternoon Session

Think Tank
I'm calling it: Defining our terms

sadly most of the responses went too fast for me to understand or write down... but the TCG staffer wrote the highlights on a paper - so maybe they will share those later...
but here are mine (MP) and some highlights I did manage to pick up....

Theatre:
MP: personal def (i.e what I imagine when I say the word) = contemporary performance, that leans more heavily on text than on choreography
Erik Ehn (former?) Dean at CalArts - something along the lines of = 'a permanent or temporary disturbance that happens in a live context'
Yoko Shioya from Japan Society: "Human being's live production which is language oriented"

Cultural Exchange:
MP: project in which cultural values are shared and mutually expressed

Cultural Diplomacy:
MP: project with the aim of sharing one's own culture with peoples of other cultures
EE again former Dean at CalArts - diplomacy is somewhere between a lie and a platitude...

International / Global:
MP: International = a project that involved artists who have passports from more than one country
MP: Global = a project that reaches audiences across the globe???

Producers / Presenters:
MP:
producers - fully back a project, funding it in large part (possibly staging it)
presenters - cooperatively commission and offer space to a project

s.o. from audience not sure who...
Producer = creates / assembles a work of art
Presenter = gives a work a stage and delivers it to an audience
3rd term is posited : Commissioner

Wrap-up and lead in to break out group....
What is the value of international cultural exchange?

- Quoting Lucien Bourjeily from Lebanon "If I have an idea I just do it."

Come up with a list of the things that must be said about the importance of international cultural exchange.

: NOTEs from break out group 1 (ORANGE) Answering that question in red:
MP's summed up bullet points that were read out after the break out session:

1. If theater is to keep up with an increasingly fluid world it must be universal, in motion, and carry with it intense integrity that stems from its very immediate locality.

2. International collaborations & exchanges force transformations in perspective, self and cultural questioning, and a recognition that difference and similarity are ignorant of national and geographical borders.

3. Younger generations and social media do not recognize the national and geographic borders, neither should live art.

4. The U.S. is known as a mixing pot / as a salad bowl, collecting immigrants and internationals from all over the globe - its art should reflect this.

5. Cultural exchanges bring deeper understandings of human nature,
5.5 which will provide valuable returns on any investment in that this understanding can extend to all of our global commercial activities... (lubricant and creative engine for good global business practices)

Notes that led to those bullet points:
the way people want to organize themselves is that people are insisting on universal access and freedom of movement
if theater is to keep up -- it needs to be universal & in motion

global in a healthy way - theater with its inefficiency can promote the availability of the local in a global circumstance - because theater is hard to move, it has to move with an intense integrity...

international work moves us out of our comfort zones and forces us to question our work - how do we maintain the integrity of our work in other environments.

perspective - world is very fragmented and we suffer from absence of understanding and knowledge about other cultures, we take for granted our own culture - one way to transform narrowness - is awareness of other communication forms... and theater is a powerful way of communicating that... facility as much exposure as possible in the world - works wonders in global and self understanding - not to overlook the self-understanding

speak in terms of theater - it has to be exchanged because it is a non-scaleable event- has to be exchanged if it wants to be global

globalization is happening in theater to make theater international
taking theater as an outreach tool as world becomes smaller - there is a pull back from understanding as it gets smaller - and nothing goes further towards bridging gaps than someone standing in front of you making sth beautiful and expressing something that is common around the world -

exchange is not an experience of congruence
it has to be me spending soemthing of myself that changes me, and in return, I expected to perform an act of charity, but I received an act - has to be transformation on both sides and sacrifice on both sides...

there is much debate about whether or not the goal is to reinforce ourselves - or to speak this to the "civilian world"? what is the value of bring someone from far away? how do we speak this to people outside?

perception & self-recognition - the brand - the human brand is the most tested and best surviving brand, and therefore most deserving of support...

every aspect of our lives are global already... there is a glitch - the same people who are already participating in international commercial markets - seem to want to protect our own culture - keep it closed off and sheltered..

next generation is creating a new global culture that doesn't identify with the old nationalized cultures... they are looking for something that reflects who they are and that is a mix of various national/ethnic "sources"

our sites need to be set not only abroad - but also towards educating our selves and our youth and universities?

what is the benefit?

at what point do you fire your audience, do you fire your donors...

macro issue & micro issue
what is the value of creativity?
what is the value of creativity within international exchange?
perhaps one answer is - how does the thing change the person? how does it change the community?

how do the creative countries justify supporting their artists?

by emphasizing international exchange we are simply promoting the American "dream", which is multi-cultural, salad bowl, mixing pot of cultural difference...
- central characterstic of Amercian Values = the validity of each human story next to other human stories...

support like rock and roll has to be fommented - it has to be agitated from the bottom up.

we have to all see ourselves as ambassadors and begin networking personally across borders, as is happening through social media

storyteller - bring back the experience from where we were - share it with the people in our local community

find a way of proving to the investors that they get something back that is valuable to them - you do this in music and cinema... we just need something like 1% of National Budget and it would change culture here -

cultural exchanges bring deeper understandings of human nature.

____________________________________
____________________________________

pre-amble to second break-out group.
"if money can fix it - it's not a problem"

What does (success in) international exchange look like in 3 years?
(these are all the notes from the break out session I was in)
- more of it (means more community organizing)
- collaborations, rather than just 'exchanges'
- value of cultural exchange should be as common place and accepted inside and outside the arts world as it is currently in certain arts niches
- more wider shared experiences for artists & audiences with the live art performance as the pinnacle of that experience
- easier to do
- prioritize process
- art will have a different role than it had - they will be the central drivers of social change

What resources and knowledge will help move this work forward?

What needs to happen to get to that 3 year goal?
be civic groups, get involved in civic groups,
build consortium/partnerships
identify cultural partners outside the arts
NETWORKS, communication tools (that don't replicate themselves, but work together)
Homes, families, we need to be invited into the audience's space, ' America Houses'
ministry of culture
aggregator for knowledge and resource information

Action Items:
individually
individual and collective activism

organizationally
learn to speak with a political voice

field in USA
cabinet minister
TCG/ITI Center - for knowledge and resources

field internationally
hospitality houses

notes from some of the discussion that got our group to those answers above....
questions (q) & comments (c)

q: how do we deal with questions of "preservation", cultural preservation?
what does "preservation" mean?
sometimes exchange can show the value of the local art to the locals, in ways that they had begun to take for granted or forget or devalue for various reasons

q: in exchange, how do you give and receive what is expected, desired and how do you shift those expectations
exchange - interaction is reciprocally transformative

c: inter-generational challenges are similarly affecting the work, as much as international
c: micro-cultures - the cultural differences are not simply differences of nationhood - there are cultural differences from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city

q: if we assume the value of cultural exchange, to make it happen in 3 years - what sorts of dialogs do we need to have with people outside these rooms in order to make it easier, richer, more productive?

c:
1. walk - slow food movement, selling inefficiency, meditation
2. nba- passports - the country is not very internationally minded - 10% of population has passports-- but now if you look at the NBA more international atheletes, more consciousness of international within mass culture
3. artist - art is too important to leave to the artists, when we go to other countries we can learn about health care and other things - broad based learning exchange
4. pedagogy - problematize quick presses for slick results... push against that

c: artistic qualitative criteria

c: look at - cultural preservation, jazz & heritage in New Orleans - festival industrial complex

q: how do you get the cultural micro-cultures that are already around, how do you get them to engage with other micro-cultures - how do you get the Japanese locals to come to the Ukranian show?
a: long-term community investment and joint cultural exchanges... build bridges for them.

q: are the way we are using performing arts venues going to facilitate these changes we want?

c: Have to develop TRUST - can't do that with marketing.
Trust is labor intensive, sacrifice involved.

c: ITI - as resources for all kinds of things that we may not know about...

