Multimedia Me
Posted on | April 6, 2010 | No Comments
Lately, I’ve been all over the place on the internets:
Several weeks back, my first full article was published for the Chicago Artists Resource Theater section – an interview with 500 Clown’s Molly Brennan. My slant on what CAR calls “Artist Stories” is to specialize in folks who have a unique career or have been successful in a more traditional track in a unique way. Hence Molly (if you don’t know her, have a read and you’ll understand.) Also at CAR, I’ve been handed the reigns to another Twitter feed (my third, for those keeping track). The pitch I made to the powers-that-be at the Department of Cultural Affairs was that Twitter is custom made for getting information and resources to a group of highly interested folks (like the folks following and posting to the “2am theater” (#2amt) and Chicago Storefront Summit (#csfs) hashtags.)
A few weeks back I took a gig (my first booking through my agent) as an extra in a series of commercials for a financial services firm that is airing on CNBC and recently showed up on The YouTube. There’s another one where I’m dead center in the opening shot (sadly with my back to the camera), but there’s the one where my noble frame is streaking across the background at the top, including half of my bespectacled countenance (also, the principle guy is my buddy Layne Manzer).
World Theatre Day found me doing my last two show day of Mrs. Caliban at Lifeline and with a shiny new MacBook Pro. Add to that my guilt over not being able to be at the Chopin setting up for the big WTD party, and you get my own humble entry into the WTD video genre, now up at the Lifeline blog.
The other thing I was doing on WTD10 was recording interviews with the cast & crew of People We Know, the final world-premiere entry in the side project’s 09-10 season. This is actually part of my ongoing project – and, really, the heir of Theatre That Works – called the side project sessions. I’ve got a lot of cool things on my plate right now, but this is one of the coolest, for me. It blends TSP’s mission of supporting and promoting artists, my own love of unpacking the why and how of theatre-making, and my huge dork-crush on This American Life, Radiolab, and Planet Money. I just released one featuring Carolyn Klein, who directed our production The Artist Needs a Wife:
[side project session 2] Carolyn Klein, Actor & Director [6:28]
posted 4-1-2010
I hope to release these on a weekly or bi-weekly basis – and I’m going to try a bunch of new things whenever I can (explainer-style podcasts on the making of moments, podcasts going inside the mind of a designer, longer podcasts on a theme) – so I hope you’ll check them out and keep doing so. Also – Adam (TSP’s AD) is taking my word that these are worthwhile for the company to do, but they do take a hell of a lot of time and effort to put together. I want to keep doing them, so I would really appreciate knowing if people are listening and enjoying them.
And finally, my great friends, frequent collaborators and fellow strugglers against the Great Old Ones at Very Clever have submitted a bunch of films to festivals in the Midwest, including several that feature me, like Fashion Sense, Hope Hath No Halflife, and one we did back in the summer, Moving Forward:
This post brought to you in part by the redoubtable Mieka van der Ploeg, costume and makeup magic-maker, who bought me a frothy Fat Tire for my post on the parallels between the music and theatre industries.
Buy me a beer?Locked in a Room with Crazy People
Posted on | March 17, 2010 | 7 Comments
"So what did you think of the show?!!"
LukeJB, over at his blog, leaps into the fray of the ongoing, perennial discussion of why, exactly, theatre regularly gets pasted in the Art Medium Wars. In responding to Eric Zeigenhagen (whose point I will further distill into “People either like theatre or they don’t”), Luke says
I think the difference is simpler: you can lump netflixing & nose-bleeding (going to a giant concert) together on one side, and theatre-going on the other. The former has much less potential for disaster than the latter. If you rent a bad movie, you can turn it off. If you go see Springsteen, he’s going to play “Born To Run”. But what happens if you get roped into a dreadful musical aimed at nostalgic baby-boomers or an over-serious Chekhov “reinterpretation”? It’s a painful experience. It’s painful for the same reason theatre can be transcendent: it’s immediate, it’s inescapable, it’s brutal.
