Take Me To The River

As the summer comes to a close, I wanted to share something that caught my eye back in May. I bookmarked it and looked back at it periodically throughout the summer because I liked the idea so much.

Back in May, as a celebration of the Minnesota River,

“performers staged a “paddling theater production” …The event offered stories, songs and characters from local river lore, presented both as live theater and live-action radio drama in an original production called “With the Future on the Line: Paddling Theater from Granite Falls to Yellow Medicine.”

… Eighteen voyageur canoes, each holding nine audience members and a guide, paddled the 13-mile theater route. Audience members could choose to take part in the theatrical voyage by signing up for a spot on a guided voyageur canoe or by bringing their own canoe or kayak.”

Take a look at the pictures that accompany the article. (Actually it is more photo essay than written text.) It looks to me like the company may have stopped at different points along the river to perform for people gathered there.

I am not sure if they did one scene or the whole story at each stop. From the images, it appears that those of the audience that didn’t take the canoes may have been bussed to the second stop.

I just like the whole concept of using the river as a mode of transport and medium for performance. Even before I read about this project, I had been pondering the possibilities for doing something similar on the nearby Ohio River.

A few years back someone told me a dance concert had been performed on a barge anchored in the Genesee River (or maybe Erie Canal) where those waterways pass through Rochester, NY. The image of people arrayed along the shoreline watching the performance has fired my imagination since.

Even if you don’t live on a navigable waterway, something like this could be possible between towns connected by a railroad or a hiking trail like the Appalachian Trail. It could serve the double purpose of bringing performances to different communities in a novel way and getting those avid about outdoors activities involved.

Imagine your company arriving in town with an entourage of 30-40 hiker-campers. Along the way there could be commentary on the flora, fauna, geologic features and historical sites found along the route.

This is the sort of audience participation and interaction that everyone talks about, only it isn’t dependent on having a physical performance space.

(Not that passively listening to Talking Heads is bad 😉 )

Founder or Flounder? Being An Employee Is Okay

Hat tip to Jari-Pekka Raitamaa who tweeted an article about mistakes people make when considering founding a tech start up. It occurred to me that the same basic advice could be given to people thinking about founding an arts company of some sort.

The basic premise of article by Jolie O’Dell, Stop founding! 10 signs you’re ‘employee material’ is that many would be founders need to get some significant experience working in a company before they decide to start one. And even then, they may be better suited staying as an employee.

You’ve never tried a real job
[…]
If all you’ve tried so far is freelancing, consulting, or agency work, founding is a pretty big leap. You don’t know about how companies run from the inside, about different management styles. You might have trouble forming and functioning in teams.

Why this is bad for founders: Founding requires commitment and longevity. Regardless of your C-suite title, in day-to-day operations, you’re functioning as a team lead responsible for managing a small crew of professionals. Experience in management with a corporate safety net is a boon.

Along the same lines, if you have only worked as a performer or only done short term administrative work for an arts organization, you may not have the skills and endurance to lead a small group through the rough formative years of the company.

You’ve already failed at one or more startups
We fetishize failure in the startup community, and we especially fetishize failing quickly. But regardless of the lessons you learn or the network you build, failure is still a bad thing.

In and of itself, failure is the universe telling you that your idea wasn’t good enough.
And it’s got nothing to do with execution. It’s your idea. Twitter was really poorly executed at first. It succeeded. Ditto for Facebook and lots of other consumer software. Ditto for a lot of programming languages. You can have wiggle room in execution for a truly great idea.

Why this is bad for founders: A string of bad ideas is more than just “throwing [stuff] at a wall and seeing what sticks.” It might be a sign that you’re jumping in too deep, too quickly. Fail at a few side projects, if you must. But be cautious about rushing into a new venture with nothing but failure under your belt.

The bit about fetishizing failure and failing quickly and often caught my eye (so my emphasis) because non-profit arts organizations are often criticized for their conservative approach and unwillingness to take chances and flirt with failure. To some extent, it may be to your credit to have embarked on a new endeavor and failed.

Still it is easy to fail as a result of ill-informed and conceived choices. The article makes good points about making sure you have learned from your mistakes before proceeding.

You can’t design or code (Translate as “You Can’t Directly Contribute To The Product”)

Lean startup culture says you need three archetypes for a startup: a developer, a designer, and a hustler. Traditionally, the hustler does biz dev, sales, hiring, and management tasks.

But what does a hustler do at a founding-stage startup, really? It often turns into long hours for long hours’ sake, lots of meetings with few outcomes, and boatloads of cheerleading and enthusiasm for a business that’s generating no income and has few or no users.

If you can’t pinpoint your exact skill set — and if your skill set isn’t unique, valuable, and directly related to product creation — you might want to take an employee position at a later stage company.

