When you’re stepping outside the well-trodden path and trying to create something new, you often have to find inspiration outside of the discipline itself. I tend to read books on local economics, environmentalism, and small business practices seeking analogous situations that might help to define this new pathway.

To that end, I am in the midst of reading Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart (highly recommended). The chapter “A Question of Design” has a segment entitled “One Size Fits All,” in which the authors discuss the Industrial Revolution’s underlying design assumption that “universal design solutions” (i.e., one size fits all) could be implemented to improve the world. They use the examples of International Style architecture and mass-produced detergent to illustrate the flaw in this orientation. I think it is worth quoting at length in order to fully understand that what has happened to the arts is not an isolated and unique historical development that was “organic” and “natural,” but rather part of a larger social movement resulting of a particular way of relating to the world.

First, the International Style of architecture as developed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Groupis, and Le Corbusier:

Their goals were social as well as aesthetic. They wanted to globally replace unsanitary and inequitable housing — fancy, ornate palaces for the rich; ugly, uhealthy places for the poor — with clean, minimalist, affordable buildings unencomubered by distinctions of wealth or class. Large sheets of glass, steel, and concrete and cheap transportation powered by fossil fuels, gave engineers and architects the tools for realizing this style anywhere in the world.

However, the vision of the originators was debased by those who followed:

Today the International Style has evolved into something less ambitious: a bland, uniform structure isolated from the particulars of place — from local culture, nature, energy, and material flows. Such buildings reflect little if any of a region’s distinctness or style.”…Buildings can look and work the same anywhere, in Reykjavik or Rangoon.  (italics mine)

The photo is of the Aluminaire House, and it is, without a doubt, one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen.

Shifting to detergent, the authors write:

Major soap manufacturers design one detergent for all parts of the United States or Europe, even though water qualities and community needs differ. For example, customers in places with soft water, like the Northwest, need only small amounts of detergent. Those where the water is hard, like the Southwest, need more. But detergents are designed so they will alther up, remove dirt, and kill germs efficiently the same way anywhere in the world — in hard, soft, urban, or spring water, in water that flows into fish-filled streams and water channeled to sewage treatment plants.”

In the interest of appealing to as large a market as possible, detergent is disconnected from its relationship to local conditions.

The arts have fallen prey to exactly the same one-size-fits-all approach, not only in mass-produced art such as television, popular music, and movies, but also in art forms that have an intrinsic local orientation, such as theatre and visual art. Plays, for instance, are designed to appeal to NYC audiences and critics. If they achieve a successful NYC run, then across the US regional theatres will produce their own versions during the next couple years, and twenty years later community theatres will do their own reproduction. But is it really true that the stories and styles that appeal to a New York audience will automatically be right for one in Asheville, NC or Lincoln, NE?

Let’s think of this by analogy. Here are two pictures of places in the world:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Would these two places not lead, for instance, to very different paintings — paintings that would be created using different palettes, different shapes, different rhythms, different styles, different brushstrokes, different techniques?

And yet when it comes to plays, we see plays such as Rent being performed in Peoria and witnessed by the ultimate New Yorker, Rocco Landesman, who will judge it according to New York values. We universalize those values, and disseminate New York stories as if, like the International Style architecture and mass-produced detergent, they are completely isolated from place, from local culure, traditions, history, and values. People in New Amery WI watch CSI: New York despite the fact that it bears no resemblance whatsoever to their reality. We have become so alienated from our specific place in the world that we no longer even notice that we have been colonized by urban values, urban rhythms, urban styles, urban stories. The gangsta rap music blasting from the car next to mine in downtown Marshall NC is likely to be owned by a farmer’s son out on a Saturday night toot.

The natural outgrowth of this colonization is for the colonizer to see themselves as the pinnacle of quality, as the natural goal of all who labor in the arts.  So nobody bats an eye when Rocco Landesman, visiting Peoria and seeing the aforementioned production of Rent, is noted as having observed “earlier in the day that amateur arts are worthwhile much in the same way that minor leagues and amateur sports have value in relation to the big leagues and professional sports.” There is no recognition that local arts done by amateurs or pro-am artists might not give a tinker’s damn about the self-identified “big leagues,” that the local arts might be a vibrant end in themselves. And artists buy into this value system. Why? Because they are brainwashed with the ideas from a young age. More importantly, what should be commented on is not whether the Peoria production of Rent is “as good as” Steppenwolf (“I’m not going to let you trap me on that one,” Landesman said transparently — har har), but rather whether it makes any sense  for Rent to be performed in Peoria at all.