Closing Discussion

What we need notes from the other break-out groups:
TCG has to have an international component to all its conferences
a knowledge center where we can learn about everything it takes to tour
on going creative projects,
reciprocal touring of finished work in a systematic structured way
international works without union barriers
initiative for an international festival circuit - that might happen from City to City
visa & taxation streamlining
stronger understanding and support from our diplomatic core
a cultural exchange field that is not US centric
an audience that is more open to coming to intnerational work
exchange that is autonomous from US policy relations
more robust NEA
strengthened relations with and amongst universities
talk about how long the process really takes - especially with 'funders'
deepen and commit to long term relations with international partners
parity across cultures - sending our work out as much as we bring it here
advocacy
creating non-results based criteria for evaluation
benchmarking the field

concluding ah ha moments
unions have been a challenge to the arts, but we don't want to be in opposition to unions
maybe we need to be integral to the changes and new labor movement

art remains alive always in the present tense

there are many baby steps to working on an international collaboration, and it can take a long time - this is not something wrong with you, this is the nature of the beast, make it a positive aspect

maybe we should meet with internationals and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the various models (ex. minister of culture)

what can we do to make more artists - world artists, owned by the world... Arthur Miller for example is no longer just an American playwright - he's a playwright who belongs to the world historical culture - in translation, he becomes a native of other countries.

there are web people and there are wall people - wall people like to hide in silos, web people like to make connective tissues

Phew - that's it
then I went and got on a train up to Baltimore and passed out in the MICA dorms, at least that is what I am going to go do right now.

More tomorrow I promise.

SIX WORDS NEVER TO FORGET: prepared for The Field's New Economy Smack Down

2009-05-14T14:53:00.000-07:00

So it looks like May is about practical things, rather than aesthetics... but practical things have a huge impact on aesthetics as well so ... that's my excuse. There. Smack it down.

Last night I was honored to share the stage with some brilliant minds and discuss solutions, suggestions and thoughts about how to re-tool our tool sheds and harness the potential of this new economic situation we all find, well, that everyone else has finally joined us in (a.k.a reality.)

Thanks to Jennifer from the Field and Robert from Galapagos Artspace for hosting us all and organizing the evening! (Audio of the entire event should be up on the Field site.)

Here is the statement I gave as my 2 minute soap box.

The Field: What is the largest problem we seem to face as a field?
my answer: Over-extended artists have been encouraged to make high quantities of poor quality art for the “professional” market and continue to operate blind in a large loosely clustered population isolated from each other, resources, and their geographic neighbors.

The Field: What is your solution?

My solution is Six Words Never to Forget:
SLOW DOWN
STRATEGICALLY PLAN
COLLECTIVELY ORGANIZE

Slow Down

Make less art for the “professional” market, make better quality more rigorous art.
Invest more time engaging in the community, seeing art, discussing art, getting to know your aesthetic and geographic neighbors, being mentored by more established artists, advocating for the arts and for your neighbors, learning about aesthetics, technology and other worldly things, and playing, goofing around in studios and with materials, experimenting with no end goal or necessary outcome.

Strategically Plan

Create and follow short and long-term (1 and 5 year) plans to achieve your vision.
Actively cultivate the opportunities that directly feed your vision.
Only make work that is true to your unique vision that only YOU can make.
Update your plans each quarter based on a realistic assessment of your progress and changes in the field, but do not let peer or “gatekeeper” pressure ever throw you off course.

Collectively Organize

Organize yourselves, your companies, your materials, your financials, your to do lists, your humans, and your ideas. Knowing what you have and being able to easily access it is vital to efficient and productive action.
Work collectively along aesthetic and geographic lines to change the way governments, foundations, presenters and other resource managers allocate their goods.
Actively help solve issues that plague all of us as citizens, including lack of healthcare, crappy public transportation, over-priced housing, and an under-funded educational system.
Reclaim the ability to discuss aesthetics from the ivory tower of academic authority, the ignorance of the art-critic, the cowardice of political correctness, and the fear of elitism. Our work must be both the making of art and the debate of aesthetics, only then will the audiences follow us comfortably wherever we want to go.
Social media are powerful tools for developing rich compassionate interpersonal networks, not just for collecting “friends” to whom we broadcast advertisements for our shows.

PS. This all goes for the artists, the presenters, the grant-makers, and all the other cultural stakeholders!

For more - info on some of the Field's prior discussions about Economic Issues - check out their blog: http://economicrevitalization.blogspot.com/
Info from the rest of the night and the other speakers will be up there as well soon, as well as a podcast of both panels!

You can also read here for some of the ideas that triggered some of these conversations:
Claudia LaRocco's Performance Club Blog

Advice to contemporary performing artists about how to get your work presented.

2009-05-09T13:26:00.000-07:00

Yikes its been four weeks - sorry about that... I have a bunch of posts I have been meaning to do, but the to do list became a little overwhelmed.
Anyway - in the meantime I will post this.

Its notes for a presentation I just did for The Field's Field Network Artists - a great group of folks and a good discussion.

Advice to contemporary performing artists about how to get your work presented.

In preparation for this I did a little research and polled a few artists and presenters. I asked them - if they were in my shoes, what nugget would they share with you about how to get your work presented, produced or commissioned? What follows is a combination of advice they gave me, advice I have learned through practice or observation over the last 10 years and some just plain common sense things that I think it helps to repeat over and over again, just to make sure we don't forget the obvious.

- There is no secret formula. Every group is going to have their own path.

Preparing

- A basic Golden Rule I desperately try to stick to that was passed on to me by a dear friend successful in business is "NO SURPRISES", in other words, nothing should ever blind-side you, or catch you off guard, or be unforeseen. Cultivate the opportunities that serve your goals. Plan all aspects of your projects ahead of time thinking backwards from final production and trying to imagine all the resources and activities that feed into the final production as well as any possible bumps or hurdles you may have to address. The more organized and forward thinking you are, the better prepared you will be to deal with surprises good and bad which will inevitably come your way.

- Get your poop organized into a nice little pile - invest as much time in your materials as you do in a production. The better your materials are the first time around, the less revising and updating you'll have to do going forward. Website, 1-page Mission & Company Bio, 1-page project description that gives readers a visceral image of the final production you are pitching, pictures, pictures, pictures, embed as many GOOD pictures of your work into these documents as you can - if they are good, they will give people a very clear image of what your work looks like and feels like. Make them modular so they are easy to update, without having to overhaul them entirely each time you make an update which should be at a minimum once-per year if not once-per quarter depending on how frequently you doing things.

- Put together a 3 month plan, a 1 year plan, and a 5 year plan, follow those plans rigorously, patiently and with the myopic focus of a predator stalking its prey, but also out of the corner of your eye always know what else is happening in the landscape so that you can adapt to constantly changing conditions. Don't be afraid to commit to yourself, to your art. Don't let lack of recognition slow you down. Don't let your peers or collaborators hold you back. Update your plans each quarter based on a realistic assessment of your progress and changes in the field. But know that it may take 5 years before a presenter even looks at your work and ten before someone gives you money.

- Take an inventory of your practical strengths, organize your art/production/ business model around those strengths. Also take an inventory of resources you already have easy access to, those resources could be human, financial or material (not everything has to be purchased - barter, recycle, share) and organize yourself to take advantage of those resources in order to build your ability to access resources you don't already have easy access to. Recognize your strengths, limitations and take well-calculated risks.

- Make work that is true to your unique vision. Don’t make work you think people want to see. Make work that thrills you, that helps you breath, that ONLY YOU CAN MAKE.

- GO SEE WORK. Get involved. Work for a more established artist. Work for a more established organization. Introduce yourself to other artists and resource folks. Attend as many talk-backs and panel discussions or post-performance dialogues -- of the people that you really like -- or are close to the work that you think you yourself want to make and talk to other people there. Get a feel for what is happening, what presenters are curating, and think about how your own work might fit (or not fit, which can actually be a good thing). Go see work. Not just the kind that you think you want to make yourself, go see all kinds of art and cultural activities, all over the place, and not at just the "usual suspects". Seeing work, working for someone “bigger”, and talking about aesthetics can is a better investment of your time than making half-baked projects.