Why this is bad for founders: Creating a minimum viable product is often Task Number One at a lean startup. Your salary shortens the runway for such a nascent company, and you can’t sell, aka “hustle,” against a product that doesn’t exist yet.

While it might have been good to trim this one down, the bit about the hustler putting in long hours for long hours sake and doing a lot of cheerleading struck a chord.

True, the crucial function in an arts organization ends up being fundraising. But I am pretty sure the time is coming soon if it hasn’t arrive yet, given the expectations created by Kickstarter and its ilk, where it will be difficult to raise any sort of funding without some sort of interesting product example.

I suspect people won’t be as willing to give based only on the idea of a promising group creating good art. Unless you are in a position to pitch in and produce from the get go, your presence may be a hindrance rather than a help.

Paul Allen and Bill Gates didn’t bring Steve Ballmer on to run the business side of Microsoft until five years after the company had been founded and provided its first piece of software.

The arts are already full of people working unnecessarily long hours, don’t add yourself to their number.

Which leads to the next point:

Your big idea is unoriginal

[…]
If the market is saturated with variations on your idea, back slowly away from your drawing board and wait for your next big idea.

Why this is bad for founders: With too many competitors come too many problems. You might not be able to wedge your way into a crowded marketplace. Or you might get suddenly squashed by a drawn-out patent or other IP lawsuit.

Along the same theory that people probably won’t give to groups without a demonstrable product, new funding for old ideas and methods of producing art is probably not long for this world either.

Again, along those lines…

You don’t know what you want

Why do you want to be a founder? This is brutally difficult territory and requires immense passion and Herculean dedication.

Scratch that: It requires Odyssean dedication. You’re on a quest with no end in sight. Every task seems impossible. There are new difficulties around every corner.

So why the heck would you want to do that?

If you don’t have a clear vision, if you’re only running on the heady fumes of startup mania, you will most certainly fail.

Why this is bad for founders: Enthusiasm only goes so far. Only a heart and mind obsessed with a specific mission will be able to sustain you through the hard times that await you.

Again, founding an organization out of simple rejection of the current choices isn’t enough. Your vision can’t be predicated on, “We will different from them and do it better.”

What does that look like in practical terms? It isn’t enough to say you will be nimble and more responsive to change, you have to have an idea of what practices and infrastructure you need to have in place to make it happen.

The other signs Jolie O’Dell lists that I haven’t expounded upon are pretty apparent or closely related to the points I have already made: “You’re young and/or inexperienced”; “You have no network”; “You get bored really quickly”; “You have no net worth”; “You’re the primary breadwinner of a multiperson household.”

I am not saying people shouldn’t found new organizations. It seems pretty clear we need new ideas and new methods. These are just some important things to consider before you undertake such an endeavor.

Trading Time For Tickets

So here is a question which may seem obsolete in an age of internet and mobile apps: Who is more important, the customer at the window or the customer on the phone?

Even though you may not face this particular problem, the question is one about expectations.

The situation I recently faced arose because our local audiences tend to buy their tickets over the phone or in person from our ticket office rather than online, at outlets or the Ticketmaster 800 number.

A musical act has been doing their Christmas show here for a decade and generally packs the house. This year I had the bright idea to send out postcards to everyone who had ordered tickets in the past. The postcard told them to ignore all the public announcements of tickets going on sale Monday, they could order their tickets the Friday prior in recognition of their loyalty to the group.

That Friday we had a line out the door and the phone ringing off the hook. I had two people at the window and one in the backroom on the phones. So that people didn’t get frustrated by the lack of an answer, I was in another room answering the phone and taking number to call back since we only had so many terminals to sell tickets out of.

After a half hour, we cleared enough of the line at the window to move another person to phone orders and returned calls to everyone on the list within an hour.

The issue is that people on the phone generally had an expectation of parity with the people at the window. If someone left their number with me at 10:15, they expected to get their ticket order in before the person who got online at the window at 10:30 and certainly before the person who happened to get through to the person handling the phones.

The truth is, it is pretty difficult to treat everyone in a completely egalitarian manner. It is difficult to ask the next person in line at the window to wait while you call someone back who called 5 minutes before they got there.

At the same time, you don’t want to give precedence to everyone at the window just because they made the effort to drive in. Many people only have one car or can only make a call during their 15 minute break at work.

Back in the day when the Internet was new and landlines walked the earth, you could put people on hold, attend to the person at the window and then go to the phone and back to the window. I am not sure the people on the phone especially would have the patience for that these days.

I would like to hear about policies and practices people have implemented that made this process seem fairer to both staff and patrons.

But I also wanted to note that Seth Godin actually recently addressed this issue on his blog. (my emphasis)

It seems egalitarian, but it’s actually regressive, because it doesn’t take into account the fact that different people value their time differently. People with time to spare are far more likely to be rewarded.