When are areas outside of New York going to develop some pride, some sense of individual identity? When are they going to express themselves, instead of compulsively sneezing “Me too” after every artistic twitch on the East Coast? When is a visit to the theatre in different parts of the country going to be a unique experience, seasoned with local flavor and served with pride of place? When traveling, every tourist seeks an opportunity to experience the local cuisine, whether it is barbecue in Kansas City, gumbo in New Orleans, or kringle in Racine WI. But going to the theatre is like going to the mall — once you’re inside the doors, you could be anywhere.

University theatre programs need to stop teaching this generic approach, regional theatres need to reclaim their local roots, and artists need to wake up and reclaim their individuality.

Knitting and the Arts

My wife knits. She is a part of the very active knitting community that gathers on the Ravelry.com site, she listens to podcasts and reads blogs, buys books and magazines, and is part of knitting and spinning groups. (The arts could learn a lot from knitters about creating a sense of community.)  Sometimes she buys yarn, sometimes she spins her own from a fleece she’s purchased from a local sheep farmer. From the point of view of economics, this doesn’t make any sense: she could buy a sweater in a store cheaper than what she would pay for yarn, and that doesn’t include the amount of time it takes for her to do the knitting.

Once, I asked her why she did it, and her answer surprised me. I expected that she would say something about the sense of personal connection she feels to clothing she has made using her own hands, and while that is certainly the case — and is the case for me as well, as someone who often benefits from her knitting largesse — that wasn’t the only thing. What she told me was that every pair of socks or sweater she knits she sees as a strike against corporate America. When she makes something herself she feels as if she’s supporting a more local, independent, craftsman-oriented economy instead of the global industrial market.

I love it.

And of course, this applies to the arts as well. Every time we create a play, paint a picture, play or sing music together, dance, or share stories and poems, we are simultaneously not supporting art created by the global mass media. We are disconnecting from the fame machine, from the mass distributed, non-local arts economy and instead reinforcing a sense of an independent, self-sufficient community. We support local farmers when we shop at farmer’s markets or join a CSA, we support local bookstores when we buy there instead of ordering from Amazon, we support local restaurants when we eat at owner-operated eateries instead of at chains. But when it comes to the arts, we often forget the local option.

Mass media — film, television, music CDs — is the artistic equivalent of eating at McDonalds, of buying the cheap sweater made in Malaysia. Make your own — stand up against global corporate homogenization. Create something unique, and do it with your own hands. Make it authentic. And then show it with pride.

Humbling

So my previous post, “Reruns: Fish and Sharks,” garnered a lot of hits recently. I was curious, so I went to my traffic analysis to see what was up. Yesterday, I have 84 hits on that article — pretty good, respectable. Except then I looked at the box that analyzes the search results that brought people to the site. Of those 84 hits, 82 of them were from searches on “fish,” “fish pictures,” and “pictures of fish.” I’ll bet THEY were surprised!

Rerun: On Sharks and Fish

For a few brief weeks, I co-wrote a blog with my former professor and good friend Cal Pritner called “Thank You! Next?” What follows is a post I wrote January 9th, 2009 that I’d like to give a wider readership — something that might be valuable as we consider a revision of theatre education, of course, but also how we might reconceive the role of the artist. Perhaps artists might also help members of the commuhnity answer the three questions of the article quoted below. Anyway, a rerun:

As some of you may know, Cal is a retired university theatre teacher, and I currently teach at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Spring semester classes start tomorrow, and I have been busily preparing syllabi and writing introductory comments for my classes this semester: History of Theatre I, Principles of Directing I, Devised Theatre, and The Hero’s Journey in Film in Literature (at a prison about an hour from Asheville). For me, the night before classes start is one of anticipation and anxiety. Anticipation because it is a fresh start, an opportunity to learn from past mistakes and try my best to touch somebody’s life.

Over the years, I have come to believe that success is less about my own brilliance than about my ability to listen to what is going on with students and respond in ways that lead them to new rooms within their hearts and minds. I have come to see my quest as being that of a string in search of a sounding board: I sound whatever notes I have found that seem rich, and then I listen to see who is vibrating to that sound, who is amplifying it. Some notes I play resonate only within me, and no matter how beautiful I think that note is, I must try another one in the hopes that it will find resonance with someone else.