What he’s hitting on here are the values and the fears of a group of people (and a large one at that). This is standard marketing practice, and it’s what anyone starting up a business does: ask what the value proposition is of the product to her potential customers.* More on this in a second.
The group we’re talking about here is the “unwashed mashes” (I assume and hope that’s not a typo, because it’s hilarious): the mythical ‘Average Joe.’ Luke makes this observation:
In some ways, there is too much theatre out there. Certainly, too much bad theatre. The ratio of bad plays to good plays is depressingly high. So odds are, when a friend asks you to see a show, it kind of sucks. You never go back. Can I blame you? Americans dread bad experiences more than we value good ones. So most people would rather see a movie that gets mediocre ratings than a play that gets decent ones. Less risk.
So let me sum up: People aren’t opposed to intimate, immediate experiences by nature, they are opposed to being bored. They value (and vote for, via their dollars and time) experiences where they a) have a reasonable expectation of what they are going to get (Springsteen will appear, he will play “Born to Run”) or b) where they can quickly opt out (This ‘V’ show sucks, I am going to stop watching it and do something else.) In storefront theatre, we actively work against those desires and create what are called barriers to entry: no one has ever heard of us; we hate doing straight-up, ‘recognizable’ plays; we make people come to us in cramped, sometimes uncomfortable or dirty spaces; we hold them hostage in a room and put tremendous social pressure on them to be as excited as we are about what’s happening.
Luke goes on to make a point about how we should be harder on each other about the art we make, as that will lead to better quality, which will lead to more people coming out to see shows (since there is less risk.) I love the sentiment – he puts the focus on what we can do to change the problems – but I think it’s a tough sell: ‘tell your friends their show sucks today, and in 15 years we’ll have more people coming to theatre.’ Meanwhile, I’m 45, not doing theatre and have no friends to boot.
A nearer-term solution would be (and here it is again): talk to your audience. Actually, no: listen to your audience. I hate seeing a bad show as much or more than the next person – but you know what makes me run away and never come back? The sense that I’m the only one who knows it’s bad.
psychosis: any of several serious mental illnesses characterized by defects in judgment and other cognitive processes and by loss of contact with reality.
Most of us know that a variety of factors – time, money, energy, money, people, money and money - inhibit our ability to fully realize our artistic vision. And we all know the pain of being in a show that’s less than what it could’ve or should’ve been. You think it’s not obvious to the audience? It is. And we only make it worse when we ignore their uncomfortable shifting and force them to say things like, “You looked like you were having a lot of fun out there.”
Let me be clear: I’m not advocating public finger-pointing and throwing our colleagues under a bus whenever our friends don’t like a show. What I’m asking us to do is to screw our courage to the sticking place and admit that not everything we do is perfect and to allow our audiences into the conversation. Make it okay for people to say, “Man, I really didn’t like it,” and, perhaps, acknowledge (without apologizing) that all art is, essentially, experimentation. And you get a lot of negative results before you make a breakthrough. Because otherwise, they’re going to feel like they’re locked in a room with a crazy person, and the crazy person is you. And I can guarantee you the problem isn’t just going to stop there: that tension and anxiety is going to come out somewhere – they’ll vent to a friend, a room full of co-workers, or god-forbid Yelp or Facebook about this awful, embarrassing experience they had with these crazies. Let them vent to you, let them see that you aren’t, in fact, crazy – and you will probably mitigate that fall out. You might even turn somebody around.
Think of it this way: your job as someone trying to build a community around a work or a series of work is to create a connection. We all hope that what happens in the theatre does that – but if it doesn’t, you can make it happen in the lobby. These conversations might be hard – we have to develop thicker skin and recognize that the work, not our feelings of self worth, are the things at issue. But you’re going to learn something: that person who hates your show might reveal something simple that you can fix – they were turned off the moment they couldn’t find info on your website, the chairs were uncomfortable, the person at the box office was rude. Or they might reveal they don’t like the type of work you do, at which point you can let them go their merry way (or even recommend some other shows they might like).
