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Carrying Forward, Clumsily

April 15, 2013 by 1 Comment
stepping-on-toes

A week or so ago, I was in a cab from Chicago O’Hare into the city to speak at the National Alliance of Musical Theatre conference.  The traffic was heavy and the cabbie was chatty, and at one point he ended up asking me whether I was married, and I said yes.  He then, logically but erroneously, assumed that I was married to a woman, and with that assumption he then carried on the conversation, asking me first just generally what she did and whether she minded me traveling so much, and … [Read more...]

04/15/13 4:27 AM | filed under: Language, Main |

Standing Up for the Charitable Tax Deduction Is Standing Up for a Healthy Society; or Reframing away from giving a tax break to the rich

December 10, 2012 by 5 Comments
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In a comment on my post from last week about framing, John Carnwath honed in on a comment I sort of tossed off about the threat to the charitable deduction posed by the fiscal cliff.  Take a look at his comment, which is very well laid out—he notes that while the tax deduction for charitable giving is surely and important driver for the arts, he’s not convinced that, given the topic of the post, a frame that suggests favoring the wealthy with a “tax break” is the best idea.  He notes … [Read more...]

12/10/12 6:05 AM | filed under: Advocacy, Language, Research |

Nothing New Under the (Ever-Closer, Ready to Incinerate Us) Sun

December 4, 2012 by 12 Comments
sun

On his way out the door, Rocco Landesman lobbed one final, wonderful bomb out there in a conversation with his counterpart in France (who, by the way, receives $9 billion-with-a-B in annual funding whereas the NEA has about $150 million).  He was speaking at the World Arts Forum, and spoke about a “fundamental, visceral distrust of the arts” by the American public.  He called the NEA funding level “pathetic,” and who can disagree, and his blunt honesty about what he called the arts’ … [Read more...]

12/4/12 8:54 AM | filed under: Advocacy, Language, Main, Research |

First the Seed: Embracing Arts as a Means to and End

June 20, 2012 by 4 Comments
citrus

As I head to TCG to moderate a panel with Diane Ragsdale, Diane Paulus and Chad Bauman on how to better integrate art and artists into a conversation about audience engagement, I feel a little like I'm walking into the set up for a joke and I don't know the end of it.  "An arts marketer and advocate walks into a bar full of artists and says, 'Maybe art is really a means to an end...'"  Then what? I've been thinking about this shift, from a mindset where the making of art is the center of … [Read more...]

06/20/12 12:12 PM | filed under: Advocacy, Audience Development, Language, Main |

Fiddling with the Believing Machine

March 27, 2012 by 3 Comments
flying-spiderman-653948 -http://www.kewlwallpapers.com/images/wallpapers/flying-spiderman-653948.jpeg

I have had some trouble getting up the energy to be upset about the Mike Daisey problem otherwise known as #DaiseyGate.  This became obvious to me as I sat at lunch at one of my stops on the Counting New Beans tour with a bunch of mid-twenties junior staffers at major theatres and heard them rail against Daisey and his lying lies, voicing the betrayal they felt as staffers who are sometimes put in the position of lying to an audience, either knowingly or unknowingly, in the service of the art … [Read more...]

03/27/12 5:55 PM | filed under: Audience Development, Language, Main, Research |

On (in)Appropriate Cultural Appropriation

October 31, 2011 by 2 Comments
Nakotah Larance in Totem, photo by Greg Horn.

Nakotah Larance in Totem, photo by Greg Horn.In the late 1800's, William Cody, more popularly known as Buffalo Bill, toured the United States and Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a production that featured sharpshooters, re-enactments of Indian attacks (it was said to have ended with a presentation of Custer's Last Stand) and, later (when the title was appended to include "and Congress of Rough Riders of the World"), feats of derring-do from people from the Middle East, Mongolia, Central … [Read more...]

10/31/11 10:26 AM | filed under: Advocacy, Language, Main |

The Evaluation Problem

October 3, 2011 by 3 Comments
sur-la-table-cooking-tools-12-stainless-steel-twoprong-fork

Diane Ragsdale and Devon Smith have written tandem arguments about the difference and relative laxness of arts incubators over technology incubators. I won’t go into all that they’ve said, as you should be reading their blogs anyway, but in sum it comes down to an argument that arts incubators, rather than adopting the put up or shut up attitude of tech incubators, whose average support time is 33 months and at the end of which they let you fly or fall on your own, instead adopt a system … [Read more...]

10/3/11 3:19 PM | filed under: Language, Main |

The best art teaches us how we should behave

August 29, 2011 by 2 Comments
"Dancing With Mom" by Nagu Tron from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.

"Dancing With Mom" by Nagu Tron from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.On Thursday of last week I finally caught up on all my blog reading, including Chad Bauman’s recent post on reconnecting with the art he was marketing by actually getting in and seeing a show.  I can relate to that feeling of drain, of forgetting the value of what we are doing (and what we’re doing it for) sometimes.  Especially with a new baby at home, and commuting 75 minutes each way to work each day, I … [Read more...]

08/29/11 8:53 AM | filed under: Advocacy, Audience Development, Language, Main |

In Whose Hands Does Meaning Live?

July 6, 2011 by 4 Comments
Photo: "DSC07227" by Phillip Torrone from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.

Where does the meaning of a piece of work live?  When does its particular resonance take shape?  When a playwright puts words down on paper and submits them to be produced, is there something already inherent in those words that form the shape of the meaning?  Or is the true shape of that meaning created by a director, whose particular eye and concept elevate the words from the page to the proscenium? This is not, it turns out, just an esoteric conversation.  As we move into an age … [Read more...]

07/6/11 2:21 AM | filed under: Audience Development, Language, Main, Research |

Communion, Captivation and Flow – With a Little Rapture Thrown In For Spice

June 27, 2011 by 2 Comments
Prarie Dog Rapture

Last fall, I was walking with a friend on the expansive brilliantly white patio outside the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.  It was a hot day, and when my friend needed to take a call, I snuck out of the sun to stand under the large flat roof of the building in the shade, next to the cool marble walls.  The building is huge, a true monolith, and as I was looking up at the architecture, one of the many quotes they have engraved on the Kennedy Center’s walls caught my eye: “This … [Read more...]

06/27/11 9:54 AM | filed under: Advocacy, Audience Development, Language, Main, Research |
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