A couple days ago, I was reading the wonderful Yes! magazine and I reached an article entitled “Blessings Revealed” by Puanani Burgess. Ms. Burgess, who is a “mediator, poet, community organizer, and Zen priest,” wrote (and with apologies to Ms. Burgess, I am going to quote almost the whole essay — but please go and subscribe to Yes!):

One of the processes I use to help people talk to each other I call Building the Beloved Community. There’s an exercise that requires people to tell three stories.

The first is the story of all of your names. The second is the story of your community. The third story I ask them to tell is the story of your gift.

One time, I did this process with a group in our local high school. We went around the circle and we got to this young man, and he told the story of his names well and the story of his community well, but when it came time to tell the story of his gift, he asked, “What, Miss? What kind gift you think I get, eh? I stay in this special ed class and I get a hard time read and I cannot do that math. And why you make me shame for, ask me that kind question? What kind gift you have? If I had gift, you think I be here?”

He just shut down and shut up, and I felt really shamed. In all the time I have ever done that, I have never, never shamed anybody before.

Two weeks later, I am in our local grocery store, and I see him down one of those aisles and I see his back and I’m going down there with my cart and I think “Nope I’m not going there.” So I start to back up as fast as I can and I’m trying to run away from him. And then he turns around and he sees me, and he throws his arms open, and he says, “Aunty! I have been thinking about you, you know. Two weeks I have been thinking: ‘What my gift? What my gift?’ ”

I say “OK bruddah, so what’s your gift?”

He says, “You know, I’ve been thinking, thinking, thinking. I cannot do that math stuff and I cannot read so good, but Aunty, when I stay in the ocean, I can call the fish, and the fish he come, every time. Every time I can put food on my family table. Every time. And sometimes when I stay in the ocean and the Shark he come, and he look at me and I look at him and I tell him, ‘Uncle I not going take plenty fish. I just going to take one, two fish, just for my family. All the rest I leave for you.’ And so the Shark he say, ‘Oh, you cool, brother.’ And I tell the Shark, ‘Uncle, you cool.’ And the Shark, he go his way and I go my way.”

And I look at this boy and I know what a genius he is, and I mean, certifiable. But in our society, the way schools are run, he is rubbish. He is totally destroyed, not appreciated at all. So when I talked to his teacher and the principal of the school, I asked them what would his life have been like if this curriculum were gift-based? If we were able to see the gift in each of our children and taught around that gift?

So much of education is about creating winners and losers. So many people believe that rigor means having a certain percentage of the class get C’s and D’s, as if success is teaching is reflected in the number of kids who fail your class. Researcher Robert Sternberg has created a “triarchic” model of intelligence that embraces not only our traditional, narrowly-focused analytic thinking, but also creative thinking (how you deal with new situations) and practical thinking (how you function within a system). But even that broadening, which would be an improvement, is still based on creating winners and losers. How much is the desire to learn, so strong in young children, damaged by this process of separation?

When I teach at the prison next Thursday, I will look around the room and wonder what the gifts are in that room that haven’t been recognized or appreciated. Will we separate these young men, cut them off from society and label them as failures? Or will we seek to identify the sharks they speak to and the fish they call to them?

Ms. Burgess concludes her essay with a few more questions that, like the questions above, resonate with my own internal sounding board: “What would happen if our community was gift-based? If we could really understand what the gift of each of our communities were, and really began to support that? So that for me is a very native approach—being able to see the giftedness in every aspect of life.” Perhaps like physicians, teachers’ should follow the Latin dictum Primum non nocere — “First, do no harm.” If we did adopt this foundational ethic, the entire educational edifice would have to be altered. Perhaps if we adopted this overall, our competitive society would likewise change to something richer, more humane, and more creative.

