Scott Walters

Organic Arts, Taste The Difference

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My cousin is a farmer. But he isn’t just any old farmer. About five years ago he started working his farms with two massive Belgian draft horses rather than using gas powered equipment. When fuel prices started climbing last year, I figured I might end up taking lessons from him some day. He hasn’t turned his back on technology by any means and calls upon neighbors to do some of the tasks that are either too much for his horses or can’t be done with his team. But he is really committed to sustainable farming with out chemicals and the like.

I have been trying to discern what lessons his way of life might have for my way of life. My cousin’s farm contributes goods to a community supported agriculture cooperative where people subscribe to receive a share of his produce throughout the year. He would probably farm like this anyway, but his timing is fairly good in that he is doing this at a time where value is being placed on organic and free range farming. His website outlines how his crops and livestock are employed to support each other which adds value to the sides of free range beef, sheep, poultry and eggs you can purchase from him online.

So I am trying to figure out what is the back to basics approach the arts can take? Other than the piano and sheet music in the parlor, I can’t really of an archetypal image in American arts life with which to appeal to people. What ideals would you invoke to remind people of value that has been lost in present times? How are they diminished by cell phones and the Internet?

And really, it is a lot of idealism that people are buying with their free range organic food these days. It can’t diminish what my cousin is doing to say so because he is obviously a true believer. I grew up surrounded by farms, (God help me, but the smell of manure still makes me nostalgic), but most consumers have no direct experience with process by which food is produced. The basics they are trying to get back to isn’t likely something they or even their parents once had and yearn for again.

So the success of a campaign on behalf of the arts wouldn’t necessarily depend on people having experienced the arts. It would just need to evoke some value people feel is missing from their lives. One of the images we want to avoid is that of the elite, white audience. Unfortunately that is a real historical image. Not only do most arts organizations want to avoid that as they strive to be more multicultural and inclusive, but likely would prefer people not imagine audiences comprised of rich bankers.

It may sound manipulative to say success depends on using the right turns of phrase. As we are all aware though, the reality is that we start from zero with vast number of people. If more people had interaction and experience upon which to appeal, it would certainly be more effective to connect with real experience rather than a nebulous ideal. The problem people like my cousins have is that there are a lot of companies out there playing fast and loose with what constitutes what organic and free range means. It is obvious that my cousin’s operation is sustainable but the other guys can undercut his price by employing less rigorous standards and calling it the same thing. If more consumers possessed the discernment which comes from direct experience with the food production process, fewer would be fooled.

In terms of producing a sustainable arts product that has resonance with a community, Scott Walters’ Theatre Tribe appears to be a viable option. (Albeit the only considered plan of which I am aware.)

Having a good product still doesn’t solve the question of messaging. Though certainly real quality lends itself to convincing arguments about value. The simple truth is, evoking the idea that arts attendance fills a gap created by modern life may not be the most effective option. You don’t need me to tell you quality doesn’t equal success. As big a trend organic is these days, there are still far fewer farmers than there were when I was a kid.

Perhaps the only lesson to take from my cousin’s example is one we already know as arts people. First, do what fulfills you and if people are interested in paying you for it great. As I said, his decision to farm with draft animals was not motivated by the credibility he would get with consumers of organic food and hopes of income as a result. He may not even make much selling to that segment of people. (In fact, he teaches agriculture at a local high school.) He just likes working his farm.

You Know, For The Kids (And Everyone Else, Too)

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February was a real busy month for me so I only had the time to bookmark The Nonprofiteer’s epiphany about the value of public funding for the arts.

“Of course you’re indifferent to public funding for the arts, you dodo; you live in Chicago, where major performers and exhibitions will show up anyway. Public funding for the arts isn’t for Chicago–it’s for Bloomington.

And she remembered growing up in Baltimore, which is not a small town but which waited for months between visits of major dance companies; and she remembered the thrill of seeing those dance companies for the first time. And she realized (0r remembered) that that’s the real point of public funding for the arts: to make available to everyone the thrill of exposure to first-rate art. Everyone: that means people who live in Bloomington, and International Falls, and Arroyo Hondo, even though the free market would not support a stop in any of those places by the latest tour from the Joffrey or the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Met.