And it works the other way: you will find people who love what they just experienced. Share that experience with them and they’ll become an advocate. Find out what they liked and it gives you clues as to how you can draw in more people like them (ask them how they found out about the show and you have the beginnings of a marketing strategy!)
I suppose most of my recent screeds can be grouped under the heading, “it’s the audience, stupid.” We envy the success of movies, tv, and major for-profit and regional theatres – but we hate their art half the time. The thing we’re ignoring is, their motives are audience-centric: either to make money or to pursue a broad mandate to ‘bring theatre to the community,’ all those folks are interested in making art that their potential audience wants to see. But in Chicago, especially, we’re artist-centric: in general, we’re building companies and producing shows in our own image, and hoping that people will be into what we’re doing. I applaud that – hell, I participate in that – but I know that it’s a miss-and-miss-and-miss-and-sorta-hit proposition unless I’m prepared to be a little proactive. Everyone I care about in the world has built their lives around this proposition – that if they build it, others will come – and I’m happy to support them. In fact, I spend most of my time trying to figure out how to make it work. But to expect that everyone will be just as excited as we are and get angry when they aren’t – that’s just, well … crazy.
*She would also ask, “What is the demand for this product in the market I’m moving into and how will I separate myself from competitors?” Whenever I get to this point in a conversation, I always want to haul out the value triangle and really unpack the concept of differentiation and customer-centrism – but let’s leave that there for now.
This post was brought to you in part by Australian reader Marcus Westbury, who bought me a gigantic can of Fosters for my extra-long last post. Thanks Marcus!
Buy me a beer?Behind the Music
Posted on | March 12, 2010 | 4 Comments
Thank heavens for second chances.
Last fall I heard a fantastic piece on NPR’s On The Media about the changing landscape of the music business – how changes in distribution (notably technology) have wrecked the existing support model and sent the industry into a tailspin. “Hunh,” I thought. “A lot of this sounds familiar – I should write about this.” And then I promptly forgot.
This week, OTM rebroadcasted that piece – also available on their website – and it was deja vu all over again.
“Everything that’s gone wrong in the news business went wrong first in the music business,” goes the opener, and I realized – in some ways, everything that went wrong in the music business went wrong in the theatre business first. Sure, video killed the vaudeville star – but more recently, and closer to home for us Chicagoans, the Storefront Revolution democratized theatre-making, took distribution channels out of the hands of an elite few and gave artists unprecedented control over when and how their art could be seen. It also created (or exacerbated) a system wherein a lot of work is done for very small audiences for no money. What we have now is - depending on your view – a flowering of artist-driven, home-grown volkstheater; a true Hobbesian meritocracy; or an infestation of self-serving artistic puppy mills.
While I’m sure most of you have at least a passing understanding of the effect mp3s have had on music retailers or have opinions on LiveNation and TicketMaster – listen again with an ear for the parallels with us poor players – and how we might go about changing it.
Part 1: Facing the Free Music
The negotiations between Napster and the RIAA reminds me of prolonged talks between members of the nascent League of Chicago Theatres (first as the Off-Loop Producers Association of Chicago and then as the Producers Association of Chicagoarea Theaters) and Actors Equity (the union for stage actors), trying to get terms that would allow Equity actors to work in Chicago without bankrupting small theatres. Back in 1983, a group including former Victory Gardens MD Marcie McVay and current Goodman ED Roche Schulfer successfully lobbied for the creation of the Chicago Area Theater (CAT) contracts.
What is especially trenchant is the perspective from the RIAA rep in the story on the, “lost opportunity” – how even though the music execs looking to litigate against Napster were huge music fans and felt that the Napster experience was ’so cool,’ common ground couldn’t be reached – to the regret of everyone involved.