- Seriously research venues and their respective gatekeepers and figure out where your work might fit best and why? Then invest the time and energy to build a relationship with them. By participating sincerely in the activities and communities operating through these venues, you build your own reputation and credibility. And if the venue managers and curators respect and appreciate you, your work will eventually get considered, and they will be willing to recommend you to their peers when you ask them to.
You might be wondering how you are supposed to make your own work and do all of these things - my answer - all these things are part and parcel of making art. They are not extra-curricular activities. If investing time in planning, in your business materials, in seeing work, and attending talk-backs means you make less product, I am willing to wager, it will also mean you make better quality product, more rigorous product, and that your product gets more opportunities.

Carefully made, rigorous, and well-planned art is what you should be trying to get presenters to see. This doesn't mean you can't have fun and do fun little projects with friends for friends if you need to get your creative energies released. In fact do lots of that, among other things it will thicken your ties with those friends and they will become more committed investors in your professional art as well. However, those fun projects are NOT for presenters. Showing presenters the carefully made, rigorous and well-planned work, tells them that you take your professional career seriously. Furthermore, that career is more than just making your art, it is exposing yourself to art, to other artists, and to all kinds of other experiences beyond the art world – it is participating intimately in a particular community.

Pitching

- When you do pitch a presenter or other resource manager - pitch them with solid, specific proposals. Use clear language to illustrate your aesthetic goals – what will the piece look and feel like? Be honest, be yourself, and be professional. Don't tell them what you think they want to hear. But also don't waste their time with something they clearly are not going to pick up, which is something you will know if you see other work at their venue, or just read through their programming materials on their websites.

DO’s & DON’Ts in the lead up….

DON'T COLD CALL - i.e. don't send, project pitches, scripts, headshot/resumes or even grants unless you have been solicited. It wastes money, time and trees.

DO invite everyone you have met and everyone you want to meet to the shows you make. Send personalized messages to those people who's attention you are really trying to attract, which is not just the presenters, but people you know who are close to or already working with those presenters, because they can recommend you. Don't forget the assistants. If you can, snail mail 4 weeks in advance and then follow up with email 2 weeks out, and ask a friend who knows you and them to recommend your show to them or better yet get that friend to bring them. (This doesn't mean you need to comp them all, just reach out and touch them personally.)

DON'T WAIT for someone to discover you or present you.

DO figure out a way to self-produce, get your work out there, then work really hard on getting presenters to see it. The more you get your work out there and build your own buzz, the less you have to chase venues. Do what you can to get the venues to come to you; i.e make it clear that THEY NEED YOU.

DON'T SLAP TOGETHER THE WORK or invite presenters to half-baked work you don't even think is finished.

DO figure out a way to take the time to make the work you wanted to make, and only show finished, polished, rigorous work to presenters and public audience members. A finished 10 minutes, will be a better representation of your work and make a better impression than a sketched out 45 minutes.

Executing

- When you are given an opportunity, don't screw it up. Put everything you can into it, no matter how "small" it is, demonstrate to the presenter/funder that you are professional, responsible, creative, engaged, committed, and serious about your work, about them, about this new relationship, but also that you can have fun. Don't rely on the presenter or the venue staff to make or promote your work for you, even if they have a technical director or a marketing department - you are still the best person to build and to promote your work.

DO’s & DON’Ts in execution (and in the entire process honestly)

DON'T BE A SNOB or a jerk to ANYONE, you never know who you are talking to, who they know or are connected to, or how they might be able to help you in the future, be sincere, professional and courteous to everyone you meet, especially any technical crew at any venues you go to, they are a secret wealth of resources that will save your ass some day and could even open some doors.

DO say yes to every opportunity or invitation, no matter how large or small, you never know who you will meet there.
Corollary: DO only say yes to opportunities you know you can commit yourself to completely without over extending yourself, saying yes to something and then having too many conflicts or flaking or just not doing what you promised you'd do will just get you a bad reputation. Its okay to negotiate your acceptance and say a conditional or limited yes. Be upfront and honest about what you will be able to do.

DON'T spin fantastic tales you can't follow through on, and don't, don't, don't follow that golden rule of cowardice - its easier to apologize after (especially with a venue’s equipment, brand, or money.) The presenters are PARTNERS in this with you, don’t screw them over.

DO ask for help, advice, knowledge, contacts and any other non-monetary gifts you can from everyone you know, the more you owe them, the more they will care about seeing you succeed, and it makes people feel good to be thought of as someone who can help. Just make sure you also give back sometimes in equal measure.

Other Alternatives:
Win the Lottery.
Rob a bank.
Or go to LA, get famous in movies, then be cast in a Broadway show as celebrity content.

Some of these thoughts have been plagiarized directly and indirectly from various brilliant people and the ether.

What would you do with these?

2009-05-02T15:58:00.000-07:00

Okay Performing Artist types - what would you do with these?

Nine Ideas to Save the World, Inspired by Buckminster Fuller

The visionary architect Buckminster Fuller believed that a single design could save the world. That ethos is being carried forward by the Buckminster Fuller Institute, which every year holds a contest to create a design with maximum social impact; the winner gets a seed grant of $100,000. The 33 finalists, chosen from 285 entries, were just unveiled. The grand prize winner will be announced on May 4. Here, we've culled nine of our favorites:

1. Bonnie L Y Chu proposes a system of cyclone proof shelters that can be built from hand without any construction experience, using prefabricated molds which guide the process.

2. V. S. Gardiner designed a portable toilet that transforms waste into fertilizer--a double boon for subsistence farmers with inadequate sanitation.

3. Charlie Paton, Michael Pawlyn and Bill Watts aim to replant the Sahara desert, through a simple system that creates fresh water from seawater using solar evaporation. They believe the system would create a new, self-sustaining source of abundant fresh water.

4. Kickstart creates simple tools that people in the undeveloped world can use to start their own businesses. The most popular tool so far has been the Super Money Maker pump--a hand-held water well that allows subsistence farmers to create larger operations.

5. Much in the wild-eyed tradition of Buckminster Fuller himself, a team of architects, mathematicians, and computer scientists proposed a system of computer programs that could automatically generate building designs. New designs would respond to previous ones, ensuring rational urban development. They'd be built on site, using rapid prototyping. Perhaps 100 years off, but fascinating nonetheless.

6. A staggering portion of the world lives in slums without proper sanitation. Umande Trust, working in Nairobi, is addressing this by building communal latrines that generate biogas, which fuels the sanitation process and subsidizes the project's expansion.

7. Styrofoam and numerous other building products consist of as much as 70% petrochemicals. Eben Bayer, Gavin McIntyre, Edward Browka found a fungus that, when applied to agricultural byproducts, produces a drop-in replacement for Styrofoam.

8. Urban farming? Don't laugh--numerous groups are pursuing the idea. It's even been estimated that transforming the New York City's roofs into small gardens could provide fresh fruits and vegetable for all six million people in the city. Stacey Murphy Landmines Productions designed a system of urban farms and distribution networks that would use incidental green space to form a local farming co-op.

9. The last, and one of the most advanced projects, is the ongoing City Car project at MIT. The idea is to produce an on-demand network of short-range vehicles—thus solving the scaling problems in public transportation. The vehicles would be checked out at activity hubs, such as train stations and shopping malls. Their roofs would use solar cells to generate their own power, and sell excess power back into the grid.

Source: Fast Company

Economics of Bi-Products

2009-04-07T13:58:00.000-07:00

This is what I wrote in response to a question WNYC journalist Claudia LaRocco asked me - to see the full article she published go to WNYC Performance Club Monday Scramble

A Response to some of the “new” economic models popping up in the arts lately
Bi-products come out of the making of art – bi-products like CDs, or DVDs, or books, or art objects, or food, or education, or political action, or services for other low-income and under-served communities, or even party/benefit events.
Bi-products can generate revenue because they have some kind of inherent value.
I have no problem with these two facts.

My problem is that right now it seems as if we are all focusing on making and selling bi-products, and not focusing on making and presenting art.
We are focused on making bi-products, because we believe and have been told that they are the things with inherent use, social and exchange value.
Whereas, live art, we are often either directly or indirectly told, has little/no inherent measurable use, social, or exchange value.

Based on these misunderstandings, we are in the midst of creating a system where the art is a bi-product of the making of bi-products.
And because our focus is in the wrong place, art is suffering, artistic discourse is suffering, and cultural engagement in art is suffering.

