The approaching summer is showing glimpses and glimmers of return to live performance in shared settings. Many theater, dance, and music companies are relaunching or reconfiguring themselves to be outdoors. Others, like The Shed, are threading the needle of audience readiness/reticence, pubic health regulations, and labor union requirements to design indoor performances. And many of us are looking, longingly, at Australia, where early hard-line controls and responsive public action are allowing major venues to welcome significant crowds. [Props … [Read more...]

This story may sound like a metaphor. But it’s actually a case-in-point: When preparing to launch the Navigation Technology Satellite 2 (NTS-2) in 1977, the NAVSTAR GPS engineering team was in a bit of a pickle. The satellite contained the first cesium atomic clocks to be sent into orbit. That highly accurate timing device would be a key component of an early Global Positioning System (GPS), the grandparent of the system your phone is using, in this instant, to determine where you are. The pickle was this: The satellite’s extreme … [Read more...]

While most performing arts organizations are still in the midst of emergency action around their current reality (safety, solvency, and immediate service, as mentioned in a previous post), most are also looking toward the still-unknowable fall and spring, when their performance seasons and tours would normally begin. The questions aren’t just around whether or when they might re-emerge into a shared physical performers-and-audience space, but also about how they might do so in what will continue to be a changed and changing world. … [Read more...]

These past few weeks, a whole world of arts organizations have been searching for, revisiting, or assembling-on-the-fly their emergency readiness plans as the pandemic turns that world upside down. Many are finding that “pandemic” wasn’t among the expected disasters in their plans, if they had a plan at all, so they’re diving into the many waves of action as best they can. … [Read more...]

When we "go to work" in the arts, we often mean actually going to an official and shared physical workspace. There are desks and phones and (sometimes) doors and walls where groups of us work with each other, or at least perform a sort of parallel play. … [Read more...]

When we talk about organizations, or other forms of collective action by groups of people, we often speak as if we have dominantly conscious control. We talk about designing the business, developing the policies, arranging the office, and building relationships. In short, we talk like architects or construction workers -- agents with autonomy, attention, and control over the ways and means of our working lives. … [Read more...]

The recent book, A Restless Art: How participation won and why it matters, offers a beautiful balance between theory and practice, abstract and concrete. The author, François Matarasso, brings decades of reflection and action to this exploration of participatory or community art. And that combination brings deep value to so many conversations about art making, arts management, and arts in society. … [Read more...]

For a second video interview for my Presenting the Performing Arts class at American University, I talked with Mark Nerenhausen, President/CEO of Hennepin Theatre Trust in Minneapolis. While my previous conversation with Pamela Tatge focused on the art and practice of artistic curating, Mark shared the many moving parts in animating and activating a building and a neighborhood through the live performing arts. … [Read more...]

Nonprofit Quarterly has a thoughtful overview of complexity and sensemaking as they relate to organizations, the first of a four-part series on the subject. The general idea is that purpose-driven collectives, such as civil-sector organizations like nonprofits, need to respond to an increasingly complex world by becoming increasingly complex themselves -- in how they see, interpret, discuss, and act in the world. … [Read more...]