• I’ve commented previously on the cool examples of hip-hop, Hispanic, and Indian (as in subcontinent) dance being integrated into modern dance and community engagement with dance via Ontario Dances.
• There is much great work going on in Texas–again I’ve given shoutouts to Houston Grand Opera’s HGOco  and to Forklift Danceworks.
• I’ve developed a new workshop (Artists and Community Engagement: New Thinking Yields New Options) for individual artists as a result of invitations from the Southern Entrepreneurship in the Arts Conference and the Arts Council of New Orleans. The artists I worked with in have helped me see the value of a community engagement mindset as a path to new career possibilities.
• My work with Arts North Carolina has reinforced my belief that the future of arts advocacy must lie in developing ever more effective means of community engagement.
• Feedback from workshop participants in Wisconsin (thanks Arts Wisconsin) has helped hone my Mainstreaming Engagement workshop, making it more immediately usable for participants.
• Speaking to the Rotary Club in Dayton (thanks Culture Works) gave me a good excuse to develop a message for those not in the arts’ inner circle. They can (and should) be powerful allies for us.
• Meeting with leaders of community arts centers in Cincinnati (thanks ArtsWave) helped me see the parallels between their work and that of rural arts leaders.
• Serving on a panel at the Emerging Arts Leaders Symposium at American University in DC allowed me to try out my evolving definitions of audience development, audience engagement, and community engagement. It was there also that, attending panels on marketing and fundraising, I heard multiple times that the key was developing relationships with the community.
• Working with arts leaders in Ft. Lauderdale (Broward County Cultural Division) reminded me of the fact that Eurocentric arts organizations and those producing work of the cultures of people of color have similar issues when it comes to engaging with communities outside their “normal” sphere.
• CultureSource‘s annual conference in Detroit allowed me to focus on issues related to “engaged programming” and to see the need to be more focused on our understanding of the arts mission: service to art or service to people through art.
• Serving on a grant panel for the Nashville Arts Commission gave me more insight into the workings of large arts organizations. Plus, seeing the city’s symphony, opera, and ballet in the same category as the Country Music Foundation was fascinating.
• Doing workshops for emerging arts leaders and artists in LA (Emerging Arts Leaders/LA) and San Diego (Rising Arts Leaders/San Diego Foundation, Balboa Park Cultural Partnership) helped me see the similarities (and differences) in engagement work across the country.

Next week I travel to Beijing where the arts management program at the China Conservatory of Music is celebrating its 10th Anniversary. I look forward to seeing whether the hegemony of Western culture (and the resultant need to address issues of community engagement) that I discovered in my trip to Singapore last year is an issue in China as well.

To all of the people who have been so gracious to me and from whom I have learned so much, I can not adequately express my thanks. Nonetheless, thank you!

And, given the travel to China, Engaging Matters will take a hiatus for the next two weeks. When it comes back, we’ll be in summer mode–once a week.

Engage!

Doug

Contrary to assumptions some make, community engagement does not even remotely mean churning out Lion King sequels. The assumption that it does suggests (though it doesn’t prove) something about the “assumer’s” attitude toward the public. I have written about this on numerous occasions here, notably in R E S P E C T:

By that I mean I don’t think it’s necessary to “give them what they want.” . . . The key is to respect people. Giving people what they need rather than what they want is a form of deep respect, if that is indeed what we are doing. If we are simply giving them what we want to give, that is profound disrespect. In order to distinguish the difference, we need to reframe our own perspective and get to know “them.”

Great art has always found inspiration in concerns of the public. Picasso’s Guernica and Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic series responded to outrage and sorrow over the Spanish Civil War. Of course neither artist was a community-focused artist in the sense of which I speak, and these works were difficult for the general public to appreciate when they were created. However, the point of connection established by addressing something of importance to the public is a critical element in community engagement.

Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time is a reflection on Kristallnacht. Its use of African-American spirituals as a means of highlighting issues of racism and oppression was a good artistic choice in addition to one that made the piece more widely accessible.

Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a brilliant example of an artist understanding what an entire nation needed in order to heal from a devastating experience. It is today one of the most successful monuments in Washington, DC.

Each of these works sprang from awareness of community issues. The artists responded to concerns shared by the public at large. The Spanish Civil War, Kristallnacht, and the Vietnam War were all major events about which no one could have been unaware. Great art was the result.