Instead we should contrive a system in which an artist’s primary function is making art.
Artists should spend all day and night making art, showing art, and engaging critically in art.
Artists should demonstrate that art has an inherent value of its own, that making art has real costs, and that just because a patron walks away without some supplemental objector service does not mean they walk away with nothing.
Artists should be reminded daily that what they do for the rest of us is immensely valuable, by among other things, being compensated for their labor such that they can put a roof over their heads, feed themselves and their children, and access the tools they need to succeed at their craft.

Thinking that the bi-products will ever cover the cost of making the art, is a delusional pipe-dream that diverts artists from their mission, limits the possibilities of artistic production, and deprives the rest of us of quality cultural experiences.
The bi-products might cover the cost of making the bi-product, but never the art.
The art, when produced well, is too valuable, too labor intensive, and too expensive for any bi-product to be able to cover the costs.

Furthermore, these bi-product endeavors seem like more of the same band-aid tactics to me that are never going to solve three fundamental issues:

1. The supply of art that wants to be considered "professional" is too high. It is time the foundations and presenters take responsibility for encouraging that over-supply. They should raise the bar, condense their resources into a smaller pool of artists who are really making art worth its weight, and begin thinking more seriously about long-term structures of support for artists from early-career high-risk to established to retirement. Or they should stop supporting “professional” art altogether and simply begin backing the proliferation of loosely clustered, neighborhood-based, public art/social-clubs, which like the local gardens are open for anyone to participate.

2. The citizens/tax payers need to understand the cost of making "professional" art, as well as its inherent values. They need to decide if it is a vital part of their nation-state's cultural identity. If it is, then they need to put their money where their mouth is and support taxes that pay for cultural institutions and artists to do their jobs and allow for ALL citizens no matter their income level to have access to those artists and institutions (YES, $20 is prohibitive for many people). Or if it is not, then the artists who want to be “professional artists” should move to a nation-state where they will be considered an integral part of the cultural fabric and financed as such.

3. "Professional" artists need to take themselves seriously as professionals. They must drop the myths of entitlement, of being “discovered”, or of romantically starving. They must search out and demand access to the knowledge, tools and resources they need to be professional artists, i.e. employees, contractors and small businesses within the arts sector of our economy, - many do, or try to, but many also don't. Or they should become professionals in a different sector, be encouraged to continue making art as an extra-curricular daily practice, and be given public outlets for their creative energy through loosely clustered, community-based arts-clubs.

Instead of wasting all our energy on trying to find ways around these issues, I believe we would all be better served by facing them head on and trying to actually solve them.

Arts VS Culture

2009-03-31T06:41:00.000-07:00

CULTURAL ENGAGEMENT INDEX
http://www.philaculture.org/research/reports/cultural-engagement-index-cei

this is an interesting new research tool out of Philadelphia
It was developed "to track trends in consumer cultural engagement over time" and marks a shifting lens from "arts" to "culture".

What seems to be meant by it is a shift from asking questions only about if/when/how/why people attend "professional" arts events to asking questions about how people engage in artistic activities throughout their lives, including sitting in your apartment all by yourself screwing around with Garageband. "The CEI asks questions about both attendence-based activity and personal practice. " There was a similar study a year ago our of Irvine California. And I have a sneaking suspicion that a similar kind of thinking might be behind Chez Bushwick's new Capital B project.

I don't know that the findings in the CEI are necessarily surprising, but the shift makes me wonder about how the contemporary performance spaces/artists can position themselves in relationship to this shift.
Does it mark a push to break-down the divide between "professional artist" and "hobby artist"? Does it mark a push to re-value the hobby artist as a way to increase engagement in professionally planned/created events as audience members?
Or does it simply recognize the anarchic proliferation of the means to production (i.e. Youtube, iTunes, IMovie and Garageband make it so anyone can make art and get it out there)?
How does the person who makes art as a personal practice fit into our communities?
How with this shift affect the way cultural activities are funded? curated? presented? professionalized? taught?

As a "cultural anthropologist" I also find it interesting that this lens shift perhaps indexes a change in how society thinks of the arts - before art was not part of culture? art as personal practice is cultural practice, but art as professional production is a service provided?

Storytelling vs. Noveltelling

2009-03-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

Alrighty - so I have a book cracked open on my desk because I am struggling with something. Last night I saw Nature Theater of Oklahoma's RAMBO SOLO at Soho Rep.

My quandry here is that after the show Pavol, Kelly and Zach were discussing the work and kept talking about story-telling and how the piece was based on a desire to collect stories that meant something to people. And then the resultant piece (as magical as it is) is actually a retelling of a novel. This statement and the subsequent post is irrelevant to Nature Theater's activities and in no way meant to critique them or their rigor or dramaturgy, its just a thought the show and subsequent discussion triggered in me. You see, in my little back water of cultural/philosophical anthropology, stories and novels are two sort of mutually exclusive things - thanks in part to an essay Walter Benjamin wrote called "The Storyteller" back in the early 1900s and which theorized their mutally exclusive natures.

Storytelling in Benjamin's context is a (primarily oral and therefore LIVE) craft in which experiences are exchanged and useful knowledge is passed on (a moral, practical advice or maxim).
Whereas the novel, (like modern cinema or modern plays I would argue) is instead a representation-of-experience and reproduces the confounding nature of human life.

Benjamin says a lot more than this in his essay - things about the coming information age and about death and about boredom and about knitting - but I'll stop at this point, because this dichotomy is the one that is most fascinating to me.

What NTofOk's show made me ponder is this: so much of contemporary performance these days is creative responses to films, novels, and other "representations-of-experience". At the core of this otherwise live experiential exchange between artists and listener/watcher is not an experience the artist lived through, but a representation-of-experience the artist read about or watched in 2D on a screen at some point before. What is that about?

How does this/can this co-opting of the representation-of-experience then translate to the contemporary hunger for "experiences"? Is there some difference in the take-away from a piece of performance that is a retelling of a story/experience vs. a representation-of-experience? If so what is it? And would we children of the Spectacle even know the difference having grown up in a world enveloped by representations-of-itself?

OR

is it that in our "post-modernness" we are just replacing the problematic truthiness of the "social/practical knowledge" at the heart of the Benjaminian story, with the very real intensity of perplexity, doubt and confoundedness at the heart of the human experience?

ADHD culture

2009-03-23T20:17:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday I saw the Wooster Group's new piece La Didone - a Kitch Sci-fi / Classical Opera mash-up in true Wooster style. And tonight I went to the PERFORMA-PECHA-KUCHY (or whatever the thing is called) night, which for those not yet acquainted with this movement - it is Chatauqua for the modern attention deficit ages - 12 lectures, 6mins each, 20 slides each - with alcohol and "social networking" added into the mix.

Something LeCompte said once in a published conversation with Foreman (in Rabkin I believe) - something about always wanting more than one thing to look at as a salve for fending off boredom - or at least that was how I remembered her statement. And Foreman's response was something similar, except for him the interruption subverts the interpretants ability to complete or fix or determine the meaning of the event that was interrupted. Again my interpretation/memory of his statement.

The collision of two events, or 12 events, or many many events as a way of keeping death (metaphorical) at bay. Keep the meaning in continuous flux, keep the actions constantly flowing, skipping, slipping. Which makes me think of Camille de Toledo's Coming Of Age At the End of History - which is a silly little book I found on a shelf at St Marks. I have no idea what kind of judgment to pass on it, beyond it being a nice little primer on the trajectory of philosophy and culture for the generation that experienced its formative youth between 1989 and 2001. About 3/4s of the way into the book Camille arrives finally at Hakim Bey's TAZ (temporary autonomous zone). And for some reason, I have always kind of felt like maybe the strategy of distraction/ event excess, is also a strategy of creating the possibility to experience/constitute a TAZ at the level of perception. Or as Foreman says in his description of ASTRONOME to create an ambiguity, in which the interpretant/interpreter can experience freedom?

I love art/events that suffer from attention deficit for precisely this reason - it stays alive, it breathes ambiguity, and it lets me be free to take up the responsibility of interpretation.

