Honolulu Symphony No Longer Stands Apart
There is an oft expressed sentiment in Hawaii that the state is about 10 years behind the current trends. The Honolulu Symphony administration, however, seems to be right in step with the current approach symphony management nationwide takes while in negotiations with their musicians.
In an interview that aired last Friday on Hawaii Public Radio, Honolulu Symphony Executive Director Majken Mechling echos the usual arguments about musicians only working part time, being overpaid for their services and being obstructionist. My heart sunk when I heard this during my morning drive to work last Friday. These arguments sound so similar to those espoused by other symphony organizations across the nation, I wondered if Mechling, who was recently executive director at the local chapter American Diabetes Association, had researched those symphony negotiations in preparation for the symphony job. Intentional or just coincidence, I believe it was a mistake to follow this approach in terms of public and musicians relations.
The symphony administration has gone from the exemplar of civil relations with musicians I cited about a year and a half ago and Ron Spigelman praised about a year ago, to just like most every other symphony.
The Honolulu Symphony musicians’ pay was about 12 weeks behind by the time a large donation late last year caught them up. They had been continuing to play for about a year even though the gap in how far behind their pay was continually increased.
Last April I had observed that the moral victory the musicians achieved by their dedication to their organization in spite of not having been paid didn’t put food on their table or pay their mortgages. I will likewise acknowledge that dedication, commendable as it might be, doesn’t pay off the symphony’s debts today.
But I can’t imagine that the decision to donate $2.13 million to the symphony last September wasn’t in part influenced by the dogged loyalty the musicians showed to the organization. I am sure the musicians’ gesture impressed a number of people enough to make less publicly recognized donations.
Now about three months after the symphony filed for bankruptcy protection, to hear the musicians disparaged as if they hadn’t provided such a significant sign of their investment disturbs me. Frankly, even if they are being obstructionist, it is hard to blame them after enduring such a long period of uncertainty and making concessions only to have things fall apart on them anyway. Even if the musicians aren’t as cordial in private as they were before, where is the benefit in employing antagonistic language?
I certainly don’t condone any threats Mechling may have received from musicians or their supporters. But after a long period where the relations between the administration and the orchestra were at least publicly polite, there doesn’t seem to be anything to gain by being critical of the musicians. The organization still retains a halo of goodwill. What is the cost of being complimentary of the musicians or saying nothing? The situation may unavoidably end with the number of musicians being severely cut. It would be better that the narrative continually be that the orchestra has always valued its musicians, always honored their loyalty and is heartsick to have reduced their numbers. That would be the sort of thing that convinces donors the orchestra is still worth supporting, even in it’s diminishes capacity.
The thing I disliked the most was Mechling’s comparison of the dealings with the musicians union to that of the state and its union employees. I believe she was trying to tap into the popular sentiment expressed on online comment forums that was recently running against the state employees while they were making obligatory noises resisting pay cuts and furloughs. (Disclosure: I am represented by one of the union bargaining units which did settle and take pay cuts and furloughs.) I believe her attempts were misplaced and unnecessary. For one thing, the state employees would have been striking and making all sorts of noise if their pay was just a couple weeks in arrears. The musicians barely made the slightest critical statement publicly against the symphony. Even now Steven Dinion’s comments in the interview that they have been frustrated by the process and don’t understand the administration’s agenda are about the strongest public statements that have been made by the musicians on the situation.
I understand and empathize with the frustration Mechling may be feeling having taken the helm of an organization that seemed to have cause for hope only to have bankruptcy declared a short time later. The time she was provided to feel any sort of elation was quickly curtailed and now she is faced with overseeing the (hopefully) partial dismantling of a long storied institution. This includes being faced with making decisions about the futures of 80 some individuals. That can’t be easy. Artists, administrators and technicians grousing about each other in turn is a national past time in the performing arts. Limiting the timing and the forum in which these are done, however, is critical.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Engaging Production Blog
Over the last few months, I have been following Don Hall’s An Angry White Guy In Chicago blog as he discusses the process behind the show he is directing, The (edward) Hopper Project..