Tom Loughlin and the Issue of Quality

Over at A Poor Player, Tom Loughlin has written an excellent post entitled “A Question of Quality,” in which he worries about his increasing crankiness with the general level of mediocrity he sees in theatre — mediocrity that insists it be treated as excellence. What troubles Tom, and is of particular interest on for those of you following the development of the CRADLE(arts) philosophy, is how the issue of “quality” plays out within a commitment to participatory arts. What “keeps me from fully embracing a retreat from the concept of the “professional artist,” Tom writes,  “is my fear that, given the propensity of 21st century society to raise the mediocre to the level of excellence, there will soon be no excellence at all.” He goes on: “The question of quality is one that I think is tiptoed around when we speak about participatory arts. When we work to open the arts to all (an idea I fully support), in this current cultural mindset we run the risk of reducing the quality of art. When everyone can get a hamburger from McDonald’s, they begin to think that McDonald’s makes a pretty good hamburger. We know that dedication, full-time commitment, experience, and an intense passion for excellence can create high quality, and that is what we have traditionally meant by “professional artist.” Trying to ascertain what is the best process and best practices we can put into place to increase participatory arts while at the same time maintaining high quality will be the trickiest part of the entire enterprise.”

The issue of quality is one that has plagued arts criticism for millenia: what makes something “good”? What if one critic “likes” something and another doesn’t — doesn’t that mean that the concept of quality is “all subjective”? What if one era dismisses something, but a later era loves it — or vice versa?

When the term “quality” is introduced into the participatory arts / community-based arts discussion, it is usually used as a way to suggest that amatuer artists don’t (indeed, can’t) create work with a “quality” as high as that made by a professional whose “dedication, full-time commitment, experience, and… intense passion for excellence” gives them a greater likelihood of achieving excellence. Indeed, in Malcolm Gladwell’s wonderful book Outliers, he devotes most of an entire chapter to the “10,000 hour rule,” which says that, no matter what it is, you have to do it for 10,000 hours before you are truly able to make a lasting contribution. The most memorable example he gives is The Beatles, whom Gladwell argues benefitted from the 8-hours-a-day gigs required of them when they were playing in clubs in Hamburg. It’s a persuasive argument. On the other hand, Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller make an equally persuasive argument in The Pro-Am Revolution. They write: “From astronomy to activism, from surfing to saving lives, Pro-Ams – people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards – are an increasingly important part of our society and economy. For Pro-Ams, leisure is not passive consumerism but active and participatory, it involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, often built up over a long career, which has involved sacrifices and frustrations.”

Let’s start with a quibble: I don’t like the use of the word “quality” in this argument, mainly because it is too broad, too difficult to define. I have the same problem with its synonym “excellence,” which I too often see as being defined as “those things I think are good.” The characteristic that Loughlin is defining as “quality,” I suspect, I’d be more comfortable calling “virtuosity,” meaning “technical skill, fluency, or style.” If we use that word, then I am more willing to admit that an amateur might be less likely to have put in Gladwell’s 10,000 hours to develop virtuosity. (Although this is not always the case — there are many people who devote as much time as do professionasl to their art, while not making their living at it. I question the linkage of virtuosity and money making, but that’s probably best left for another discussion.)

However, I think virtuosity is only one part of “quality,” and perhaps not the most important one. Virtuosity is something that is contained within the artist, and expressed through the work of art. It stands alone. For me, however, quality is an interaction, it is something that is created between an work of art and its audience.

A work of art can exhibit virtuosity, but fail to connect to its audience in any way. For example, a concert pianist might be a virtuoso playing a Mozart concerto, but if he performs before an audience for whom the Western tonal system is foreign and meaningless, then for me the performance lacks “quality.” On the other hand, a story told by someone who lacks virtuosity, but whose story connects to its audience in a powerful, immediate way, for me, is a higher “quality” performance. In other words, “quality” exists not in the work of art or performance itself, but in the experience of the art by a specific audience.

Which brings me to what I consider more important than virtuosity: authenticity or genuineness. The characteristic of being “free from pretense, affectation, or hypocrisy; sincere:; or “Honestly felt or experienced: genuine devotion.” This is a characteristic that exists both within the artist and the audience. The works is genuinely felt by the artist and authentically experienced by the audience. To me, more than anything else, this is what leads to a “high quality” performance — the authentic communication of a genuine emotion or idea from artist to audience.

Sometimes, authenticity is enhanced by virtuosity — for instance, think of when you watch figure skating in the Winter Olympics and you have been informed how difficult a particular move is and how long the skater has been working on it. When that skater successfully executes that move, you as an audience share in his or her authentic emotion and you appreciate the sheer virtuosity of what was accomplished. But all too often, virtuosity becomes an end in itself, and it stands between the audience and the epxerience. The form has taken precedence over the content, and the result is an empty experience and a lower “quality” experience for the audience. For example, much modernist art is incomprehensible to the average spectator, and while it may exhibit a high level of virtuosity, the experience is one of bafflement.