Another example: Call the company that sells your favorite tech brand and ask for customer service. You’ll be on hold for one to sixty minutes. Why do they do this? They can obviously afford to answer the phone right away, can’t they?

Like the mom who waits for the sixth whine before responding to her kid, these companies are making sure that only people who really and truly need/want to talk to them actually get talked to. Everyone else hangs up long before that.

You can hear the CFO, “well, if we answered on the first ring, more people would call!”

Again, at first glance, this seems like a smart way to triage with limited resources. But once again, it misses the opportunity to treat different people differently. Shouldn’t the really great customer, or the person about to buy a ton of items get their call answered right away? The time tax is a bludgeon, a blunt instrument that can’t discriminate.

Godin straight out acknowledges that people with more free time will get advantages. I quoted some additional text from him to raise the point that most arts organizations aren’t in a position of having the resources to answer calls immediately, but can genuinely be struggling to cover the phones.

I wonder if his suggestion about treating different people differently might be even more valid for those who have fewer resources. It could allow them to prioritize and focus on who is served.

Instead of the preferential donor/subscriber hotline which reinforces the social stratification the arts are trying so hard to distance themselves from, the preference could be predicated, as Godin suggests, on providing service to society.

Putting literacy volunteers and Habitat for Humanity volunteers at the front of the line could certainly show an organizations commitment to serving and improving the community.

The Long Arc Of Artistic Growth

A few weeks ago the directors of the local museum invited me to an after hours talk by an artist whose work was showing in one of the galleries. Apparently the artist had floated the idea of doing a powerpoint presentation, but ended up talking about her work while walking around the gallery.

I am glad she opted for that because listening to her talk about how her process has evolved while referencing the different pieces in the gallery was much more engaging. Once she was done, everyone went scurrying back to the walls to look at the pieces in the context of her commentary.

For the last few weeks I have been wondering if a performing artist could be as effective and engaging talking about their process. A visual artist has a bit of a benefit in this regard.

When the artist I saw speak noted that she got more comfortable with the idea that she didn’t have to include the limbs in great detail when she was really interested in a person’s head and torso, the evidence was right before you as she compared an early work to a later work.

When an actor or musician says they did something one way in the past and now they do it this way and demonstrates the differences, you never know, they could be lying. Also the way they depict their style of performance in the past is informed (and perhaps infected) with everything they have learned since. They can’t perfectly reproduce their past imperfections.

This dynamism is what makes live performance interesting so we certainly don’t want people trying to ossify their abilities. It just doesn’t have the verifiable elements that visual arts have.

Ultimately, primary qualification for successfully talking about your process is being skilled at talking about your process in an interesting way. The artist I saw could have been just as terminally boring without a powerpoint as with.

I was reading an article in Boston Magazine about the incredible lengths to which a musician was going in order to audition for a percussionist spot on the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Every night he was sending excerpts of his practice to Christopher Lamb, the principal percussionist of the New York Philharmonic. At one point Lamb responds,

“in the case of Ravel’s BolĂ©ro, a piece with a famously repetitive snare-drum part — “You’re too young, this is too fast for this old guy 
 relax, be more inviting.’”

After reading that, I wanted to know what did too young sound like, what does relaxing and more inviting sound like?

Would I, as a layman, actually be able to discern the difference or would I need to be a percussionist practicing 20 hours a day as this auditioner was, to even perceive the nuance?

What is the impact on the rest of the musicians if he is playing too young versus more relaxed, and does it have an impact on the enjoyment of the audience? Or is it just the other musicians who will really notice?

If there was a demonstrable difference between the week before and the week after he got the note, (versus comparing how he played when he was 15 versus today), it might be interesting to audiences to learn about “the change that landed me the job on the BSO.” (Well, he isn’t listed as a BSO musician, but you get the idea.)

In regard to theatre performances, they are often intentionally directed in opposition to previous productions so an actor could be equally brilliant at the same role in entirely different ways simply because the productions had different focuses. There can be both maturation of skill as well as an increased flexibility of approach that an actor can talk about.

All this got me wondering if artists conducting performance talks should move beyond talking about what they did to create the present work and talk about that evolution. The frustrations, mistakes and choices that had been made over time might help break down the perception of talent and inspiration being absolute things that are doled out to some and not to others.

People may be better able to identify and connect with artists who talk about a process of misses, self-criticism and evolution that parallels their own experience. Not to mention realizing that careers are not usually made on reality television shows.

Again it wouldn’t work for everyone. Some people won’t be skilled at keeping the conversation from crossing from self-examination and deprecation over to self-pity and recrimination, alienating their audience.

Anyone have examples of artist talks that they thought were done very well?