Hall directed a play based on Edward Hopper’s iconic Nighthawks painting. He was inspired by a retrospective of the artist at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Nighthawks, Edward Hopper via Wikipedia.org
What has kept me coming back on a consistent basis is the fact that he does such a great job talking about his process and holding my interest when so many production blogs fail to do so.
So I thought I would direct a little attention his way (though he certainly doesn’t need my help) and point out some of the entries that caught my attention most:
-His discussion of how to make a play written by a group work. He acknowledges writing by committee generally isn’t going to yield anything of quality and talks about working through the conflicts he had with people who didn’t agree with his cuts. (And here is a reposting of Time Out Chicago preview piece he inserts into his blog later in which his process is described less charitably. To his glee, it seems.)
-Post about the start of rehearsal
One of the interesting things he does is reposts all the reviews of the work, starting on January 19 (if you followed the link to all the Hopper entries, just scroll up and start reading upward from the review by Joe Stead.) He then reflects, pretty fair and honestly for the guy who directed it, about the review, further discussing what his aims had been.
He acknowledges why some people may find the show difficult or dislike the style in which the show was presented. He says as much in response to one of the first reviews
“I’d be lying if I didn’t feel a sigh of relief that someone appreciated the fractured narrative structure and found it “consistent with the mystique evoked by Hopper.”
His review of reviews illuminates in one place the truth that you shouldn’t attempt to gear your show toward pleasing critics. What each seemed to think he lacked contradicted at least one other reviewer.
-One of the entries I loved the most since I have never heard of anyone else even trying to experience their show in this manner is the entry where he listens to his show being described for the blind. He laughs so hard that he approaches the point of sabotaging his own show.
However, Don does suffer some repercussions for his practice of reprinting reviews whole cloth and receives a cease and desist letter in response. The Chicago Tribune Theatre Editor pre-emptively reminds him of the limits of fair use when he provides Don with the link to the review which appeared in that paper. (I assume he does that with all the blogs and not in reaction to the desist letter.)
While I don’t wish legal action on anyone, I appreciate the reminder about the intellectual property issues and concerns one must be cognizant of when creating art. From what I understand, the cease letter was sent in reaction to reprinting a review from a web only publication. Since he fully credits and links to the original review, the only motivation I can think of for hiring a lawyer is that the advertising revenue lost by not having people visit the site. I am not sure Don was even asked to take the post down prior to receiving the letter. As more newspapers move to web only presences, I wonder if this sort of thing will become more prevalent.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Making Spitballs In Art Class
Last week, over at Dewey21C blog, Richard Kessler linked to the Arts cover story in American Teacher magazine (starts on page 10). The magazine is published by The American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers unions in the country so this is going out to a lot of people.
I know we have heard it before, but it really got my hackles up to read about the arts being viewed as a fun subject or a “frill designed to provide students with a break from their regular classroom routine.” So learning isn’t supposed to be fun, eh? Well I am glad educators finally came out and admitted what I suspected in elementary and high school. I hadn’t realized enjoyment was such an impediment to one’s ability to learn.
The thing is, an arts teacher has to great crowd control skills. Because students view it as a relaxed, enjoyable experience, arts classes engender the energy of gym class without the opportunity to expend it with physical activity. Teachers need to be adept at channeling that energy into creative outlets rather than goofing around. Classes can often require the materials supervision of a science lab so teachers need to make sure students don’t leave the room with substances embedded in their clothes that weren’t there when they arrived.
Besides, anyone who says learning about the arts is fun clearly hasn’t had a conductor lecture about a piece ad infinitum prior to a concert.
I am only half kidding about when I make that comment. There is plenty of serious scholarly work that has been done on the arts that can be taught. The fact arts can be fun and be the subject of significant study should be to its credit. I will admit that the arts haven’t done a good job showing its connection to other disciplines.
We talk about the arts’ inherent power to raise test scores but art is not created in a vacuum entirely independent of any other discipline. Maybe that fact needs to be explored and exploited more often. An artist often needs to be a historian and researcher. They need to know about the properties of materials and how they interact. (The number of times I have heard about ceramics being ruined when a person uses low fire clay in a high fire kiln is proof enough of this.) The artist needs to know about physics and mathematics. (Fibonacci progression in music, anyone?)