The one caveat - it has got to be RIGOROUS, thick, rich, and provocative.

p.s.
Peachy Coochy - do you think they are aware of the potential double vaginal connotations of the title of their event? Especially for those of us who being mildly dyslexic on top of mildly ADD have a very difficult time remembering the order of letters when they hold no anchor-able/already familiar meaning and can't keep our minds from wandering through the chaotic cloud of significance to places perhaps unintended.
Are stem cells temporary autonomous zones?

What is it in an ending?

2009-03-16T12:43:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I saw Palissimo's latest piece Weddings & Beheadings. It has some beautiful images, but never quite cohered for me. In trying to sort out why that might be, I arrived at the sensation I kept having during the last half of the show: "Okay this is the end. No wait, one of the dancers is changing into a new costume over there on stage right/left." At which point a new piece would begin and I might or might not again think to myself "Okay this is the end. No wait, one of the dancers is changing into a new costume over there on stage right/left." This happened maybe four or five times before the show really did finally settle into an ending with the performers revealing our reflections in the wall-to-wall mirrors at the back of the stage and coming and joining us in the audience.

Each of these endings had their own beauty, but somehow this reversal of the Gertrude Stein commandment to always BEGIN AGAIN, found itself unsettled in what seemed, to me at least, to be Palo's attempt to END AGAIN, and again, and again. There was something quite different about this experience from the normal sensation I feel in pieces that 'begin' again and again. Rather than a sort of serial sensation of anticipation of something coming, I felt a serial sensation of conclusion.

Ending again and again. Perhaps this is what it feels like when one gets older, and rather than everyone having babies, everyone starts dying off? I don't mean that to be a morbid thought. Just an observation.

We have so many ceremonies that are about beginnings, even graduations are really about marking passage into a new beginning. Hell, funerals are somewhat paradoxically about beginnings, beginning the rest of your life without that person. But Edward Said (in his book On Late Style) identifies the artistic vocation with memory. I'm not certain I agree with Said, but if I follow the thought, art becomes what has already passed, a fragement mostly lost to fragile biochemical inscription, an object shared only as trace, a calling up of a moment that had its end already. And if one were to follow the logic of this understanding, one could arrive at a conclusion that art is a re-membering of dead things, of things that ended long ago (or just a moment ago). A repetion of endings?
End Again.

A challenge?

2009-03-12T09:34:00.000-07:00

Okay so last night I saw a show, it shall remain unnamed, suffice it to say I definitely would rather have watched the fat kid dancing.

But it triggered a thought in my head - what do you do with live musicians on stage? How do you make a performance that isn't continually upstaged by their very real, much more interesting presence?

I'll explain a little. The show was 4 dance pieces, and a few of the pieces had live musicians playing on stage along side the dancers. The problem I kept having was that the musicians were mesmerizing, and the dancers just got in the way. This has happened before sometimes with video - where I find myself watching the big video screen and the actions on the video screen and being almost annoyed that the live performers occasionally block my view. Sometimes with technical artists - where I end up watching the technical artists just off to the side of the stage, because their reality, their factness and the machinery and the intricacy of their actions is so much more fascinating than the 'theater' being staged. Its not that I want these "distractions" to be hidden. Its that I wish the other stuff had as much tension, alive-ness, potential for failure, earnestness, focus.

Maybe?

Its a crap first post perhaps, but I think of it as an aesthetic challenge.

I wish more performance groups would work with live musicians (especially the cutting-edge ones making new 'experimental' music) and I wish they would take the technical artists more seriously - they are artists too, not wrench monkeys, and I wish live performance would start experimenting more with the digital tools that are being created all over the place - I don't mean video, I mean robots, and sound machines and the re-appropriation of old machines that have been tweaked and updated into something new by those wiz-kids at ITP - there are so many more interesting machines now, thanks to all the new technologies.

The challenge perhaps is to find ways of educating ourselves about and then integrating all these old arts and new arts. And then in the making of the works being sensitive to finding the right balance, so that I don't wish those poor dancers (as hard as they are trying) would just go stand up stage, be quiet and stop moving because I just want watch the kids with the weird instruments break their shit.

2009-02-20T05:20:00.000-08:00

A MANIFESTO FOR
CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE (and other dancing fat kids)
A bastardization of the Futurist Manifesto

1. We want to praise the love of genuine risk, the rigorousness of craft, and the strategic and earnest generation of aesthetic, resource, and geographic networks.

2. The essential elements of our art will be courage, audacity, compositional hybridity, and the ability to unbalance the everyday beliefs of our fellow citizens.

3. We want to exalt the art of confusion, of feverish frustration, of raising the intellectual bar, of the perilous leap, of the dizzying cliff, of the visceral doubt inducing experience, of knocking you off your feet.

4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of hi-speed connectivity. A racing micro computer wirelessly tied in to a series of great tubes like serpents with explosive breadth and deeply interconnected communities... a roaring digital world which seems to run on human energy and shared knowledge, a powerful under-utilized tool for developing rich compassionate interpersonal networks and not just “friends” to whom we advertise our shows.

5. We want to praise the “professional” artists who take themselves seriously as professionals, who search out and demand access to necessary knowledge, tools and resources, who engage in mentor relationships and build their skills as craftspeople, who actively advocate for the collective benefit of all arts professionals. We also want to praise the amateur who makes art as part of their daily practice, and shares their love of art by participating in loosely clustered, community-based, public outlets, by attending professional performances, and by engaging in critical aesthetic discourse that challenges the professionals.

6. We will no longer make work we think people want to see. We will only make work that is true to our unique visions. We will only make work that thrills us, that helps us breath, that only we can make. And we will make it without fear, because we believe failing gloriously is more valuable than competently executing the mediocre, even when the mediocre is “popular”, and because we believe that those who hold the resource purse-strings should follow our lead and chase after us for the work we make instead of the other way around.

7. We will follow long-term plans to make high-quality art rigorously, patiently and with the almost myopic focus of a predator stalking its prey, while staying socially, culturally and discursively engaged so that we can adapt to the constantly changing conditions of our world.

8. We refuse the ideology of opportunistic thinking because it can only react to opportunities that appear in the landscape and may or may not have anything to do with our vision. Instead, we think strategically because in strategic thinking we actively cultivate the opportunities that directly feed our visions.

9. Performance exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not faced well-formulated critical debate. There is no great work that does not engage its culture in fervent discourse. We must reclaim that ability to discuss aesthetics from the ivory tower of academic authority, the ignorance of the art-critic, the cowardice of political correctness, and the fear of elitism. Our work must be both the making of art and the debate of aesthetics, only then will the audiences follow us comfortably into the unknown.

10. We are on an extreme promontory of the centuries! We must learn from the past as we push into the future never forgetting that we too are citizens of this century – which means we must actively organize to solve issues that plague all of us as citizens, for example, lack of healthcare, crappy public transportation, over-priced housing, and an under-funded educational system.

11. We glorify the value of live performance - the only cure for the world – the visceral experience, the communal participation, the constructive gesture of mutual aid, the beautiful ideas that question our everyday assumptions and practices, the power of rigorous research and innovation, and the contempt for the fear of failure.

12. We demolish the stagnating blockages that persist in cultural institutions. Large arts institutions, foundations, governments, and other organizations - that constipate the organic circulation of resources and access to the arts - must be thrown from their pedestals of cowardice and forced to rigorously cultivate the future, the young, the high-risk, even while they safeguard the past, the experienced, the established.

13. We encourage the great crowds agitated by our work, by pleasure and by deliberate collective action; the multi-colored and polyphonic hybridity of contemporary performance; work that is enriched and made stronger by artists who are active citizens, engaged earnestly in building and deepening their ties to their local neighborhoods, their aesthetic peers, and their material resource networks; the articulation of the REAL costs of making contemporary performance; the artists laboring night and day to make their work; and the applause of enthusiastic crowds even if they number in the single digits.