The more artists are aware of community concerns large and small the more starting points they have both for their art and for connecting with the community. Community engagement is about mutually beneficial relationships–art is advanced and the well-being of individuals and communities is enhanced. For the artist that chooses to do so, relationship-building with segments of “the public” can be a valuable means of enriching their work.

———–

On another topic, you may be interested in EmcArts’ contest to pick participants in their next round of “innovation support”: Business Unusual National Challenge.

Engage!

Doug

Photo: Some rights reserved by wallygrom

I recently had a comment/reply conversation with an individual artist who took me to task 1) for suggesting that there was merit in fostering the creation of more art that grows out of relationship with the community and 2) for pointing out that some artists consider the fact that “the public” doesn’t understand them to be a badge of honor.

Taking the second point first, I have known some artists who in the privacy of their own minds and aloud among like-minded peers do not believe the person on the street is sophisticated enough to understand their work. I have often asked arts professionals (artists and administrators) who say that “The arts are for everyone” whether they really believe that their work is for or can speak to Bubba or Bobbie Sue. There are many, many, many artists who say “Yes” and demonstrate the truth of their answer. Others are silent; a rare few admit out loud that they don’t believe it is or can. And that attitude is one (relatively small) brick in the wall between the arts and the public. No one wants to enter into a relationship with someone who looks down on them. It’s not a factor nearly as significant as the structural, financial, and training elements that separate arts organizations from the public; but it is one worth mentioning in the context of this blog.

I respect the fact that some artists don’t believe that any of their peers actually think this way. In the nearly two years of writing this blog I have become very aware that my experience is simply my own, that others in the industry have very different backgrounds and that age, art form, region, and place of operation (academia vs. “in the trenches,” for example) have a huge impact on our understand of “what is.” That said, at least to some extent, I don’t think my experience is a complete aberration.

• In the 1950’s Milton Babbitt wrote an essay titled “Who Cares If You Listen?” Granted the title was not his; it was imposed by an editor who knew a sensational headline when he thought of one. However, the essence of the article was that composers needed to separate themselves from the public for the purpose of moving the art forward. (Yes, I know that’s an over-simplification, but this is a blog post, not a book.) This view held sway for years in academia, where Babbitt suggested composers should reside.
• In the late 1970′s I was working on my doctorate in composition at the Eastman School of Music. Aaron Copland came for a guest presentation. In the Q&A session an undergraduate student castigated him for “selling out” by writing accessible music. To some in the audience that young man was a hero for speaking truth to power.
• As a composer, it took me some time to become comfortable enough in my own skin to write the tonal, lyrical music that best expressed my aesthetic sensibilities. There was much peer and, to my mind at the time, “academic industry” pressure to write what can aptly be described as esoteric or austere music.

I know that the times have changed and that more accessible new music (and all other arts as well) is easier to find now than it was back in the day. And the fact that some of this attitude may still exist is entirely understandable, given the evolution of the arts infrastructure. I addressed this in my inaptly titled previous post. The evolution of the idea of the heroic artist who is always out ahead of the public was a valuable addition to the field. However, we also need artists who want to connect with and be a voice for the people today. I guess what I am attempting to do here is assure artists who might like to try something more community-focused that it’s intellectually and artistically acceptable to do so.

———————–

Regarding the first point above, contrary to assumptions some make, community engagement does not even remotely mean churning out Lion King sequels.

But this post is running long, so I’ll pick up here next time.

Engage!

Doug

Photo: Some rights reserved by saigneurdeguerre

[CAVEATS: 1. I don't really "blame" Beethoven. That's just a semi-cute, attention-grabbing, hyperbolic title. See below.  2. There is nothing about any of what follows that suggests we "pander" to people's tastes. I've written way too much about that in way too many posts to rehash that here.]

One part of the explanation is that with the development of specialization of labor, artists began to be supported by those who could afford to support them. (Artists are not stupid!) Over time, this meant that the interests of the supporters naturally became more important than the expression of the whole community. Today, we have become so accustomed to this disconnect between the arts and the public we often don’t recognize it in any but the most abstract sense. We lament it, certainly, but we don’t see it as unusual.

Another part of the explanation has to do with the Nineteenth Century’s invention of the “heroic artist,” aloof and disconnected from the concerns of common humanity, answerable to no one but himself. (In the Nineteenth Century it was almost universally himself.) This development stood the historical relationship between artist and community on its head. Now, instead of being an interpreter of and voice for the community, the artist became an outsider forging new paths without concern as to who (if anyone) would follow. The artistic merits of this shift are open to lively debate. But the impact on social sustainability (and therefore political and economic viability) has been negative. From the point of view of fostering lively, artistically vibrant communities, this has led to a cultural cul-de-sac.