I thought she made quite a few good arguments on behalf of funding the arts. They seem of particular value given that she finds them compelling as a person who is not particularly supportive of public funding for the arts. It isn’t often that a non-politician who has not drank deeply of the Kool-Aid takes the time to provide considered commentary on behalf of public support of the arts so it behooves us to take note. As might be expected, I am not entirely in accord with her suggestion that support should only be in presentation rather than creation of new works. Though I certainly do see her point:

“…you have to accept another, equally painful truth, which is that no one can actually determine what’s “art” til at least 25 years after it’s been created. Probably the Nonprofiteer doesn’t need to remind you that people threw things at the stage the first time they saw and heard The Rite of Spring, now part of the musical canon. But what she probably does need to point out is that this doesn’t mean the public should accept and/or fund every objectionable thing it sees in hopes that it will ultimately turn out to be art. Rather, it means that support for creation is a mug’s game, a gamble at which most players lose, and that the public should instead put its money into presentation.”

I hadn’t initially assumed she was saying that public funding of the arts was needed to bring culture to the hinterlands. All the same, I was glad for Scott Walters’ comment to her about the importance of enabling local groups to develop works that emphasize and reinforce the value that can be found in their communities. For me that is the strongest argument for funding the creation of new work. I am not as vocal as Walters is on his blog about how the concept that artistic success originates from NY/LA/Chicago is robbing the rest of the country of talent. But I am certainly in agreement with him that there is no reason those places should be held as a standard of quality and be viewed as the only destinations for achieving artistic success.

Public monies and tax breaks are offered to attract and retain industry, perhaps the same should be done with the arts. The argument can be made that state and municipal support of the arts is doing just that. What the public support is not doing though is generally providing incentive to “buy locally.” In some cases, there has to be an equal investment in encouraging people to create locally as well. I have mentioned in a number of posts lately that while it would be much more economical for me to present local artists, there aren’t enough of quality to sustain the effort very long. There are a fair number of talented people in the community, but most (though certainly not all) are expressing themselves via Broadway plays and musicals or covers/derivatives of other people’s work.

Still, if the criteria for receiving public monies and tax breaks was 100% of the concept and execution by local artists, I could take advantage of the support at least once a year and guarantee my audiences the quality they have come to expect. That sort of confidence constitutes a good starting point in my mind.

One last bit of the NonProfiteer I would quote is her view that we need to get public support for the arts as acceptable a concept as public support for education.

Yes, yes, the Nonprofiteer knows: education isn’t well-funded either; but relatively few people argue that public funding for education is just a plot to spread disgusting lies, or to keep teachers from having to work. Let’s get the discussion about public funding for the arts to the level of conceptual agreement we have for public education, and then we can engage in any further battles that might need to be fought.

In other words, brethren in the arts community: stop talking about public funding for the arts as if the point were for the public to support YOU. No one cares about you. What we care about as a society is US, and how exposure to what you do will improve us.

I think there is a distinction between what she means by “how exposure to what you do will improve us” and the message the arts have been communicating along those lines. While improving test scores, reasoning skills and developing geniuses in the womb are probably part of what she is suggesting we talk about, it can’t be the entirety for the simple reason that it excludes anyone who is not a child. People care about their kids, yes, but everyone will only be persuaded when they perceive they are included in the benefits. I think it is pretty clear that the reasons we give can’t be about what we want people to experience but what they want to experience.

We want people to experience transcendent moments and there is a good chance the first time they sit down to hear a symphony play, they won’t have a transcendent experience. The measure of their satisfaction with the experience that night may simply be that no one caught on to their utter cluelessness. Transcendent experiences should certainly always be a goal and are absolutely attainable on ones first interaction. I just spoke to a woman today who had a group of students who did just that, though they probably couldn’t have identified it as such.

There is a difficulty in asking people what they want out of an experience with which they have had limited interaction. About 18 months ago I linked to a video of Malcolm Gladwell talking about how when people were asked what kind of spaghetti sauce they liked, described the sauces they were eating. However, when presented with samples of different options, expressed strong preferences for sauces that no company actually made. When asked, people may say they like car chases and gun battles not realizing what they really may value is dramatic tension and once they get past the arcane language, a lot of Shakespeare really suits them.

If trying to draw responses of value from your audiences sounds like an intimidating process, well sure it is. There are big companies sinking millions of dollars into marketing and research trying to figure it all out too with limited success. The advantage you have is that you only have to figure it out for the community you serve.