2009-01-29T13:00:00.000-08:00

Testimony Prepared For:
Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
Domenic M. Recchia Jr., Chairperson
Council Chambers - City Hall
Thursday January 29th, 1:00 p.m.
“Oversight - Encouraging Self-Sufficiency and Better Business Practices for Artists and Cultural Groups”

My name is Morgan von Prelle Pecelli and I have been working as a producer, strategic consultant, artist and anthropologist in New York City’s performing arts sector since 1999. I have worked primarily with very small arts groups throughout the five boroughs whose budgets average about $5,000 - $75,000 per year, as well as larger more established organizations like Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The Graduate Center’s annual PRELUDE Festival, and the relatively new 3LD Art & Technology Center with budgets between $400,000 and $1.6million. Some of these artists receive direct local and state support, but many of them receive little other support from private foundations and larger arts institutions. Although, the smaller arts groups I am speaking about remain, for all intents and purposes, unknown to most New York performing arts audiences, these artists have been written about in publications like the New York Times, American Theater, NYU’s TDR/The Drama Review, and ArtForum Magazine as well as international press outlets. And, while they do not have the audiences or budgets of most Broadway or Off-Broadway houses, many of them have attained internationally recognized and culturally historic importance. Furthermore, they are a prominent face of New York City across the globe, because they are the artists performing at large international arts festivals in places like Sydney, Paris, Hong Kong, Berlin and Tokyo.

The arts groups I speak of here have achieved these remarkable heights, against many odds, through their own diligence, talent, and ability to self-organize. They are already self-reliant. Out of necessity and despite the fact that their university training provided them with NO business education whatsoever, they have cobbled together hybrid models for revenue and resource generation, including diverse earned income streams (box office, art sales, and earned income from software they designed), token stipends from presenters here in NYC, across the US and in foreign countries, small amounts of contributed income from individuals government agencies and foundations, and material donations received through wonderful institutions like Materials for the Arts, as well as other off-book practices like bartering for labor and equipment, dumpster-diving for materials, and couch-surfing for housing. However, despite all these avenues for generating resources and “income”, these artists still often fund their art by working jobs outside of the arts industry or as day-laborers for larger artistic institutions. Their art certainly does not provide them with the money necessary to keep a roof over their head, food in their stomach, or fare for the subway, forget about health insurance. Furthermore, as their careers progress, many of them actually hit financial walls, because the foundations that funded them when they were “emerging”, cut them off after two or three years, and there are very few funding sources to replace this loss. So, while the demand, expenses and time outlay for their art has in fact increased remarkably during that ‘pseudo-funded’ time, their income does not necessarily experience a steady rise to match these developments, simply because of systemic issues in the way arts and culture are funded.

I state all this not to complain about their circumstances nor to tout their skills at masterfully eeking out an existence in already dire conditions, but rather to express my concern for their future. The way these artists, - the international face of New York City, artists who could live anywhere in the world, but desperately struggle to continue living here because they love this City, - the way these artists have survived this long is in some part by feeding off of ‘bigger fish’. And in this downturn, I worry that they won’t be able to anymore. What will happen to their prospects as the service industry tightens its belt and restaurants, bars and clubs choose employees who can work any shift all 12 months of the year? What will happen to their income as the bigger non-union theater houses cut their budgets and with it their freelance over-hire carpenters, electricians, and designers? What will happen to their ability to build their sets when the borrowed, recycled and dumpster found materials become more scarce due to the cuts in production costs in New York’s mid and large sized creative institutions?

I know these may seem like trite concerns for a small population, but you are asking today: “how can arts groups employ better business tactics, use marketing strategies, take advantage of technology and community outreach and connections and become more internally organized and self-reliant during these harsh economic times?” For the artists I work with, the economic times have always been harsh. And, rather than cut them out unwittingly because they don’t have big enough audiences or potential box office returns, the larger institutions might want to consider bringing them in closer and asking them: how have you been surviving all these years on next to nothing?

Furthermore, I have to beg the committee here that while they consider these business issues, that they also consider whether or not there is perhaps something intrinsically valuable about the arts that cannot be measured by ticket sales, audience attendance and financial bottom lines. Because, while I am one of the biggest lobbyists amongst artists for improving their business skills, thinking strategically about their professional development, and working cooperatively to improve resource networks, I also know that often times the best, the most challenging, the smartest, the most rigorous, the most culturally relevant art is made by artists who couldn’t tell you the difference between “a bottom line” and “a target demographic” or who could tell you, but simply do not have the time to develop a business plan or implement a new marketing strategy. And, I worry that when left simply to market forces of supply and demand, it is these artists who will fail. I worry, that these artists, who make New York City a flourishing bastion of cultural progression and economic innovation, may disappear not because their art is worthless, but because they can’t hire people with MBAs and marketing degrees to sell their art for them.

The Arts Industry must have more than a financial bottom line. Likewise, it must also have a mission beyond community outreach, beyond educational tool, beyond tourist attraction. New York’s cutting-edge artists and small arts organizations produce work that challenges our expectations and experiences. They confront entrenched ways of understanding the world. They generate culturally relevant methods of connecting people from diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. They inspire curiosity, experimentation and rigorous investigation into new areas of knowledge. And, they achieve all of this, while also bringing pleasure to audiences of all ages, backgrounds and interests.

If the City wants to maintain its position as a cultural center and as an innovative engine within the broader US economy, then shouldn’t it really be supporting art that is ground-breaking? Shouldn’t it really be asking the large institutions it supports – are you producing art that is relevant to today’s culture, that is forward thinking, that is going to present a face of radical creativity to everyone who lives here and visits us? And, the answer to that question cannot always be found in audience numbers, demographics and marketing data. Because while there should always be a place for popular established cultural expression, shouldn’t a City that wants to remain a dynamic force be supporting the cutting-edge risk-takers in all its core industries? The leaders in cultural progress? The artists, scientists and inventors no one has heard of yet, but will change the world tomorrow?

As you ask the Arts Industry to be more internally organized and self-reliant, I’d like to ask the committee to consider also using its leverage to pressure these large, well funded, arts organizations to come up with new models that reach deep into the arts community and take into account not simply their own currently dwindling financial bottom lines, but also New York City’s cultural environment today, in 5 years and even in 50 years. On the City’s behalf, these institutions should take it upon themselves to diversify their artistic interests in an effort to strengthen their cultural capital as much as their financial capital and achieve not a short-term band-aid, but a long-term solution to ensuring New York’s cultural vibrancy. I do not mean to imply that the larger institutions should help small groups by passing through funding or other such already limited resources. Rather I mean to suggest that the smaller arts groups could help the large institutions. So often, the large institutions ignore smaller groups despite the smaller group’s recognized international and cultural importance. The larger organizations should open their doors, ears and minds to the ideas, skills, and strategies that the smaller arts groups are already employing. They could begin by looking to those free-lance artists (aka leaders of small arts groups) that they hire occasionally and instead of laying them off because of budget cuts, ask them to become strategic consultants. Partner with these smaller scrappier artists who know what it means to make art in harsh conditions, how to network and collaborate for resources, how to recycle and reuse, and how to work closely with other local industries in the community to ensure the neighborhood’s success as a whole. Learn cooperatively how to survive, as the committee so aptly put it, "in harsh times" and to more actively share in building a strong and healthy cultural community.

The smaller cutting-edge artists have played a large role in defining culture in New York City for decades and particularly in defining its image overseas. They might also be able to help redefine New York’s large cultural centers as progressive, culturally diverse, and economically efficient institutions.

Some ideas include:
1. Encourage the institutions you support to create top-down partnership networks between large institutions, mid-sized institutions and the small cutting-edge spaces. In the current climate, many artists find it very difficult to make the career leap from a small theater to one of the City’s larger venues. Through a partnership network, larger institutions, like Lincoln Center, the Public Theater and Brooklyn Academy of Music, along with mid-sized houses like DTW, The Kitchen, Performance Space 122 and HERE, as well as smaller spaces like the Ontological-Hysteric Theater’s Incubator programs, Chez Bushwick, or The Brick Theater, would be able to invest in the futures of the early higher-risk artists, and create a manageable growth path to established careers. These networks would share in curatorial, marketing and even material resources. The arts institutions involved would commit to cooperatively monitoring the growth of the performing arts industry in New York and make it possible for young artists to have access to more professional resources and be making their art full time and with more robust audiences sooner, all the while ensuring these larger institutions have a foothold in the next generation of audiences. It might mean a short-term reallocation of resources for some of these institutions, but the long-term benefits would be remarkable for the institutions, the artists and New York City.