Paper making alone can be used in conjunction with history (Silk Road, preservation of knowledge, expansion of literacy) and science (what is the volume of water that different types of pulp can absorb).
This was what I had in mind when I talked about arts teachers needing to be good classroom managers. I was once involved with an outreach project where we went into schools with paper making. We didn’t do anything in connection with science and history and maybe we should have. But as far as I am concerned, any teacher who can keep kids engaged and on task when they have the ingredients for a massive spitball on the table in front of them is truly a master teacher.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Funny Thing Happened While Revising Bylaws
I was really surprised at some recent developments in my block booking consortium today. For about a year we have been scrutinizing our bylaws because people began to realize that practice was deviating from the specifics of the document. I had contributed some information on bylaws to the conversation based on material I wrote about in an earlier entry.
Since the last meeting a committee had met to discuss the bylaws. I wasn’t surprised to learn that people were leaning toward merging with the organization that “birthed” us. Most of the membership overlapped so we generally ended up having meetings together. The only defining difference between us were the genres of entertainment we booked. The discussion of merger brought up many technical questions that will require consulting a lawyer.
One of the interesting questions that arose was if we dissolved one organization and consolidated everyone into the other, could the funds of the dissolved organization be absorbed by the remaining organization. While non-profits’ assets are usually only transferable to other non-profits, an organization’s charter may specify where the assets should go if it ceases operation. Someone mentioned a group to which he belonged had stipulated the funds be split among some local music programs.
What surprised me was the amount of introspection that was occurring about the organizations. It turns out my experience as a member, that of a partnership to leverage our buying power and to collaborate on grants, is not the ideal upon which the groups were founded. There is a lot of history of which I am unaware. At one time there was a much greater focus on community education projects. And the membership was much larger. As coordinating tours started monopolizing greater amounts of time at meetings, the organizations became less relevant for many members and they started drifting away.
By the time the meeting ended, we decided to have a retreat prior to our annual meeting in May to examine the identity and purpose of the groups in addition to discussing whether they would merge or not. This was the last of my associations I expected to be organizing a retreat to contemplate its ideals. Everything has been very practical. Discussions have revolved around times, dates, hotel rooms needed, artistic fees and whether a group offered ed services.
Now people are questioning whether we can be a force for arts advocacy in our community.
I am starting to get a little excited about this planned retreat in May and what might develop.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Theater That Revolves (Among Other Things) Around You
It has been a busy week for me. All the entries this week were started on the day prior to the time stamp and finished after midnight. In the interests of getting to bed a little quicker, I want to offer you a short entry with this very cool video from TED.
Joshua Prince-Ramus, an architect on the Wyly Theatre of the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas speaks on the process they went through to create a space that is able to recreate itself. In this building, the seating and the stage actually fly in and out providing as few as two people the ability to shift the space into multiple configurations. In addition, an audience can either enter through the lobby or directly through one of the pivoting exterior walls.
Though he admits it would take a little too long to do in a 15 minute intermission, he suggests a show could start in a thrust configuration exit to an intermission and have the audience return to a second act in arena configuration–with the audience entering and exiting through different modes of egress.
All of this designed with the aim of the building serving the needs of the artist rather than the artist fitting the work to the building.
All very cool. And *sigh* very expensive, I am sure.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Chatting In The Gauntlet
For the discomforting performance I referenced in yesterday’s entry, we had set up a seating area on stage so that audience members could sit there and watch the performance looking out at the audience in the permanent seats. The cast referred to it as a gauntlet arrangement and from the tension it evoked, it was probably an apt description.
Can’t Talk Now, I Am Acting
Part of the performance involved the participation of “volunteers” from the audience. These people were chosen from those seated on stage and at one point, they help secure a performer in a bungee rig. An interesting thing happened. One of the volunteers started chatting with the artistic director while the bungees were being flown in about how much he had wanted to take her master class and maybe even take a dance class at the college. Striking up a conversation during the performance was a pretty strange thing to do, but the show was a little strange itself. After the show he spoke with all the cast members and even emailed the group complimenting the performance.