What’s more, Brooke’s comment that “the stuff we used to pay for we can now get easily for free” hits me especially hard – both as an actor myself (who spent very little time off stage this past year yet only made $250 for performing) and as a producer via a very small company. The flowering of small, independent theatres is very much built on the talent, time and energy of artists. What’s more, a variety of forces have contributed to a trend that seems to value the contributions of designers over directors or actors – it is entirely common for designers or other technical positions to get 3-4 times what an actor gets, if the actors get paid at all.
Beyond the prima facia fairness issue, I get more and more concerned when I meet young actors who internalize this tacit value system – they see getting cast as a favor done for them. Occasionally, I see small theatre AD’s doing the same, taking actors for granted or outright exploiting them for what is, essentially, a vanity project. I am far from a strident capitalist, but its times like these when I put some stock in the fact that paying for something makes you value it more.
Part 3: Played Out
The mechanics and economics of producing live music has more obvious connections to the theatre biz. Rick Karr sets up this section thusly, “Most musicians historically have never actually earned their livings by selling records or downloads. Instead, most musicians have earned their livings by putting butts in seats, playing live, touring.” He notes that, for example the average Rolling Stones tickets are three times more than they were in the 70s. And – and here’s the terrifying “our enemies, our selves” moment given what I said above – the reason fans are paying more is “because the consolidated promotion conglomerates beat their local rivals by paying more to artists.” As concert promoter John Scher says, “You simply can’t compete with them. All you can do is choose to be a second-class citizen.”
Here’s another salient point : “Only the top superstars ever got rich off of royalties,” says Rick Karr – and later, John Scher says,
“But if you look now at what are considered the sort of younger superstars, you know, you look at Radiohead, you look at Coldplay, you’re looking at acts that have been around for 15 years. There’re very few, very, very few artists that have become arena or amphitheater headliners with any staying power. There are, every year, a couple of artists, often in the urban world, that become very, very big for a short period of time, but the American Idol model, it’s about now, not about three or four or five years from now.
So, will it correct itself? I think it’ll correct itself, but there’ll be the Dark Ages of the concert promotion business probably for anywhere from five to 10 years.”
And again:
What’s terrible about it is, forget the promoters. It’s the public. When you’re looking at 250- and 500-dollar tickets as being the norm for big shows, and if, you know, you’re going to spend 250 dollars to see the Rolling Stones or to see U2 or to see Madonna or Paul McCartney or, you know, any of the giant acts, that’s probably the one concert you can afford to go to all year.
Sound familiar? To me, this is as close as we’re going to get to a case-study in why the old model – both the production/promotion side and the side agitating on behalf of artists – won’t work in the long run – and in fact, never worked for the majority of people.
And let me say this, no matter what you think of Broadway in Chicago (full disclosure, the side project was last year’s recipient of the BIC/League of Chicago Theatres “Emerging Theatre Award” – and the small, one-time cash award the company got as part of that is what allowed TSP to bring me on as MD) – the non-profit world reflects the same lop-sided incentives and runs perilously close to the “there can be only one” scenario. The Goodman, Steppenwolf and Chicago Shakes each have operating budgets in the area of $15-16 million dollars – the next closest theatre is difficult to determine for a variety of reasons, but whether its Black Ensemble Theatre, Victory Gardens or the Court, the budget range is $3-4 million. That’s a gap of 400% – 500% between Theatre #3 and Theatre #4.
I do want to be clear here – I’ve been in rooms with BIC folks and folks at the big non-profits: they know the model doesn’t work. And despite what you may believe as you scraping out your existence and making your art with table scraps and gaff tape: mo’ money does in fact mean mo’ problems. It’s very hard to make radical changes to your business model when you have investors, unions, and hundreds or thousands of employees – people who have stake in what you’re doing and, in some cases, rely on you for their own livings. Take my word for it or not, but I walk out of those rooms knowing that there is no Great and Powerful Oz, and that he can’t go back because he doesn’t know how it works. The answer is in my own backyard – and they’re looking at us for innovation.