Vital To Discuss: Graduate Preparation

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In a confluence of good timing, my Inside the Arts compadre, Jason Heath, touched on a subject yesterday aligned with that of two of my favorite bloggers. In an entry with a self-explanatory title, Music School Enrollment Spikes as Economy Tanks, Jason cites a Chicago Tribune article on that subject. Jason discusses the cons of pursuing a degree in music but seems heartened by the article’s assertion that studying music confers skills applicable to other fields. (Given a recent post, that is good news to me too.) My only concern is that in tough economic times, there are so many people with direct experience with jobs, there is no need for those with skills that carry over.

The article notes that music schools are making sure their graduates have training in addition to performance to make them more capable and prepared for the realities of the industry. Theatre schools are apparently not following suit in the estimation of Theatre Ideas blogger, Scott Walters, and A Poor Player blogger Tom Loughlin who met for the first time this past weekend at the Southeastern Theatre Conference where they presented a session on revamping the way theatre students are prepared.

Both gentlemen reflect on the experience in their respective blogs with some disappointment that the conferences do not really allow serious conversations about the state of the industry and how graduates may be better prepared.

Says Mr. Loughlin:

“At places like SETC, NETC, and ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) the emphasis is 97% on “how to succeed in the theatre business by trying a little harder.” It’s self-perpetuating, narcissistic, and almost cult-like. Anybody interested in having an adult conversation about what might be wrong, what might need reform, etc., is faced with the reality that everyone else there has drunk the kool-aid of pre-professionalism. You might as well be talking to a wall.”

[….]

“As I walked through the halls of the hotel complex during the afternoon I grew more and more sad watching all these young dressed-up kids with their audition numbers pinned to their chests waiting for their turn to show everyone what they could do and begin their climb up the great Broadway ladder. They know nothing else at all about theatre except this professional business model, and they have no sense of independent thought in terms of thinking about how to push back against it. They’re just buying it hook, line and sinker. And we, the educators, are tossing them the baited hook.”

Both felt the keynote speaker, Beth Leavel, was the worst offender when it came to underplaying the difficulty of making it in theatre and overselling NYC as the sole source and standard for success.

Scott Walters’ observations were most pointed in this respect.

“The crack she peddled was pontent: she had only had to work two weeks in her entire career at anything outside the theatre. I could see young girls texting their parents with this fact, proof that their choice of a major in theatre wasn’t foolhardy in the least.”

[…]

“Not surprisingly, nobody ever asked, and clearly Beth Leavel never considered, the utter insanity of such an arrangement. Nope, it was all about New York, and Beth had made the leap from SETC to Broadway, and you can too. You just have to want it badly enough. Because we are so lucky to do what we do. Why, she burbled, I’ve never worked a day in my life, and I mean that.”

[…]

“It seemed so appallingly irresponsible. To look at all these young, hopeful people with numbers pinned to their chests, I kept thinking of Biff Loman’s pathetic plea at the end of Death of a Salesman: “Will you let me go, for Christ’s sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?” I knew that many, many of these kids were very talented, and that for most of them those talents will go unused and unappreciated in the theatrical Oz to which Ms Leavel had pointed them. And they will limp home thereafter and, like Mr Tanner in Harry Chapin’s heart-breaking ballad of the same name, they’ll never sing again, or dance again, or act again.”

I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but I found it interesting that both men reference the audition numbers pinned to each person’s chest in what is probably not even an attempted veiled allusion to the “hopes pinned” phrase. According to Walters, they did their best to dash what for most will be false hopes in their session citing dismal employment and median income figures of Equity union actors.

We urged teachers to ” take that phony dream and burn it before something happens” and replace it with something important, something rooted, something that would enrich our towns and cities and states. We urged theatre teachers (and had we not presented before she did, Beth Leavel) to get out of the export business, in which our purpose is to ship off “goods” to New York City.

None of the entries are terribly long and bear reading in their entirety. If you aren’t familiar with Loughlin and Walters, they are both professors in performing arts programs who have been reflecting for some time on the education processes with which they are involved–and on the fate of their graduates.

As a person who came out of a theatre background, I have always felt a little superior to the other arts disciplines because theatre tends to be a lot more together in many regards. In graduate preparation theatre seems to be lagging. Not all music training programs offer the type of preparation mentioned in the Tribune piece, but there are enough to serve as examples for theatre training programs.