Would that experience be improved by a degree of knowledge, so that one might appreciate the technique? Absolutely, and such knowledge might release the authentic emotion contained within the virtuosity. But again, that rests not in the virtuosity itself, but in the interaction between audience and work of art. Which in turn means that the “quality” of a work of art changed with each audience.

Like Tom, I find most theatre that I see mediocre at best. But for me, it isn’t because it lacks virtuosity, but rather that it lacks genuineness — I don’t believe it, I don’t feel it. It doesn’t speak to me, because I have no connection to the artist, the story he or she tells has little connection to my life, and all the virtuosity in the world won’t bridge that gap.

Obviously, the ideal is to combine virtuosity and authenticity. The question is which element is primary. For me, a work of art needs to first be authentic; virtuosity is frosting on the cake.

Inexplicable Dumbshow Interview

The good guys at The Inexplicable Dumbshow have posted the podcast interview they did with me last week. Check it out, and while you’re there, check out all the other great stuff they do. We spent some extra time on the “(NetFlix + YouTube) / (time = money) post below.

NEA Press Release: Art Works

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 21, 2009

ROCCO LANDESMAN ANNOUNCES

“ART WORKS” TOUR

AT THE 2009 GRANTMAKERS IN THE ARTS NATIONAL CONFERENCE

NEA Chairman to visit Peoria, Illinois, as first stop

Brooklyn, NY –National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman delivered a keynote address today to close the 2009 national Grantmakers in the Arts conference: Navigating the Art of Change.

In his remarks, Chairman Landesman laid out the guiding principle that will inform his work at the agency, which can be summed up in two words: “Art works.”  Chairman Landesman explained that he means this in three ways:

1.      “Art works” is a noun.  They are the books, crafts, dances, designs, drawings, films, installations, music, musicals, paintings, plays, performances, poetry, textiles, and sculptures that are the creation of artists.

2.      “Art works” is a verb.  Art works on and within people to change and inspire them; it addresses the need people have to create, to imagine, to aspire to something more.

3.      “Art works” is a declarative sentence: arts jobs are real jobs that are part of the real economy.  Art workers pay taxes, and art contributes to economic growth, neighborhood revitalization, and the livability of American towns and cities.

Chairman Landesman announced that he will spend the next six months learning and highlighting the ways that art works in neighborhoods and towns across America.

For the full release, please go to: http://www.arts.gov/news/news09/arts-works-release-and-speech.html

MEDIA CONTACT: Victoria Hutter: hutterv@arts.gov / (202) 682-5570 / (202) 309-0100 mobile

Jarvis Crocker on Participatory Arts

In the September 14, 2009 Nation (and the August 26, 2009 on-line version — WTF?), the former front-man for the Brit-pop band Pulp, Jarvis Crocker, was interviewed in the Back Talk segment. In May 2009, “he spent a week with his band working in an art gallery in Paris…” Here is what he says about it:

I was investigating what music can be. Now that it’s no longer a supposedly viable commercial venture, would the gallery system be a valid way of disseminating it? That sounds very dry and academic, but it isn’t. We set up in this small gallery space and rehearsed, and every now and again we’d have hours where people would bring an instrument and play along, and then we provided the music to different classes, like a yoga class and a belly-dancing class. What I liked was that there were spontaneous moments–the music happened for ten minutes or however long it took, and then it was gone. So many things in our culture are based around repetition and being relived, and it’s nice to have something that comes out of nowhere and returns to nowhere.

How was it related to your work as a curator, like when you organized the Meltdown festival in London in 2007?

Meltdown was about the fact that culture isn’t something you consume. You can create it yourself; you can participate in it. The gallery residency was a natural progression of that: people were invited to participate through playing with us onstage, or people who couldn’t play an instrument could join one of the classes with our music. People have become spectators in their own life. The consumer ethos has infiltrated not just the way people live their lives but also the way they consume culture. I’m an old person, so I was brought up when punk rock happened, and the message was that you can do it yourself.