Part 4: Charting the Charts
This piece has some really interesting revelations about the way large media companies determine popularity – and answers my long-held questions why country and rap seemed to come out of nowhere and suddenly take over the airwaves in the late 90s (hint: it was a technical change in the way the music industry determined popularity. So never mock my love of databases, people.)
The OK Go story – about major label attempts to co-opt the band’s underground popularity into mainstream success, called by Billboard’s Rob Levine a manifestation of the “Snakes on a Plane fallacy” – pings my own theory of “The Myth of Steppenwolf:” the idea that any group of reasonably talented and passionate kids can get together, form a theatre company, become movie stars and have their company become a $16 million machine while still retaining its storefront roots. It ain’t so – when it started to enjoy more mainstream success, the ‘Wolf co-opted – or was co-opted by – another system: first the Broadway-success model, then the Large-Regional-Non-Profit model. My argument has, is, and will be that the future is smaller and more sustainable – and that we’ll all be better off when we stop trying to fit our art and culture to the model, and start making a model in our own image. (And lookie-lookie – there goes OK Go making its own model. Here’s the same announcement again, with cute dogs.)
To get back to counting popularity again, there is also something to the issue of data bias, via Chris Molanphy of Idolator.com:
Ten years ago at this time, the kinds of albums that were topping the chart regularly were Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears. But we’ve started to see some albums topping the charts recently that are beloved by probably a middle-aged audience. I’m thinking of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, who scored his first number one album in over 30 years, with Modern Times, because who are the last people still going to record stores and buying physical albums? People in their 40s, 50s, 60s.
Again – this makes me think of Regional Theatre programming – they get their feedback from people who see traditional theatre which, surprisingly, reinforces the idea that you should program more traditional theatre.
There’s another bit in here that I find particularly interesting for us in the theatre, but perhaps not for the reason you might expect. Eric Garland is “co-founder of the company BigChampagne, which tries to track all the ways music spreads these days.” Mark Phillips is the NPR Reporter.
ERIC GARLAND: One of the things that we’ve looked at for a number of years is something that we call “songs per fan.” How many songs from this artist is the average fan interested in? You know, an artist like the Dave Matthews Band, if someone is interested in one song, they are likely interested in more than five songs. I chose that example because that’s a very elite club. You know, I would put the Beatles in that company.
But let me put the question to you, if you look at the top of the airplay charts, the top of the sales charts, how many songs, on average, do you think people are interested in from those artists? Remember that the number can’t fall below one, right? It’s about 1.1.
MARK PHILLIPS: It’s a mathematical way of saying the average artist on the top of the charts is a one-hit wonder. And Garland says this effectively chops off the top of the charts, because one-hit wonders don’t make money like they used to. In fact, he says they’re so expensive to produce and promote that the real money is with smaller acts with more devoted followings.
This, to me, is the real take-away: I can say this with mathematical and anecdotal evidence at my back, the vast majority of theatres that pop up in Chicago are, in effect, one-hit wonders. Fueled by (most likely) the passion of the people making the theatre or (occasionally) touching a chord with the zeitgeist by doing something superficially “new,” they make a splash and get some steam. But because either (or both) the artistic foundation or organization/community building foundation are pathetically thin, they crumble. My take on this for the storefront gang: if you want to be doing this for a long time, don’t throw all your eggs into one basket (eg. your next show), relying on it to hit and carry you forward. Chances are, it won’t – and if it does, it probably won’t be the game-changer you thing it will be. Stay lean and build your fan base.
Part 5: “Why I’m not Afraid to Take your Money”
At the end of it, if you don’t want to listen to me, listen to a woman who could kick my ass and make me like it: Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls on how to fund your artistic pursuits:
Everyone has to stop thinking there is an answer. The answer is, there’s an infinite number of answers.
Rick Karr hits another nail on the head, right in the opener: I am so tired of having the fight with small theatres about asking for money – possibly getting back to the institutionalized feeling that ‘no one values art or artists.’ They see fundraising as “begging people for money so I can play.” Karr calls it “monetizing fans’ passion,” which is exactly right. We take for granted that anyone can do what we do – hell, most of us are making it up as we go along. But most people don’t, and they value people who do, otherwise no one would ever watch TV, read books, listen to music, or go to the theatre. Kicking in a little cash is one way of showing their support. Palmer has experimented all over the place – why can’t we be just as creative?
