Art. IT CAN INFECT YOUR BRAIN!!!!!

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Before the Christmas holidays I was watching a TED video of Golan Levin using interactive technology to manifest visual art in response to human action. The video is pretty cool itself, but there is a section starting around 6:30 (video embeded below) with Jaap Blonk performing Kurt Schwitters’ tone poem The Ursonate. (There is a longer YouTube video segment of Blonk’s performance here.)

Much to my surprise, the cadence of Blonk’s recitation ran around in my head for a few days after. I don’t know if it qualifies as an ear worm since I couldn’t tell you a single word. Though I could spout nonsense syllables in an approximation of Blonk’s performance. Maybe that is the point. The experience sent me to a website containing recordings of the work, including two by Blonk whose delivery varies in the two decades between the recordings.

I am sure if I started pondering the intent beyond the composition, I would be told I was over thinking it. But I am also certain that like the works of e.e. cummings, there was a great deal more energy invested in its creation than is initially apparent.

I immediately thought of my undergrad acting classes where we were supposed to carry on a conversation using numbers rather than words communicating our intent employing various vocal qualities. We generally limited ourselves to a pretty narrow range of expression.

I probably wouldn’t have appreciated the performances back then. Listening to Blonk’s and some of Schwitters’ recitations today, I recognize just how fun language can be. (I haven’t listened to all the different recordings.) Blonk especially seems like he enjoys playing with the sounds, luxuriating in the pleasure of pronunciation and takes joy in the enthusiastic exclamations. (I didn’t watch the YouTube video above until after I listened to the audio so my impression of his joy is almost entirely aural.)

By listening to vocalizations that are bereft of meaning, I also feel like I gained slightly more insight about how music acquires intellectual significance for people.

This is what is so great about the arts to me. I watched the TED video because I have an interest in technology and the arts. I thought the inclusion of Blonk’s recitation was fun, but it didn’t especially excite me. I wasn’t about to seek out performances of Dada tone poems at the end of the video. But something about it penetrated into my brain where it was identified as interesting compelling me to return for further investigation.

 

Outsourcing Creativity To The Rich?

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Newsweek recently had a short piece on the increase of Pro-Ams, though that isn’t what they called it. I don’t know that there has been a precipitous increase in the rate at which people are engaging in these activities since I wrote about it two years ago, though I would grant that it probably has since I first wrote about it four years back. I felt like they were just playing catch up on how things were developing. And not very well, either.

One of the reasons I didn’t post yesterday was because I was doing a lot of reading of other blog posts. Among them was an excellent series of posts by Ian David Moss on the Pro Am subject (h/t to Adam at The Mission Paradox). The post itself make a good argument, but his “Further Reading” links at the bottom really expound upon his point.

That point, summarized too simply in the face of many well-constructed discussions of the subject, is that as people acquire competence and are willing to perform a task for less money, or have the resources where they don’t care about their losses, starving artists ended up starving more.

It seems the age old narrative of the threat to employment coming from poor immigrants or residents of foreign countries who are willing to work more cheaply than Americans is being rewritten a little to include people who are wealthy enough or have enough leisure time. Moss mentions amateur wine makers who essentially knocked the profitability out of high end wines by accepting lower margins. But the same factors are at work when families support students through their low/no paying internships allowing them to gain valuable experience and often cachet of working for prestigious companies.

Though they didn’t refer to these things directly, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) piece I referenced four years ago, Bill Ivey and Steven Tepper did suggest that money and opportunity were going to divide those who had a variety of cultural choices from those whose choices were tightly limited.

One of the reasons economic forecasters say that the next phase of the economy will emphasize creativity is that creativity can’t be outsourced. That may be true, but as I read these blog posts, it didn’t take long to realize that it can be underbid and even crowdsourced. If you are going to be competitive in the coming economy, your are apparently going to have to get creative about being creative.

Just as today, those who can make a living in the arts are going to have to possess skills and vision beyond that of the average person. The bar is getting raised.

While I won’t deny the reality of this situation and am concerned, I guess I have a more optimistic view over the long term. I imagine it is because my facility does a pretty active business renting out to community groups. I am using some of the proceeds from rentals to support the presenting side of things so I see a lot of it as beneficial.

I will freely admit but for the support of family and friends, the quality of the work produced often wouldn’t garner much attention. Those I interact with are not necessarily moving us toward some Pro-Am utopia. There are a lot of erroneous beliefs about how simple things are to accomplish because they benefit from the efforts of professionals with Master’s degrees, additional training, long professional experience and hearts of gold.