2. Partner with other city agencies, local universities and arts service organizations to create a stronger and more strategic professional development path for locally based artists. No arts student should graduate with a Bachelor’s degree from any of our local institutions without having taken a business-skills-for-artists course, that teaches them the basics from how to use Excel to how to create and build a committed audience. Artists who do subsist below the poverty line should be shown how to take advantage of the small business development, healthcare and housing services the City provides to others just like them who work in other industries. Artists should be encouraged to work with their service organizations, to articulate their changing needs, and to gain access to larger networks of human, financial and knowledge resources. Artists and community members will benefit most if all of these organizations are acting in partnership, sharing information with each other, creating strong relationships between the arts community and local neighborhood communities, and reducing redundant programs to avoid wasting their own limited resources.

3. Create a North East Arts Corridor. Learning from the touring models many of these artists leverage when they work in Europe, perhaps the City, in conjunction with Amtrak and local transit authorities could take the initiative on spreading the creative wealth and sharing the financial burden. So often recently, I have heard discussions about an exodus from New York City because costs are simply too high to sustain artists. Instead of continuing to view Philadelphia’s recent growth as a cultural center as competition, perhaps New York City could position itself as an anchor in a cultural corridor from Washington, D.C. to Portland, Maine. This corridor could act as a regional touring circuit. It would generate more cultural cross-pollination between cities, defray production costs across cultural institutions throughout the North East, and provide broader access to high-quality cultural events not just to those living in big cities, but also universities, community organizations and smaller arts centers scattered across the North East Metro Area. It could provide desperately needed space and time resources to artists struggling to find appropriately equipped and sized development space in New York so that their work can be realized to its fullest potential. Furthermore, it could raise the profile of New York’s artists as well as of New York City itself as a cultural hot-spot for tourists and business people visiting from nearby. It could also better prepare artists living and working in New York for international tours, making them an even stronger face for the City abroad.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak here today.

Sincerely,

Morgan von Prelle Pecelli
The Lost Notebook
www.lostnotebook.org

Between the Black Box and the White Cube

2008-09-01T04:53:00.000-07:00

PRELUDE 08 Dramaturg's Statement

What can an anthropologist say in few pages about an issue that has plagued the fields of theater, performance, performance art and their scholarly counterparts for more than a century? Particularly a decade after we began living in a "post-theatrical, post-anthropological age"?(1) Likely, not much you don’t all already know about yourselves. The debate the curators are trying to trigger about place is not necessarily a new one. However, as New York City experiences a growing exodus of artists to places like Berlin and Philadelphia, and as a number of our lobbying groups and service organizations are working on our behalf with city officials to obtain “affordable performance and development” spaces, it seems particularly relevant to revisit the question: How do New York City performing artists, producers, and curators respond to the places they call their creative homes, i.e. the theatrical black boxes, the museum’s white cubes and all the grey spots in between?

In 1849, Richard Wagner wrote “The Art-Work of the Future” and handed modern art a challenge: to find its way back from “an egoistic, self-concerning business”(2) to a common public endeavor deeply connected to life and offered up his theatrical Gesamtkuntzwerk (total artwork) as possible solution. 150 years later, in 1999, an article titled “An Agenda for American Museums in the Twenty-First Century” advised something in a similar vein: museums should “engage actively in the design and delivery of experiences that have the power to inspire and change the way people see both the world and the possibility of their own lives.”(3) During the 15 decades between these two articles, artists struggled with the challenge not just of reaching out to diverse and wide-ranging communities but also of doing so from within the confines and the limitations of institutional theaters and museums that predominantly reproduced traditional western societal and political hegemonic norms. Artists working against those entrenched values had to break out of the black box and the white cube, taking their work to the streets, private homes, bars, and other such alternative venues in order to reach not simply their niche audiences, but also that elusive “common public”.

The theatrical work of the surrealists and symbolists, including Artaud’s “Theater and Its Double,” would appear to have posed the first real challenge to western theater’s dramatic foundations. As the trigger for a revolt not simply against the aesthetic form, but also against the ideological and social legacies that the “theater” as a place – as an institution – represented, some have pointed to Alfred Jarry’s first showing of Ubu Roi and to his 1896 publication of "The Uselessness of Theater to/in the Theater" in which he not only took aim at the audience’s desire to sit silently in the dark and be entertained, but also with their desire for “realistic” visions of their daily lives. However, it could be argued that the Dadaists and Futurists, many of whom came from the visual, plastic and poetic art worlds, with their revolutionary performances, really ushered in the "demise" of theater as anything other than affirmation of the dominant cultural and political sensibilities.

By the 1970s and ‘80s, revolutionary performance forms that followed in those early footsteps were finally accepted into the very institutions they were meant to defy, and performance art became an integral part of curation for the Art World. (4) By introducing theatricality, particularly the live performance form, into the "white cube," curators challenged many of the foundational tenets of their museums and galleries. Rather than merely replacing the "white cube" with the "black box," (5) this shift introduced to the museum/gallery a whole other mode of interacting with the audience. First, watchers of performance become participants in meaning-making, a novel experience for the modern viewer of art, who had grown used to being confronted with an object, the meaning of which was supposed to be complete and transparent with or without the viewer. (6) Second, the ephemerality of the "Live" questions the nature of artifact and memory inherent to the purpose of the museum. No longer a home simply for historically relevant art objects, by including live performance the museum could catch in its grasp the “present” as well. Third, the lack of a legal mechanism by which a performance may be owned or traded also creates an unsettling possibility for galleries whose purpose is to 'sell' things. Theater in the museum and gallery setting becomes a kind of “non-collectable art” and becomes highly valued precisely for its impermanence. In these ways, the showing of live performance becomes an ideological subversion of authority, of ‘ownership society,’ of capitalism, and even of the commodity fetish. During the past 50 years, museums have been fighting reputations as "institutions" that reproduce national identity, stoke capitalist market greed, and promote a kind of stagnant culture. Live performance has offered them a way to hook into the post-modern ephemerality of the "Live," the hunger for experiences, and other such things for which our schizophrenic post-Delueze/Guattarian YoCo (“Young Cosmopolitan”) audiences are searching – and for which they are willing to shell out time and money.

The exchange between the American avant-garde theater movements and performance art over the last 40 years has generated a plethora of rich and diverse theater, performance, curation, and scholarship, as well as new understandings of place. Perhaps the question still up in the air is: why hasn’t the “THEATER” caught on? Or has it, perhaps, but the general public just has not noticed? Why has it been relegated to the status of “irrelevant entertainment” and how did it let itself become “a place where serious debate and subversive discourse no longer happens”? While many self-described ‘theater companies’ may have caught on, why do the institutions themselves and the audiences they serve seem to remain lodged in the 19th century, making dramatic spectacles? Place and particularly the institutions embodied through these architectural monuments continue to play a critical role in how performance is presented to and valued by the public. Can the theatrical box be salvaged? Should it be? Or should we simply claim the term “performance” for all theatrical work that abandoned the dramatic- naturalistic-entertainment foundation, and move on? Should we concede the term “theater,” in the end, to the “post-theatrical” age?

The works of the artists show-cased in this festival draw on this legacy of 160 years of struggle to change what a “theater” is and what a “museum” can exhibit. Over the four-day festival we ask them to consider how the places where they make their work have affected not simply what they make, but how they make it. We ask them how new technologies that incorporate virtual spaces and virtual audiences influence how they use the performative place. But we also ask them to imagine, in this 21st century, where theater and performance will go and how we can convince the audiences follow. As one of the curators stated, “Do we change ‘theater’ to accommodate contemporary audiences’ interactive habits? Or do we change the proposition of what is expected ‘in the theater‘ – the actual four walls?”