And this is where I sometimes find myself saying, “I blame Beethoven.” The danger in writing this down is that there is a major “however” that needs to be added, and a sentence as provocative as that one can spin out of control when withdrawn from context. Nevertheless . . . . The “however” is that Beethoven’s refusal to consider himself (or act like) a servant was a necessary pushback to the notion of artists as scullery/drudge workers. (That was certainly not part of the “expression around the campfire” world out of which the arts evolved.) In a sense, Beethoven was pushing for a bit of social justice, recognizing the importance of the fruits of the worker’s labor. (That starts to sound a bit Marxist, doesn’t it?) The problem is that subsequent artists (Wagner as, perhaps, the prime example) expanded the notion to near-deification of the creative artist. Of course Wagner believed the pantheon of deities to be a small “group”–himself . . . and maybe Beethoven.

The idea of the artist serving his or her own muse exclusively creates an inevitable separation between the art and those who might “consume” it. I am not saying that every artist needs to be serving their community with every work they create. However, while the pendulum swing that Beethoven fostered was worthwhile in its context, the time for a recalibration, a reversal of that swing is in order. A view that artists operate solely for themselves without connection to the communities in which they live will keep the arts themselves separated from those communities. (Of course there are many artists who are very aware of and involved in their communities. At the same time, there continues to be a strand of thought that places creators outside the rest of society.) The reversal of pendulum arcs can be a valuable corrective.

Engage!

Doug

Photo: Some rights reserved by saigneurdeguerre

[But first, to re-repeat, here are the operating definitions I'm using:

• Audience Development is a marketing strategy designed for immediate results (sales, donations, etc.).
• Audience Engagement is a marketing strategy designed for deepening relationships with current stakeholders and expanding reach over time.
• Community Engagement is a mission strategy designed to create and maintain relationships with individuals and communities. The desired end results are deepened relationships and expanded reach for the arts organization and healthier, more vibrant communities.]

Let me take Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, an oratorio written in response to Kristallnacht, as an example to consider. It employs African-American spirituals to highlight issues of racism and oppression. (Yes, gross oversimplification, but there it is.)

The company that produces this work and identifies synagogues in the community as good places to sell tickets is doing audience development.

The company that sponsors a scholar (or panel) discussing the Holocaust as a pre-concert talk is employing an audience engagement approach. In this it would be assumed that a deeper understanding of the Holocaust will enhance an audience member’s appreciation of the work.

The company that has an established relationship with both the African-American and Jewish communities and, as a result of discussing (with them) the need to build bridges between those communities, decides to produce A Child of Our Time is involved in community engagement. The arts organization could then sponsor workshops/panel discussion/presentations on the issue. Or even better, it could work with organizations in those communities as they develop ways to utilize the oratorio in the service of their own interests.

I don’t deny that it would be possible to use A Child of Our Time as a means of beginning a relationship with the communities mentioned in the previous paragraph. HOWEVER, that is difficult. Imagine someone you’ve never met coming up to you and offering you a shiny new Rolex saying they want to be your friend. The prospect might give you pause, at best, especially if this person was part of a family with which you had had a less than positive relationship before. Using a work of art to begin a relationship can be done, but it must be done with care and with awareness that it could appear to be simply a ploy to sell tickets.

It’s a good exercise to apply the same type of analysis to any work of art with which you are familiar. How might anything you would present be imagined in each of the three categories? The more you do it, the easier it gets. I’ll say, I’m still working through the thought processes myself.

Engage!

Doug

Photo: Some rights reserved by greeblie

[To repeat:

• Audience Development is a marketing strategy designed for immediate results (sales, donations, etc.).
• Audience Engagement is a marketing strategy designed for deepening relationships with current stakeholders and expanding reach over time.
• Community Engagement is a mission strategy designed to create and maintain relationships with individuals and communities. The desired end results are deepened relationships and expanded reach for the arts organization and healthier, more vibrant communities.]

But definitions are abstract things. It’s a good idea to flesh them out in order to make them meaningful. Here is a chart of questions to ask of projects or programs that may be helpful in differentiating among them.

