Way back in June, I helped lead a project team at the National Performing Arts Convention in Pittsburgh. The event was the first-ever gathering of multiple national service organizations in the performing arts and their membership (OPERA America, Chorus America, American Symphony Orchestra League, and Dance/USA were the primary partners). And it offered an astounding opportunity to learn what challenges these arts professionals were talking about, what ideas and insights they might discover as a cross-disciplinary group, and how such an effort to cross boundaries might work.
With the vision and leadership of my colleagues Alberta Arthurs and Steven Tepper, and an amazing team of graduate students from arts management, policy, and related programs, we forged an initiative to serve as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the various convenings…listening to the content and rhythm of the hundreds of conversations, and building a framework for encoding those conversations for analysis.
The I-DOC Project, as we came to call it (standing for our efforts to Interview, Document, Observe, and Clarify), was an amazing experience…driven through long hours and hard thinking by caffeine, starchy foods, and wireless laptop computers.
Our findings are now on-line in a final report that seeks to capture what we heard, what we learned, and how we might apply that knowledge to advance a more collaborative, discipline-crossing conversation among performing arts professionals.
It’s only 34 pages (if you ignore the endless appendices), so it’s clearly just the tip of the iceburg. But I sense and hope that it’s the beginning of a deeper conversation somewhere.
