Had a meeting with my booking consortium today and learned some interesting things.
First of all, in relation to my post on advocating to keep our state arts council staff from being laid off. I was told that during the hearing, it came to light that the decision to lay the staff off came after all a consultation with all the unit heads–except the council’s executive director. Apparently it was felt the arts council was not an important unit and the grant administration could be accomplished by the general state accounting staff. Then it was decided that the grant administration was specialized knowledge the accountants couldn’t handle themselves so the executive director and one assistant should be kept to help the accountants. (So the restoration of two of about 10 people slated for layoffs.)
The final decision has yet to be made. It did occur to me that while we can recite the economic impact of the arts stats in our sleep, there are still people who don’t know the arts contribute to economic activity. The president of our group said he was able to easily point to a recent $10,000 artistic fee payment that yielded $150,000 in additional direct spending independent of any restaurant checks, parking fees and babysitter payments.
Second thing I learned is that with funding so uncertain, especially among universities, a lot of tour decisions are being made much later in the year. Apparently this was a topic of conversation at a recent regional conference. Because we depend so heavily on artists touring the West Coast to keep our prices down, we will have to make our own decisions for the 2010-11 season months later than we usually do because opportunities may never emerge. I am sure since four of our members are associated with universities this will just perpetuate the cycle of postponed decisions.
One of the positive things I noticed during the meeting was people were proposing many more artists I could afford to present. Last year’s cycle seemed to emphasize higher paid acts, but fewer of them. I haven’t quite analyzed how things resolved themselves this year to determine if artists are lowering their fees or if my partners are looking at a greater number of less expensive performers. If the latter is the case, they are either instinctively or intentionally following the Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser’s advice not to cut programming in tough economic times.
I am personally feeling less anxious than I was at this time last year when I was faced with the proposition of putting together a slate of performances without the benefit of as many partnerships as I had in the past. Of course, it also helped that I walked into the meeting knowing a show I started conversations about two years ago would be opening my season.
Another thing that came up was a desire to have much closer communication between those organizations that aren’t consortium members and those that are. Someone initially proposed Bela Fleck, Zakir Hussain and Edgar Meyers for the coming season unaware that they were playing with the symphony this year. This represents something of a missed opportunity for the symphony since they have played in at least one of our member’s venues before and could have partnered to take the performance there. (Though it ain’t cheap and given the symphony’s recent financial problems, it was probably more prudent to do as they had.)
Having heard how great the concert was, member organizations seem likely to pursue presenting the trio alone. People expressed regrets that the two weeks notice they received in speaking with agents didn’t provide the opportunity participate in the tour this time around. The problem of duplicating another local arts entity’s efforts has been an ongoing one. Any show that doesn’t have an agent or rights holder monitoring it for geographic conflicts, Shakespeare’s shows for example, has the potential of popping up more than once as a local offering. In some areas groups try to get together and alert each other to future plans. But even that arrangement might not be effective if groups need to postpone their final decision making until later.
That said, we all get tons of emails every day alerting us to routing opportunities. It is amazing that there are actually some acts touring whose plans we haven’t heard about.