I’ll reiterate that all of this is still “work in progress.” However, the basic questions:

• When was the community considered?
• Does a relationship already exist with the community?
• Did the community have input into content?
• What was the nature of the community input into the event?
• And particularly, has the relationship been maintained after the event?

all lead us to better understand the role (and timing) of relationships with the community in defining the terms. The third question is of considerable importance. If the selection of work presented does not come from relationship-based awareness of community interests or needs or from direct community input, there is really no community engagement involved. But it’s important to understand that the previous sentence is an “or” statement. Community engagement does not need to mean that the community picks the work. If the arts organization understand the community well enough to know the community’s interests (NOTE: This is a difficult thing.), then selections made that address those interests are a demonstration of community engagement.

And the last question is an important one. The world of the arts is by its nature event focused. We finish one and we want to move on to the next. However, community engagement demands relationship maintenance. Think how it would feel if you were invited to and participated in a major party by a new friend and that new friend then went on to hold many more parties and never talked to you again. That’s the experience of some communities who have been exposed to “hit and run” relationships with arts organizations.

Next time. I’ll try to explain this using a specific work to illustrate the three approaches.

Engage!

Doug

Photo: Some rights reserved by greeblie

———-

Let’s be honest, the word engagement has become a fad of late. That should be a good thing for someone who has written a book about community engagement. And it is. It’s one of the reasons you’re reading this. However, the lack of understanding of the word is so pervasive that we are in danger of losing the power that community engagement represents in the fog of meanings that surround it.

My despair around this issue reached a peak when I heard someone describe a revenue sharing project–$1 of every ticket sold to a dance concert went to the soup kitchen–as community engagement. If that is, indeed, community engagement, community engagement is a meaningless concept. What it is is cause marketing, a good and worthy thing, but it’s not engagement.

Since I believe community engagement can be a powerful tool benefiting both the arts and the communities they serve, it’s necessary to define it (and terms for concepts that get conflated with it) in meaningful ways. This understanding has led me to an effort to differentiate among audience development, audience engagement, and community engagement. It is important to highlight the fact that all are good things to do. The issue for me is that they are not all the same thing. Here are my “work in progress” thoughts.

 Audience Development is a marketing strategy designed for immediate results (sales, donations, etc.). It is internally focused (artcentric) and usually results in little or no change to the arts “product.”

In contrast, the word engagement implies relationship. Audience Engagement is a marketing strategy designed for deepening relationships with current stakeholders and expanding reach over time. Also internally focused (artcentric), it may result in new modes/venues of presentation and means of illuminating/explaining the arts to the public. Work is often developed/presented unilaterally. Typically, “outreach” is an example of audience engagement.

Community Engagement is a mission strategy designed to create and maintain relationships with individuals and communities (many of whom may not be currently affiliated with the organization). It is dependent upon establishment of trusting, mutually beneficial relationships over time–the arts and the community are equal partners. The focus of community engagement is on the relationship; the art grows out of or is a response to the relationship. The desired end results are deepened relationships and expanded reach for the arts organization and healthier, more vibrant communities.

In my next post I’ll present some questions to use in helping to determine which is which.

Engage!

Doug

Photo: Some rights reserved by greeblie

The first is one I’ve used with boards of directors for years. It’s been a bit astonishing to me how much difficulty some people have with the question. And that difficulty is directly related to the issues the arts face and the root of the work that needs to be done.

• How are the lives of the people of your community made better by the work that you do? (No variant of “because we exist” addresses this question.)

The second question is designed to force a little reality testing, albeit internal. “Do I really think this is true?” And, “To whom would I point (individuals and groups outside of the arts’ inner circle) as specific beneficiaries of our work?”

• Would community members who are not “arts believers” agree? (How do you know? How many–percentage, numbers, etc.–would agree? Would community leaders agree? Would the “person on the street” agree?)

And finally, is there any evidence that people outside of the arts think your organization is improving the life of individuals in the community?

• What are the practical ways this belief is made manifest in your community (e.g., greater than normal governmental funding, your inclusion in the “community family,” or widespread support in times of stress)?

This may not be the ultimate community engagement diagnostic tool, but it certainly gets at the issue of public value. Stay tuned as the questions get refined.

Engage!

Doug

Photo: Some rights reserved by sashamd

I’d like to take a different approach to consideration of mission in this post from the previous two. This one is less directly about the relationship between mission and community engagement (although two of the examples deal, very explicitly, with that). What I’m interested in here is the power that can come from factoring market realities into adopting a mission. Identifying a valuable market niche and staking your mission there can yield great results. I am presenting this in Engaging Matters because a vigorous focus on community engagement is still a relatively rare stance in the arts world and it can serve as means of setting one’s organization apart from the pack.