While I agree that an increase in Pro-Ams will glut the marketplace, over the long term my hope is that amateur participation will increase appreciation for the arts and the effort that goes into them. Some will keep at it, but eventually many people are going to realize they can’t make a living doing the art for nothing and scale back. Even if they are replaced by younger folks, they will hopefully retain an interest in the areas they had invested themselves.

The complicating factor is that these Pro-Ams are likely to contribute to changing the whole game. They may not be content to do things as they have always been done and will create new standards for what live performances look like. So we may all still be in danger of losing our present jobs even as a resurgence of interest in dance, music and theatre emerges 15-20 years down the road when younger folks today approach their 40s. Which at least these days is an age where people start to re-engage with the arts.

Ah, Proscenium!

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I am beginning to understand why performance spaces were constructed in the first place. I have done some talking in the past about how performances may need to be uncoupled from the traditional performance spaces to have significance to audiences whose entertainment experiences continue to evolve. But now that I am actually trying to do that…. Well, I begin to see the wisdom of having a controllable environment.

I think the problem is that we are trying to offer people a traditional experience in a non-traditional space. I have moved performance operations to remote locations and run outdoor music festivals so I am familiar with the logistics of having performances in places that were not designed to accommodate them. Some of that will help me make arrangements for our site specific production, the Celebrity Project. In the long run though I think committing to taking art out of the traditional spaces is going to require a concomitant effort to change expectations about where and how arts can be experienced. (And yes, it certainly can be argued we are trailing so far behind in that respect, we may not be in the position to shape and define these expectations.)

But in some ways, I think we are hobbling ourselves by cleaving to old practices. Our concerns revolve around getting enough lighting equipment to different outdoor locations. People will move between different locations, but will stay there for a long enough time that they may want to sit so we will have chairs set up. But the chairs need to be set up in a way that has good sight lines but doesn’t congest the movement of people between different areas.

I am starting to think that next time maybe the site specific show needs to make more use of the site specific features like natural light. The Greeks might have been big on outdoor theatre, but they knew the natural features were of great importance. But with a show dealing with celebrity, moments in the limelight certainly can’t be neglected. Modern technology helps us cheat a little and put shows where we want them rather than needing to places with natural sound reinforcement.

Part of this is because are somewhat slaves to audience expectations. If we have a show as an event rather than just a happening on the street, people have a certain expectation of length to motivate them to make the drive. Comfort and accessibility for aging audiences during that time period need to be addressed. They will also want to see and hear everything that is going on from whatever vantage point they are at. All these considerations shape the staging and seating arrangements for our performance.

Most nights we only need to direct audiences to locations that meet these expectations once a night (we assume they can find their way back pretty well after intermission.) For this project, we will need a good plan for doing it multiple times over the course of an evening. So even as rehearsals start today, we are starting to plan. Though not too carefully too soon as I am sure the layout will change a number of times before the show opens.

How Much Am I Bid For This Sweaty Towel?

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When it comes to fund raising, I imagine there have been quite a few people who have looked around their buildings wondering how much they could get for various objects laying around.

They probably aren’t the first, but Philadelphia radio station, WXPN has started an auction section on part of their website in the hopes of shortening their fund raising drives. They offer a mix of objects from access to special seating sections at concerts and dinners with artists to old stuff they found laying around their former building.

There are times I have joked about selling the towels artists have used on eBay to raise funds, but sent them all to the washing machine. I wonder if I have been too shortsighted….

If you are like me, your problem isn’t that you don’t have plenty of interesting stuff to auction off. It’s that your budget is so tight, you have recycled the stuff so many times you can’t decide which significant performance to claim it belongs to.

In fact, it may have more value to schools teaching art restoration. Students can practice removing successive layers of paint to analyze the techniques used. Most of the stuff you have is probably good for at least five-ten semesters of instruction before they reach the original finish. This is probably the way to go anyway since the multiple attempts to repair the objects over the years have endowed it with a good three pounds extra in glue and screws and a strange tilt when placed on a flat surface.

But in all seriousness, it is something to consider to raise some extra funds. Certainly, it can’t become a veritable business unto itself for your organization or else the IRS may be stopping by to review your non-profit status. I know there are a few theatres around that rent/sell costume pieces just before Halloween to clear out their storage areas and generate a little income.

XPN’s auction site seems to be created via AuctionAnything.com. Services like theirs can provide a more professional environment than something like eBay can. However, given the cost, it would likely only be worth it over the long term, (as opposed to single use around a special event), if you intended to offer things consistently and had someone tasked to attend to the arrangements.