Life's a Pitch: May 2008 Archives

By Richard Chang, Paul Hodgins and Timothy Mangan
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Richard Chang, visual arts critic/blogger

In some ways, blogging and visual art are a perfect match.

Blogs are a great place to view art, comment on it, and interact with others who share an interest.

But blogs cannot replace the experience of personally encountering art. Computer screens don't have the same dimensions and interactive properties as three-dimensional works of art. They don't replicate the spaces where art is shown. Sound doesn't always translate. And images don't always reproduce well on laptop and PC screens.

But sometimes there's nothing more immediate than attending an art show and posting pictures and thoughts online, and inviting others to do so. Even when there's disagreement. I think they used to call that "community." I think they still do.

I've been blogging online about art for about year. Before that, I had a visual art column in The Orange County Register.

To my initial chagrin and the disappointment of my fellow critics, the blog replaced the column. Because of print cutbacks, there were fewer column inches in the Sunday newspaper. But the space online is apparently unlimited, as long as you've still got the attention of your reader. (That's when visuals and intriguing pictures especially help.)

I've had fun with the Arts Blog, especially since our editors aren't as concerned with what we write there as they are for our print product and official Web site. But it is another mouth that needs feeding, and I'm forced to be constantly thinking of new content for the blog, new coal to shovel into the furnace. That's on top of my other responsibilities.

Considering the number of blogs out there, sometimes I wonder if anyone really cares if I post or not. That's when I let a day or two slip. But I can't let the multitude of voices and opinions on the blogosphere discourage me. I just don't know where all of this is going sometimes.

Those are my thoughts for now... I'll have more as they come to me.

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Paul Hodgins, theater critic/blogger

Writing for an blog was not an assignment that the Register's arts writers initially greeted with optimism. It was an added duty at a time when our responsibilities had already been increasing as cutbacks reduced the size of our newsroom. And some of us didn't relish the hurly burly of the blogosphere, with its scorched-earth missives and rude polemics.

I was pleasantly surprised. The Register's Arts Blog has attracted a small but devoted, knowledgeable and thoughtful readership. While not always as interactive as I would like, I've found they read the blog regularly, and their feedback is often helpful: correcting inaccuracies, giving me additional information about a subject, suggesting with their interest new possibilities for stories and subjects (we can track an online story's popularity in minute detail through Omniture and other reader metric programs). The blog has given me closer and more meaningful connections with my community's theater professionals and participants and allowed me to fine-tune my beat to their interests.

Will bloggers eventually replace professional critics? Not on my beat, at least not in the near term. It takes not only devotion but time and money to see 100 to 150 shows per year in a wide-ranging geographical area such as Southern California. While a few independent bloggers (Cris Gross at Theater Times, for example) show considerable initiative and equal many critics in terms of knowledge, critical skills and writing ability, it's highly unlikely they could provide the comprehensive coverage a professional can, unless they're highly motivated, otherwise unemployed and independently wealthy.

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Timothy Mangan, classical music critic/blogger

Blogging on classical music for a newspaper is both rewarding and exasperating. I started my blog, Classical Life, in March, 2006, with a limited rubric: Cover the Pacific Symphony's first European tour from the trenches. When I got back, I found that the blog had been so successful, and the writing of it so enjoyable (if exhausting), I decided to continue it, with my paper's blessing. I think I valued the freedom of it most: I could write about whatever I felt like writing about (within the certain limits of my subject, of course), at whatever length, or non-length. One didn't worry about pitching ideas to an editor, or whether or not a gazillion readers would find an item of interest or even if it would ever appear in print. I was my own boss. It developed, as most blogs do, into a kind of miscellany, a place to share my favorite videos and links, to air my gripes, to break news, to have fun. My expose of Fanfare magazine's pay-to-play editorial practices started on the blog with my publication of a musician's e-mail, and snowballed into a bona fide controversy. I even wrote some well received poems and short fiction. It turned out to be a good place for think pieces as well, some of which caused minor stirs around the blogosphere.