I think there is an image that participatory arts are somehow mainstream and uncool, but this is an example of how a cutting-edge musician might facilitate the creativity of others. There is a generosity to what he and his band were doing in Paris.

I found his dismissal of the music industry business model in a dependent clause — “Now that [music's] no longer a supposedly viable commercail venture…” — stunning, an indication that in at least one of the arts, the business model of selling products to consumers is recognized as being unworkable. Can the other arts be far behind?

Cocker has come up with a vibrant, locally-based approach that, while best considered an end in itself,  is also an effective way to build audiences. How many people who jammed with Crocker, or who did yoga to his music, are likely to buy his album or attend his concert?

(Netflix + YouTube) / (time = money)

As I mentioned yesterday, Chris Ashworth has been “obsessed with finding a solution to the problem of funding theater.” He’s done an excellent job trying to break this down into little steps, so that his readers can follow. I’d like to piggy-back on his analysis, and add my own piece.

As Baumol and Bowen noted over forty years ago, the cost of creating performing arts is greater than the amount of income that can be generated by the box office. The unfortunate thing is that, when Baumol and Bowen first published their study in 1966, both their and the artistic community’s response was not to search for a workable business model, but instead to propose that the “gap” be filled with government funding and foundation grants, an orientation that continues to plague us today. As Chris notes, “My informal inquiries suggest that theaters both large and small in the Baltimore/DC area see only about 25-40% of their income in the form of ticket sales. Anything in this range is considered pretty healthy.” Ahem. By analogy, think of this in terms of breathing: if you get only 25% – 40% of your oxygen through your lungs, and the rest is provided by an oxygen tank, you’re pretty damn sick. I think the performing arts as a whole are starting to emerge from denial and acknowledge that maybe we’re not as healthy as we’d like to be. Chris’ analysis is further evidence of this.

Traditionally, the way the theatre has bridged the “breathing gap” is through a combination of exploitation of the workers (unpaid internships, unpaid or low-paid artistic work) and begging (“please, Ms. Doris Duke, could I have some more?”). This is a toxic combination — sort of the artistic version of Goldman-Sachs, complete with outrageous salaries for leaders like, say, Robert Falls at the Goodman. Except unlike Goldman-Sachs, we keep asking for a bailout year after year. As Chris laconically notes, “the numbers stink.”

Chris wants to abandon this model, and to this end proposes as a starting point a for-profit rather than non-profit structure based on a justifable assumption that a for-profit model requires accountability. I agree. He then provides a scenario with which we can work:

Let’s say I’ve got a 100 seat theater. Let’s say I’ve got 10 people in my company. Let’s say I want to pay them each 50K a year. Let’s say I run shows Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, that each show I produce runs a month, and that I do six shows a year. A solid schedule. That makes 96 days a year I’m opening my door, or 9600 seats I can possibly sell. If I sell every single one of those seats, I’d have to sell them at over fifty bucks a ticket to pay my company members, and I’d have nothing left for rent, production costs, or anything else.

So that doesn’t work. Options are limited: “I can add more seats, I can add more shows, I can cut my (generous?) paychecks, but try to wiggle any of these numbers and I hit the limits real fast.” But Chris doesn’t want to get rid of selling tickets, just change it. “Exchanging money for art is a way to complete my artistic life, not damage it. That’s what money is for: translating what I can make into what you can make, and vice versa.” Chris seems to have come to the conclusion that I am against the exchange of money. For the record, I am not. As G. B. Shaw once said, I have nothing against money — I think everybody should have some. In the phrase “selling tickets,” it is not the first word I am against, but the second. The idea that people buy tickets to specific events seems to me problematic. Chris thinks so too.

So we look for a different model.  Chris looks to memberships rather than tickets, so that (like Netflix) members of your theatre pay a monthly fee. Seattle’s ACT made a foray into this business model. According to an article on SeattlePi.com, ACT is offering “to patrons who prefer the flat monthly rate of a ‘basic membership’” an opportunity to “see just about anything playing in ACT’s various performance spaces for one low price.For example, during September a basic membership participant can get a ticket to any or all of the following for his one monthly fee of $25 (or $20 if he’s under 30): “Das Barbecü,” “Until the Last Dog Dies” and “Runt of the Litter.” And, as long as tickets are available, there is no limit to the number of times a member can attend a performance in a given month — at no extra charge.” Here’s the problem with that model: Netflix offers over 100,000 titles, ACT offers 3. And let’s get serious: how many plays do you want to see more than once, much less the average playgoer? When you rent a DVD at Netflix, do you watch it over and over, or do you send it back for something new as soon as you’ve watched it?