The well-known case of the Oakland Symphony in the 1980’s begins with a clear sense of mission rooted in the realities of Oakland. Aware of its inability to compete head-to-head with the San Francisco Symphony, Oakland chose to focus on “exceptionally well-performed new music not played by the San Francisco Symphony,” to “cater to a local audience,” to commission new work, and to maintain “a . . . limited performance schedule.” As they achieved success, they sought to become something different, something that more directly competed with the San Francisco Symphony. In other words they sought to become “another major orchestra.” This departure from what was a reasonably well-functioning market niche was one of the many factors that played into the orchestra’s demise, famously documented in Autopsy of an Orchestra. The phoenix that has arisen from the Oakland Symphony’s ashes, the Oakland-East Bay Symphony, has adhered to and refined the original vision of the OS. OEBS sees itself as a community-centered orchestra and works from that position.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music, in the shadow of the performing arts juggernauts of Manhattan, has staked a claim on contemporary, especially avant garde work. This clear sense of identity, along with brilliant leadership, has created an institution that is the envy of its Manhattan peers and an international force in contemporary arts.

And Ballet Memphis, about which I have written before, taking stock of its community and the fairly crowded ballet world (on the national level), chose to be a community-focused institution. The demographics of Memphis led the Memphis Symphony to a similar mission and together they serve Memphis well.

Mission is not an abstract, academic notion. Properly conceived, a mission serves as a life raft in the sea of troubles . . . and “shiny object ” temptations of artcentric goals. It should be the basis of every significant decision an arts organization takes. It should be informed by the realities of the market in which the organization exists, and not simply the desires of the founders, artistic director, or the board. I think one reason that I, as an advocate for community engagement, find reality-based missions so important is that there are a lot of “generic” arts organizations–the symphony, theatre, dance company, or museum that could be in any city in the country (or world). One reason they struggle is because of their lack of connection to a place. I would argue that a community-focused mission is one way for an arts organization to differentiate itself from the crowd and, perhaps, make it stand out artistically and be more sustainable.

But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Engage!

Doug

Photo: Some rights reserved by Roland Urbanek

In Engaged Mission: I, I suggested that service to people is/ought to be a fundamental element of the understanding of our mission, whether or not it is formally articulated in a mission statement. I think that is probably not too controversial. It’s the extent of the service and the way we carry it out that could be a little more challenging for us.

In the simplistic graphic I presented last time, I tried to show that art as only service (community focused), while there are people and organizations with such a mission, is not the ground I am claiming when I speak of community engagement. It is the middle ground–where mutual interests (the arts’ and the community’s) are advanced–that is the focus of my work.

People for whom a particular art form or a specific work has deep meaning have difficulty understanding/relating to people for whom that is not the case. As a result, they assume that simply putting forth their work or medium/genre is serving the community. As a result, in spite of their intent, the effect can be artcentric. The key for the future of the arts lies in finding ways to serve people who do not already feel the arts are important to them–ways that they recognize. Surreptitious service (service that is invisible to the “recipient”) is not beneficial for practical reasons; it is also, in many cases, not actually service if the people being “served” are not aware they are benefiting.

From a practical standpoint, service exclusively to those who already understand the value might be sufficient if there were far larger numbers of people in that category than there are. But even if there were unmanageable multitudes already hooked, wouldn’t there still be a moral argument to do more? If we do this work because we are aware of its great power for good, don’t we have some obligation to share it with those who are not aware? If so, then we are faced “simply” with the issue of how to do so.

This brings us back to the second question from my previous post. To what extent do we serve people? Since mutuality of benefit is the hallmark of effective community engagement, one-way service to others at the expense of the art, artists, or arts organization is not the answer. Every organization will make its own choices on the continuum. So long as work begins somewhere to the right of Artcentric, progress is being made. Simply asking, in the context of every programming decision, “In what ways can our art be made personally meaningful to people unfamiliar with it or with its benefits?” will be helpful. The benefits will be increasingly valuable the more the responses to that question are based on direct knowledge and relationship with the community.

Any sincere desire to serve is a great beginning. As experience is gained and training is received, the quality (and benefits) of the engagement will improve.

Engage!

Doug

Photo: Some rights reserved by Roland Urbanek