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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 |

This Is A Work of Non-Fiction

March 19, 2012 by 91 Comments

This is a guest post by Alli Houseworth, an independent arts consultant and former marketing and communications director at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. I don't have anything especially interesting to say about Mike Daisey, but Alli does, so I have asked her to do it here. The views and opinions expressed are Alli's alone.   In 2010 I worked at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, when The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (TATESJ) was “birthed” at the theatre, and the following … [Read more...]

03/19/12 2:31 PM | filed under: Audience Development, Main |

Finding the Practical in the Esoteric

March 12, 2012 by 1 Comment
navelgazing

I’m writing this from Chicago, on the first stop of our multi-city tour to disseminate the results of the intrinsic impact research.  Over this past weekend, Alan Brown and I have been pulling together the presentation for these stops, and I’ve found myself thinking about and reacting to the wonderful coverage we received this past week from HowlRound, Jumper, You’ve Cott Mail and others—and the response that that coverage has received. Last week, I had the fortune to participate in … [Read more...]

03/12/12 5:46 AM | filed under: Main, Research |

An Obsession with the Afterimage

March 5, 2012 by Leave a Comment
AmericanFlagAfterimage

In June 2009, I was briefly in Washington, DC, visiting friends right after that year’s Theatre Communications Group conference in Baltimore, MD.  I was in their spare room, small and tightly packed, and it was humid because it was DC in the summer, and there was a CPU humming in the corner and various lights blinking under the desk, and I was on West Coast time still, I think—so I was checking Facebook.  Back then, I got a lot of different feeds—many more people than I see now, thanks … [Read more...]

03/5/12 5:30 AM | filed under: Advocacy, Audience Development, Main, Research |

The Work of Presentational Art in the Age of On-Demand Technological Empowerment

February 19, 2012 by 6 Comments
tvsets

I have a friend who is getting his Ph.D. in linguistics by resurrecting a dead Native American language.  Working with one member of the tribe, and drawing mostly from hundred-year-old documents that attempted to transcribe a non-written language that has since died, he is recreating, based on educated guesses, other similar tongues that have survived and, well, I don’t know what—he is recreating a lost language from scratch. I was reminded of this effort as I listened today to the … [Read more...]

02/19/12 10:05 AM | filed under: Advocacy, Audience Development, Main |

Funny, Catchy and Not Too Challenging, or “At some point, you’re just an elitist f*ck.”

February 8, 2012 by 13 Comments
sweet_home_alabama

I was having a conversation with Arlene Goldbard about a month ago, and at some point I started getting a sour taste over some of the things we were discussing, but I couldn’t figure out why.  Our subject was the four interviews with patrons that I had conducted as part of our intrinsic impact research (which will be published, along with an essay by Goldbard, as part of the 450-page report out on the whole project, Counting New Beans: Intrinsic Impact and the Value of Art, available March … [Read more...]

02/8/12 11:01 AM | filed under: Advocacy, Audience Development, Main |

A Divided Country Still

January 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

  This post originally appeared on the Theatre Bay Area Chatterbox at http://www.theatrebayarea.org/chatterbox. As we celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and remember the great strides that were made, despite tremendous resistance, in the 1960’s by King and many other brave men and women, it’s important to also note that, by and large, the theatre community continues to be a divided country. Our genre, at least in the United States, and at least in the more mainstream … [Read more...]

01/16/12 10:35 PM | filed under: Advocacy, Main |

What Inequality Looks Like and Where and When It Starts

December 12, 2011 by 14 Comments
"Not Equal" by holeymoon on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons.

A couple weeks ago, I was the recipient of a string of emails that are making the rounds—emails stemming from a lack of diversity in the panelists at this year’s National Arts Marketing Project (NAMP) Conference.  These emails, which were, in order: An email from Roberto Bedoya, the executive director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council, to Bob Lynch, head of Americans for the Arts, which produced NAMP (ultimately forwarded to a variety of other people by Roberto), An email from Bob Lynch to … [Read more...]

12/12/11 10:31 PM | filed under: Main, Research |

Art and Happiness: New research indicates 4 out of 6 happiest activities are arts-related (!)

December 2, 2011 by 16 Comments
"Happiness" by Aprile C from Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

Last week, an article that was actually published nearly a month ago on Chatelaine.com passed through my Facebook feed four times in two days.  The article, titled “The three times people are happiest—you may be surprised,” rather vaguely discussed a research project out of the London School of Economics that was mapping happiness levels associated with various activities—and the results, per the article, indicated that, behind sex and exercise, the next most happiness-inducing activity … [Read more...]

12/2/11 10:33 AM | filed under: Main, Research |

Theatre as an Antidote to Isolation

November 29, 2011 by 1 Comment
"Honeycomb" by nene9 from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.

"Honeycomb" by nene9 from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.I'm transcribing some interviews we have conducted with patrons (some of which I've written about previously) about the impact of artistic experiences on them, and I was so affected by one that I'm going to just post an excerpt of it here and let it speak for itself.  Well, speak for itself except to say that the interviewee is a man by the name of Sean McKenna who lives in Oakland, and who attends about 35 shows a year with … [Read more...]

11/29/11 10:33 PM | filed under: Audience Development, Main |
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