AMANDA PALMER: I’ve done free webcasts in which I’ve auctioned off props from the videos that I’ve shot and handwritten song lyrics and weird stuff from my apartment. People have bid hundreds and hundreds of dollars on this stuff. But a lot of it is not even really so much about the stuff itself as it is about their willingness to, to connect with me and support me.
And I’ve also done a lot of sort of flash mob shows using Twitter and my blog to get a bunch of people in a public space, and literally put a hat out and said, I gave you this show for free, I’m really glad you came. If you can afford to give me some money, do it. If you’re too poor, don’t.
I have been screaming about this from the rooftops of theatres all across the city. Palmer gets right to the heart of one reason we’re having such a hard time finding the money – again, replace ‘musicians’ with ‘theatre artists,’ ’studio’ with ‘major theatre’ and ‘putting it up online’ with ’small, independent theatre’:
AMANDA PALMER: I think what’s important to point out, that it was never the artists asking. It was Tower Records or the anonymous record label. It was never Madonna putting her hand out, saying, here’s my record, give me the money. You know, people kind of don’t like it. They want their artists and their musicians to be these sort of like pure beings who are like holed up in garrets wearing scarves and like painting and strumming their guitars and howling in pain, and like some product gets mysteriously delivered and then somebody else who doesn’t mind dealing with the money goes out with the hat.
Now, that you can make music directly available to your fans, I think it’s also time to destroy the myth that artists shouldn’t ask for money.
RICK KARR: Surely, there’ve got to be some downsides to this, though. I mean, nobody’s going to give you half a million dollars up front to go into the studio and make your record, right? Come on. You’re making it sound like it’s a perfect scenario.
[...]AMANDA PALMER: No, no, no, no, this – it’s definitely not ideal. And one of the advantages that I certainly had with my band, The Dresden Dolls, was that we signed back when it was sort of like the last wave of, you know, here’s a bunch of money to make a record.
But, an album can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce, with a gazillion people behind it or, you know, someone can pick up a guitar and record it into their Macintosh for zero dollars.
But if that person recording their guitar into their Mac and putting it up online sings about something that connects with millions of people, nobody will care what the medium was. All they’ll know is that they heard a song that made them cry and they want to hear it again.
The key is – you have to really connect with your real fans, which means talking to them and listening to them. On Twitter this week (@dangranata) the 2am Theatre Crew has been talking about the Red Curtain in all it’s forms, and the one that’s most pernicious is our fear of our audience. We don’t want to hear what they have to say, not really. We want them to buy tickets, we want them to applaud and laugh at the right places, and we want them to go away. The thing that bugs me most about Storefront Theatre is that we have a double standard – we want to take creative power back from casting agents and ADs or Lit Directors at big theatres, to say “the hell with you, I can do this myself!” But we still want someone to do the “icky” stuff for us – selling tickets, promoting our shows, getting to know the audience, figuring out how to pay for everything. It’s a very Lear-like proposition, isn’t it? And we know how that ends.
But maybe that’s for the best:
AMANDA PALMER: People don’t love music any less. There might be a lot less money out there in the industry, but maybe that’s a good thing. [...] As far as the music is concerned, maybe it ups the ante. If you’re a teenager with a dream of being a rock star, maybe you’ll really think about why. Were you doing this to be rich and famous or [LAUGHS] are you doing this because you really love music and you want to connect with people, and you’ll do it even if it just means you make a living wage? If that’s true, I’m – you know, I’m a fan [LAUGHS] of the new system.
This post was made possible in part by the redoubtable Bil Gaines, who purchased a frothy Great Lakes Eliot Ness for me, thereby staving off complete mental breakdown for another day.
Buy me a beer?