Those that spoke to him didn’t get the sense that he normally had problems acknowledging social boundaries. He was just really excited by his experience and wanted to talk about it.
Encourage People To Text During Your Monologue?
I started to wonder if this might be a sign of things to come as people begin to expect that the ease and immediacy of social media conversations be translated into their face to face encounters. We have already seen the negative side of this with people talking on cell phones and texting during performances. But this incident Saturday night gave me some insight into the constructive possibilities if a performance was well-designed to take advantage of these impulses.
There seems to be a growing practice at conferences that people Twitter about the speaker/panels, often with the hope that someone is monitoring the tweets and will adjust the content accordingly to either address areas of interest/questions or move past the boring parts. This sort of interactivity could be harnessed for a performance to change its direction every night.
But I wonder if there is a way to create an entirely new dynamic between performers and audiences in which a more extensive interaction than the way having people call out suggestions at improv shows transpires. I don’t know exactly how it would manifest, but I can imagine the performers would act to guide things in a general direction and integrate audience members either individually or as a collective resource.
How Sharper Than A Serpents Tooth Is A Marginalized Audience
What I am fairly certain of is that it won’t be a matter of trying to adapt what is already done to include patrons. People may find some successes, but shoehorning your audience into King Lear isn’t going to cut it in the long run. The format may evolve from current practice in stages, but I think it will depart from it eventually.
The success of this idea hinges on the guy from this weekend being a sign of things to come where people are less self-conscious about stepping forward to become involved in social interactions in general rather than an outlier. Given that those who watch YouTube videos far outstrip those who contribute, I don’t expect self-consciousness to ever erode so far that everyone will want to be up on stage.
Fits With Other Trends
It occurs to me that a situation where those with training/greater experience in the arts act to guide those with less dovetails well with other trends we have been hearing about. It would allow Pro-Ams to become more involved and pursue their interests if greater opportunities existed. If arts people became more adept at directing people without arts training in various activities, then perhaps they will gain the requisite skills to drive the creative economy we are told is emerging.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Getting What I Wanted…And Then Some
From the “watch what you wish for” file. Last Friday I was driving home pondering the fact that far fewer people purchased tickets over the phone or in person than they did even five years ago. As a result we have lost an opportunity to speak with people and gain clues about what their impetus was for coming to the show and what sort of experience they expect. Certainly, we can speak with people in the lobby before the show and at intermission, but both our ability and time frame in which to act on things we learn is impaired. We also aren’t getting information like “my wife asked me to call for tickets for our friends and ourselves…” to learn who it is that initiates the attendance process.
Technology allows us to provide information and an opportunity to purchase 24 hours a day. However, I being to feel that the communication stream between our patron base and ourselves is increasingly one way. We provide the information telling them about the show on our websites, emails and stories but we get relatively little back from our community. If they didn’t buy tickets, we might not get any sign of response at all. Lack of purchase may not necessarily indicate lack of interest, just use of the wrong communication channel to reach people.
So as I was driving home Friday, I started pondering making today’s entry an open letter to our communities telling them they needed to be partners in the communication process to let us know if we were meeting their expectations.
Then came our show on Saturday.
We had advertised the performance everywhere noting that it was for mature audiences only. You couldn’t buy tickets online without seeing an image of the brash performance group making crude gestures (crotch grabbing, etc). We didn’t hide that the show might offend people. We warned people we suspected might be upset by it, including mentioning that it might not be suitable for their kids. We made a similar announcement before we opened the door that night.
Within 10 minutes people walked out and asked for a refund. I gave it without question because there was worse than that to come and I didn’t want to be accused of manipulating them into sticking around. More people walked out at a particularly intense scene. One woman threw her program book down in the row in front of me and criticized the choice of the performance while the show was continuing on stage before storming away from me. (This was the person who had come in to buy tickets and we cautioned against bringing her kids.)