Recognizing this problem, Chris offers something else to supplement this: access. “I can visit every rehearsal. I get a guaranteed ticket to every show you do. I get unlimited empty seat passes after I use my guaranteed ticket. When a guest artists comes to do a Suzuki workshop with your acting company? I get a chance to sign up too. For free. When you have some down time, your company members teach a class, and I get to come. For free. It means that instead of throwing your unused costumes and props in the dump, you throw a souvenir party. I get to come take home a souvenir. For free. Because I am a supporter, and that special-purpose prop is just more sawdust to you.”

I like this. What Chris is proposing is creating a relationship with the audience members, rather than a transaction. This is a step forward in the artist-audience relationship. Instead of seeing them as “consumers” who will buy a ticket to your “product(ion),” you are looking at them as ongoing members of your organization. In this model, “tickets are a byproduct,” what you are selling is a “process.”

Don’t encourage your customers to track dollar-for-dollar what they get out of every transaction. Encourage them to understand that theater is a process. A process that costs money, but produces hundreds of wonderful results. Let them invest in the process, and then let them reap the results. Use technology to increase your surface area. Live stream your shows. Post daily rehearsal photos on Twitter. Invest in a qualified videographer, and use the hell out of them. Build a living production document of every show online. Let your audience see how a scene is evolving from rehearsal to rehearsal with a quality video record of the evolution. Annotate each clip with a description of the director’s instructions, of the actor’s new choices, of the salient theatrical choices that made this version of the scene different from the last version. Put them up in a timeline. Let us see the process unfold, even when we can’t be in the room. Let me see how a scene is taken from a written blueprint to a live performance. Edit out the boring stuff.

Again, all good stuff. We do enjoy watching the outtakes and the behind-the-scenes-making-off segments on the DVDs we watch — it gives us a chance to peer into a secret world that isn’t open to the public. Except in Chris’ model, it is open, but whatever. I would add, by the way, that this would be a good enticement for a theatre to maintain a permanent company, since the artist-audience relationship is only ongoing if the faces don’t change every month. Think of this as Facebook for theatres…

I think if more theatres adopted Chris’ ideas, the theatre scene would become healthier. But there is a point where Chris and I part company, and that’s what this post is about (you thought I’d never get there, right?). The place in the woods where two roads diverge is found in the paragraphs that serve as the starting point for Chris’ brainstorming: “Let’s say I’ve got 10 people in my company….We have our product: theater. We have our customers: the audience.” Chris is still operating with the We-They model: “We” are the artists who make the art, “They” are the audience who passively (or even somewhat actively) consume it. And despite all the involvement that Chris proposes, this relationship remains intact: there’s a company of ten who create shows for an audience.

For all Chris’ regard for the Web 2.0 scene, the thing about YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Linux, and Facebook is that people are creators and participants, not just observers. There isn’t a special class of people who are allowed to contribute, anyone who wants to can do so. This is the takeaway from Here Comes Everybody and Wikinomics and Crowdsourcing: EVERYBODY PLAYS.

So here is my model, which is a derivitaive of Chris’. It is expressed in the equation in the subject line: (Netflix + YouTube) / (time = money). Breathe, mathphobics — it will be OK.

1. Netflix: I agree with Chris: Netflix is a great model. Pay a monthly fee rather than buying tickets. Make this fee reasonable, and provide a family package that can be used by anyone in the family. But the important part of the Netflix model is variety: there needs to be a lot of different options.

The problem is that even a company of ten artists can’t create enough content to provide enough variety, especially in our current 4 – 6 week rehearsal traditions. One need only look at ACT, which is a big theatre, vbut it can only provide three options in a month. This is where YouTube comes in.