(1)Phelan, Peggy, The Ends of Performance. 1998, p5.
(2)Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future. 1849, p75.
(3)Harold Skramstad, in Daedalus; Summer 1999; 128, 3, p128
(4)Goldberg, RoseLee, Performance Art, 2000.
(5)Manuel J. Borja-Villel, “A Theater Without Theater: The Place of the Subject”, in A Theater without Theater, 2007, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
(6)Manuel J. Borja-Villel, “A Theater Without Theater: The Place of the Subject”, in A Theater without Theater, 2007, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona

In preparation for these framing remarks, I asked the curators and artists three questions, and I think some of the answers were, to say the least, worth sharing. To close the frame here, I let their words speak for themselves:

What is the difference between on the one hand theater and on the other performance art or installation/visual/plastic art?

“There is no difference, all art is created to be seen, to project something onto the world where there was nothing before.”

“I think of performance art as more expansive, blurring the parameters between art forms and disciplines, altering space for the artist and audience. But more and more…theater forms and conventions are happily fracturing”

“More often than not, the difference between these genres is one of framework, of context, rather than content or even form. The theater has been dominated for centuries by an urge to tell stories, to represent, to use language. Conversely, the history of performance within a visual arts context is one of body-based, non-representational art… But today, these two histories are meeting; the gene pool is mixing.”

“The difference is the impact of experiencing the work over a fixed period of time. Speaking generally, every piece of theater has a beginning, middle and an end. There is a contract unconsciously agreed upon between artist and audience as to the duration of time necessary for properly viewing the work. This arch of time becomes the framework within which all other choices are made. The theater artist counts on this period of captured attention to structure his work. Likewise, the gallery artist must consider how to make fully expressed statements without this guarantee of time.”

“I perceive very little difference between these forms. The difference that DOES exist seems to come from the difference in how the forms are received. Installation/visual/plastic art seems to be considered sophisticated, intellectually rigorous, high brow, etc. Now, of course, there are bad things that go along with this perception. The spaces where installation/visual/plastic arts are shown seem to be more elitist, and require all sorts of strategies to invite encourage attendance and discourse. Free nights, programs like First Saturdays.., etc have been devised to open these places up to more folks and to engage with the neighborhoods in which they exist. Theatre, on the other hand, perhaps because of its being tied up with entertainment, seems to be perceived as less than. Maybe that is what is so distressing about the rising prices of theatre tickets. Something that is perceived as being for everyone and not some cultural elite, [is now] carrying higher and higher ticket prices, [and may start] to alienate it’s audiences, [and] distance itself from the neighborhoods where it resides.”

“Performance is contextualizing a live event in a way that says it isn’t normal reality…Theater is a form that can be art that uses performance as a medium. Theater can [also] be entertainment…. What is this difference between entertainment and art?…Entertainment sets out to meet or exceed your expectations in terms of gratification…you know what the psychological and emotional transaction is with entertainment…it’s a very clear tangible deliverable, it can be rated and qualitatively judged based on its ability to deliver what it promises. Art on the other hand creates a space for ambiguity and ambivalence and questions. Ultimately the point is to create questions, to create discomfort and to investigate…Contextualizing theater as art, you remove the expectation that it is conventional entertainment.”

Why do you choose to make your works in the theatrical context as opposed to the museum context? (Is it a choice?)

“I love theater. I started, like most people, with Shakespeare and musicals and what was available to me. I love theater. I love the process of making it. I love the experience of being the audience. I love listening to language. I love being moved emotionally. I love that experience of being in a room with other people and sharing it.…It’s not a choice. It’s what I like.”

“Its not a choice, it’s born out of necessity … I [can only] speak the language of staging, of composition in 3-dimensional space and of the musicality of emotion.”

“It’s not a choice so much as a soil, you grow in the soil you’re in.”

“I do shows where ever I can find people who want to put them on.”

“I make my work any way I possibly can. But I am extremely interested in the possibilities for collective response/action that live audiences provide.”

“Museums strike me as mausoleums. They are places to pay homage to the past. Theater happens now.”

“Of course it’s a choice. As artists we are in complete command of the framework for our work. And if we fail to maintain that control, then others will surely take the opportunity to do it for us.”

“I try to think about theatrical venues as rooms instead of stages. The word “room” helps me to think about the encounter with the audience included and equal… I wish all theater would leave theaters.”

“In the beginning of my career, I worked exclusively as a theatre artist. I never considered work outside that context because I had no training in any other medium. Also, I never would have considered the museum/gallery space as a viable place for my work based on that lack of training and also, they seemed such closed environments. It all seemed so specialized. Since moving to New York, however, and seeing how difficult it was to get work in the theatre, work I wanted to do, anyway, work in the visual arts became more attractive. Working within it, I have found more and more folks from disparate disciplines working as masters of their own fate. There’s a freedom that I have found in empowering myself to create work rooted in theatre practice, but not bound by theatre space. I have worked much more and been far more creatively fulfilled than I was when I chased the carrot of venue, producer, etc.”

If you have made works for museums, or site-specific contexts, how was that experience different from when you produced in a theatrical venue?

“A venue is just a place. A piece of theater is no more or less a piece of theater because of where it is performed. It is all about the structure and framing of the event…the temporal nature of how the audience experiences the work.”

“Installations often offer more one on one experiences. Theaters provide a living breathing community, even if only for a couple of hours.”

“I think every show you make is site-specific because there's a big difference between doing a show [in one place] as opposed to [another], just in terms of the space, the dimensions, the dynamic, even the working dynamic and the place's relationship with and identity in the world. Museums obviously are places with inherent codifying attributes, so to do a show there feels maybe more momentous, both to you doing the show and maybe to the audience, despite post-modernity's wish to de-centralize that power. But in a nuts and bolts way, little difference.”

“The theater has existed within a framework of entertainment and populism for centuries. Art has institutionalized itself to such a degree that one could argue it has completely divorced itself from these concerns. On the one hand this produces a fantastically rich, academically-enhanced discourse around artistic production. On the other hand, this distancing from “the people” has allowed for so much artistic production to slip into solipsism. Artists in both traditions are addressing this concern. But to the extent that the theater continues to be stewarded by a majority of commercially-minded entertainment impresarios, much of art continues to be maintained by curators and gallerists who care little for these concerns around the general public’s access to the work.”

“It seems that when theatre is de-formalized, or taken out of its traditional “space”, the audience acts in unpredictable ways, choosing to participate, with usually exciting results. It is obviously of benefit to be able to control the whole event in a theatre, using lights, sound and other technical tricks to manipulate an audience, but there is something so fundamentally important and intriguing about performance when that potentially dangerous, incontrollable element is added.”

“The term theater has many different definitions and it feels tied to a market. Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway, regional etc. … I think the folks who are out there mixing it up are not finding “success” because their work does not fit the market. I’d argue that the market is too closed and that those folks would do well to take a look a the museum/gallery space.”

“The principle difference is that a gallery is a showroom. In the business of selling… a museum is in the business of “branding” or adding value to a work/artist, etc… I think of theatre as more of a marketplace with a tangible exchange. You buy a ticket. You expect to get what you paid for.”

“A theater is where you go sit in the dark and watch something happen on a stage. A museum is where you go look at artifacts from a different era or objects created by other people to exist to be looked at and evaluated and judged and you are to be told why they are valuable. Performance that happens in a site-specific sort of way seems to be the beginning of a questioning of those models…A museum is a place sacred to the muses, so I actually feel like a museum could be a theater, a performance space, anything really…What we probably need to do, is really stop doing experimental theater in theaters. I’d put it in a museum. Just don’t call it theater anymore. Educate audiences, reach out to visual art audiences, give people the tools to look at art performance in the same way they look at visual art.”

“I recently heard a figure that in terms of video art, a museum/gallery goer is likely to spend about 20 seconds viewing the work. That’s a pretty staggering figure on many levels. What both museums/galleries and theatres seem to be moving toward is what I call the “mac store” model. We’ve all been there (I think). Whenever I go I’m always amazed at the number of different audiences they are able to serve... It’s a bit of a utopian kind of thing in the way that I’m characterizing it, but you can see the theatre and museum both making moves in this direction. Think of the number of theatres that have been opening cafes lately or the whole “late night” series thing that goes on in... It’s all about traffic. If you can get a bunch of folks into your spaces and give them a reason to hang out for a bit, you can turn whatever the location into a destination.”