Let me just say at this juncture that the show, while quite unsettling, wasn’t providing an extreme experience. There is far more coarse language concentrated in the first 10 minutes of David Mamet’s American Buffalo. The subjects being covered frankly and with some profanity, were not pleasant ones as you might imagine. I started to realize that people may be confusing being made very uncomfortable with actual obscene acts. Far more violence and sexual situations can be seen on television and in film but there is nothing to mediate the experience when it is live.
I admit that the show made me uncomfortable as I knew it would and I approached the lobby at intermission and the end of the show with some trepidation. But I guess everyone who hated the show had already left because no one approached me with complaints.
-One woman praised me for being brave enough to present the piece. She said of the four people in her group, she liked the show the best. She also said we gave her group something to talk about on the ride home. They were one of the last people to quit the lobby that night.
-Another woman told us that she was amazed at how far the performers went with the subjects. She noted that most of the time, groups were afraid to really commit themselves to fully exploring tough subjects so she was amazed when she realized they had reached the point people usually retreated from were going to just continue on. She said something to the effect of “I have had these conversations in private before and was flabbergasted that someone was saying them aloud for all the world to hear.” She said she was going to blog on the experience. We told her we hoped she would and asked her to send us the link.
-One of our students said his perspectives had changed.
-This weekend the performers forwarded comments attendees had left on their website. The commenters repeated the sentiment about the show giving them a lot to talk about.
I was surprised that we didn’t receive any negative emails or calls about the show over the weekend. The woman who complained to me in the theatre during the performance did call today to continue her criticism. I mostly just listened and let her talk. She told me how the show was inappropriate for the type of organization she perceived we were. Even though I didn’t agree with her about the type of places these shows should be performed; the responses of other audience members clearly showed there was some value in broaching the subject, I didn’t mention any of that.
This was the conversation I was yearning to have with my audiences on Friday. I didn’t necessarily want to have a criticism infused discussion, but I was getting what I had wanted–an audience member telling me how she perceived our organization and what she valued about it.
I really don’t have any desire or ambition to upset my audiences to elicit these sort of conversations from them. I would love for them to say these things to me all the time. But even if I was having rich, meaningful conversations with my audiences all the time, I would still present challenging work that made sense for us when I had the opportunity. Conversations on those subjects are desirable as well.
Popularity: 6% [?]
If I Were David Byrne…
I just couldn’t help it.
When I started reading the reactions (Theatre Ideas has a good discussion in comments section) to David Byrne’s blog post about how spending on the arts is prioritized (including what sort of arts were getting priority), the first thing that came to mind was a line from Crash Test Dummies 1993 song, “When I Go Out With Artists.”
The song starts out with the singer feeling overwhelmed and somewhat alienated by all the specialized language surrounding art and feeling a little anxious about being asked what he thought of the art. He imagines David Byrne wouldn’t have that problem.
If I were David Byrne
I’d go to galleries and not be too concerned
Well I would have a cup of coffee
And I’d find my surroundings quite amusing and
People would ask me which were my favorite paintings
All I could think upon reading Byrne’s entry was that he actually is concerned about the measure of art, acknowledging that he doesn’t really get Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, though he doesn’t feel he is any less accomplished as a musician for it. I very much get the sense that if Byrne was in the Crash Test Dummies’ hypothetical gallery, he wouldn’t find his surroundings very amusing if one was required to subscribe to tightly defined standards of evaluating art.
Of course, not everything is negative in Crash Test Dummies’ universe. While everyone is pretty snooty, single malt whiskeys get their proper due and greater exposure.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Only 15 Minutes Of Fame For Tragedies?
Lucy Bernholz at Philanthropy 2173 makes some fascinating reflections on the impact of technology on giving vis a vis the Haitian earthquake relief efforts.
I confess a huge amount of skepticism when I had first heard that one could donate to the relief effort via text messaging on your cell phones. I wondered how much the phone companies were profiting off this and how big a cut the donation processors would be taking. Apparently I wasn’t the only one because according to Bernholz, the phone companies have waived the fees under pressure of public opinion.