2. YouTube: the artistic staff has two functions: 1) create their own work, and 2) facilitate the work of others. The first function is necessary, otherwise why would any trained artists want to devote their time? The second function, however, is what provides the variety necessary. So in addition to the performances by the artists, there are performances by people in the community. Maybe there is a dance troupe that needs a place to perform: they’re in; maybe there are some storytellers or comedians who need a venue: they’re in; maybe there is a community choir who wants to sing: they’re in. The possibilities are endless: lectures, classes, meetings, displays of art, quilting or knitting groups, political meetings, improv or No Shame theatre events, dance classes, music lessons. Have a coffee house or bar where people can hang out.  The goal is to keep the space humming with activity, beacuse ultimately the priority is the creation of community, or what Robert Putnam calls social capital. And your monthly membership fee gets you into everything. And yes, this means that everything needs to be created lightly: no monster sets for the productions — they need to come down, possibly after each performance (see my description of Sir Peter Hall’s Young Vic company, as well as Virginia Tech’s experiments with a system they called RALPH).

And like YouTube, the “quality” of these events will vary, and that’s OK. The artistic staff’s job is not to serve as gatekeepers, but rather to encourage community creativity and to provide as much variety as possible. The artists can lead through their own work,of course, providing things to aspire to. And they can (and should) help improve skills through teaching as well as facilitation. But if you buy a monthly membership, you are buying a chance to be a creator.

3. (Time = Money): But will there be an audience for all these events? After all, the long tail Chris Anderson described in a book by the same name means that there are some things that are only of interest to a few people. There are a lot of unwatched YouTube videos. Again, attendance is irrelevant, because what is being purchased are the options.

However, if your goal is to get as many people spending face-to-face time together as possible, if you want people to try out a variety of arts events, then there needs to be a little extra motivation. After all, we are all pretty content at home, and have lots of entertainment options there. Getting in the car and driving someplace requires a little push. That’s where (time = money) comes in.

Let’s say you buy a monthly subscription for $25, and you get a membership card that resembles a credit card with a swipe area. When you attend an event, your card gets swiped, and it is recorded in a database.Here’s the kicker: each time you attend an event or hang out in the coffee shop for an hour or more, a certain amount is subtracted from your next month’s fee. So if I come home from work and that night there is a choir concert, and I’m not totally certain that it really is something I want to do, but I’m sort of interested — the fact that it will subtract money from next month’s bill just might provide the little boost I need to get away from Kate and John and head over to the theatre. I might be willing to take risks I wouldn’t normally take if my time will not be wasted, but will be credited toward the future. So the result might be to create an atmosphere where risk is encouraged — or at least not discouraged. (P.S. I stole this idea from Chris Anderson’s Free: the Future of a Radical Price. He described a  Danish health club (I believe) that charged members only when they didn’t work out once a week. The motivation of members was completely changed.)

Oh, and if you provide an event, it is an automatic full reduction for the next month for everybody involved.

But what if everybody kept coming to see things? How would you pay for the next month’s rent and salaries? Good question. First, members will always have to pay a small monthly fee no matter how much they attend — membership should never be completely free. The gap between what they pay and full price, which is necessary to keep the operation going, is paid by sponsors. A sponsor might subsidize 25 members each month, and in exchange they get some sort of advertising option (and I don’t mean an ad in the program — how many of those ads do you actually look at?). A local government might sponsor some memberships in the interest of promoting community building. A foundation might do so out of an interest in the arts, or an individual might sponor one or two a month just out of the goodness of their heart. The difference is that they pay more the more people attend, so you are selling access to guaranteed eyes. In the traditional model, an advertiser buys space in the program for the same price no matter how many people actually attend; in this model, it is a sliding scale according to attendance.

I know this is a different way of thinking about the arts, and I’m certain that the model can be improved with the suggestions of others. But as a starting point, it accomplishes several things: 1) it gives full-time work to a core number of artists (the size would vary according to the number of memberships); 2) it encourages arts attendance by providing an extrinsic motivation in addition to the intrinsic motivation of a specific arts event; 3) it builds community by promoting face-to-face interaction; 4) it encourages local arts — arts by, for, and with the community; 5) it is sustainable.

Thanks to Chris Ashworth for the prompt.

Chris Ashworth Works on a New Funding Model

Over at ChrisAshworth.org, Chris has written a passionate and logical analysis of the lousy business model non-profit theatre currently has, and proposes some changes, which he is trying to implement in his own theatre. His post is called “Toward A New Funding Model for Theater.” I agree with Chris about 80% or so, and will propose my own model, which I’ll call “(NetFlix + YouTube) / (Time = Money)” — I roll it out, and let you all shoot at it, and at Chris as well. But first, check out Chris — great work!