She also talks about the possibility that those who received funds may be under greater scrutiny. I remember after Hurricane Katrina, many people were horrified to learn how great a percentage of their donations were going to administrative overhead at the Red Cross and similar organizations. The Red Cross has shown some transparency by tweeting near real time updates of the climbing donation totals. Bernholz suggests that Twitter may become the platform where this is not only reported–but where people also question what has been done with the money.
The suggestion that really grabbed my attention was her idea that technology might cause/allow people to acquire “Donor Attention Deficit Disorder”
That people all over the world can be so instantly engaged and moved to donate is certainly a good thing. But does it come with costs?
On Wednesday, January 13, #Haiti was a trending topic on Twitter all day (a measure of what the millions of tweets are discussing). By Thursday, January 14, it was gone. Does the ability to give instantly and painlessly (mobile donors won’t even see a charge for the gift until they get their next phone bill) make it extra easy to give and move on? Will “donor fatigue” be replaced by “donor A.D.D.?”
The concept that even tragedies have only 15 minutes of fame before people move on is pretty chilling. If the best tactic for successful fund raising is providing people with an opportunity to give at the point where the emotional appeal is greatest, it is going to be increasingly difficult to sustain any sort of long term support. And how long will it be before people become inured to solicitations of calculated to concentrate a great deal of emotional response in a short span. Such an approach might stunt efforts to gather support for true tragedies.
It probably doesn’t help that we are told to just give money. Granted, in this case, it just isn’t practical to become physically involved. Much less so that after Hurricane Katrina. There is also something of an underlying message that once you have given, you no longer need to be engaged with the problem. All you are being asked to do is just give money and you can accomplish that by doing something you enjoy doing everyday–text a number.
Popularity: 8% [?]
First Creative Campus Class Reports In
As I have been reading blog entries about the recent Association of Performing Arts Presenters annual conference, (APAP) I have seen mentions of Creative Campus project presentations. Since this information isn’t widely disseminated, I thought I would give the projects and the participating organizations some publicity to share the news of their success.
First a little history, APAP administers the grants program but the original idea emerged back in 2004 at the 104th American Assembly. (The paper they produced on the concept may be found here.) The first group of projects is drawing to a close (though some were only one year projects and have been completed) and the granting for the next group is in process.
Many of the organizations in the first group created dedicated webpages to archive their efforts which you may be interested in visiting.
Dartmouth College dedicated themselves to exploring the class divide in the surrounding community as well as within the college community.
The University of Nebraska Lied Center worked with multimedia performance group Troika Ranch to create a new performance piece, bring the disparate departments of the university together in creative experiences, and most interesting to me, adapt motion performance software for modern dance for use with rehabilitation patients.
This is not to be confused with the efforts of the University of Kansas Lied Center’s project, Tree of Life Creativity – Origins and Evolution which involved a intra-campus collaboration as well as partnerships with other campuses.
The University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium, still displaced by the damage caused by the flooding of summer 2007, commissioned the development of a world premiere, Eye Piece, in cooperation with various departments. The work explores the process of gradually losing eye sight. The topic may seem a strange one until you learn that the university’s Carver Family Center for Macular Degeneration was a project participant.
The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s current theme is Diasporas. I say current, because it the description implies there is a different theme each year. Indeed, the APAP website information about the project lead me to believe it was about the death penalty. The university’s some times controversial summer reading program is a partner in this project along with the departments of communications, dramatic arts and resident LORT company, Playmakers Rep.
I wasn’t able to find information about their respective projects on the Hostos Community College or Stanford University sites, so the final project is Wesleyan University’s Feet to the Fire on global warming. This project involved interdisciplinary learning that appears to have permeated every corner of campus activities and moved out into the surrounding community. From the video summary of the project, it sounds like people who attended their events felt the power of the arts was essential to getting the message across, as was suggested in recent posting.
Even though the project officially ended last June, the university has continued to provide the experiences they initiated. Like most grant programs, I am pretty sure this was the goal–that the funded initiative will be perpetuated. If you are inspired by what you see, it is unfortunately too late to get into the current grant cycle. But it is the perfect time to start conversations about what you might like to do–including prodding a local university member of APAP to get involved.
Popularity: 8% [?]