All of a sudden I found myself to be part of a worldwide community of classical music bloggers, a friendly and supportive bunch, some of whom have become long distance friends. I do not consider the stereotypical amateur blogger in pajamas as competition to the professional critic, but rather stimulators of a much needed conversation about the art form, as well as valuable sources. To call them amateurs, at any rate, is an insult. Most, at least the ones I read, are extremely well versed and trained in classical music. And few, if any, offer competition to my main line of work at the paper, which is writing reviews of local concerts and features on the artists involved.

And, so, what's exasperating about it? As newspapers, including mine, have begun to take a nosedive, the powers that be have decided that blogs must pay. The numbers (hits) are watched incessantly, and increasing them has become the criterion for survival, not just of the blog itself, but of the writer behind it. In a real sense, the blog has become an albatross, or a target painted on my chest. If I didn't have one, no one would be looking at those blog numbers - they'd be looking at other numbers, true, but there'd be no pressure on the blog. There's the rub: a blog with pressure becomes work, and blogs shouldn't be work. Oh well, I get more hits when I'm unbuttoned anyway, so I plan to keep on letting it rip, or die trying.

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To hear more from these three writers, read "The Arts Blog".  
To learn more about NPAC sessions such as "The Online Salon", visit the website.

By Hilary Hahn
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In a time when artistic organizations are vying for attention and burgeoning public access to formerly "elite" art forms is setting a new stage for the future, artists are being challenged to rethink the definitions of their craft. They are forging lasting connections across genres and culture, some joining together over a geographical divide, others meeting up in person to make creative history. In music alone, the last few years have brought unprecedented inter-genre collaborations, as well as forays into experimental film, dance, live photography, narration, and cooking. In all fields of the arts, however, countless projects await discovery. It is clear that inventive types are pushing their own boundaries, attempting to meld their training to something out of the ordinary without losing their professional values or respect for tradition.

The latest collaborative trends incorporate little of the crossover inclinations of the past. The label "crossover" refers to mixed genres: classical plus bluegrass, rock plus classical, or plugged-in, amped-up, alternatively decorated versions of standards, to name a few.  Those experiments are now considered old hat, and much of the controversy surrounding them has died down as they have established themselves in the mainstream public's awareness. Recent developments, on the other hand, are neither mainstream nor genre-driven; instead, they are organized by the artists themselves and favor pursuits that show each participant at his or her perceived strength. If anything is mixed in such projects, it is the best qualities of the performers. Through those elements, the audience is led full circle to the initial source of inspiration: the art itself.

Like most musicians, I have ventured into unfamiliar territory. Any new project is a bit of a gamble; one hopes that someone else out there will appreciate the attempt. Most recently, I completed a tour with singer/songwriter Josh Ritter. In a joint effort, we split a recital, presenting it as solo artists (he without his band, I without a pianist) in classical concert halls, on classical concert series. The content of the program was important to us, so we shaped the project around our particular musical partnership and our individual musical preferences. Each of us performed core repertoire, and we linked our work - I joined him on some of his songs, stepping into his musical world, and he entered the classical realm in an intelligent, thoughtful way. Some onlookers thought it risky, but the entire undertaking could not have been more organic. Happily, the unbiased reactions of the concertgoers proved that listeners are ready for a challenge, ready to be led beyond their existing frames of reference. They revel in projects that performers believe in. They enjoy discovering the unusual. Most importantly, they want to be taken seriously by both artists and presenters.

For any artist, the benefits of free-flowing exchange are invaluable. I know my own experiences best, and I am grateful to my colleagues for their influence on me; working with them is an education unto itself. From fellow classical musicians, I learn mostly by example, from elements of their interpretations that catch me by surprise. Many concepts are directly applicable in performance; I try out ideas right alongside the people who inspire them. Through these colleagues, I also discover more about my artistic heritage than I knew existed. When I step outside of my classical comfort zone, on the other hand, what I pick up is more basic but equally stimulating: improvisational techniques, stylistic adaptations, abstractions in creativity, and a greater understanding of the channels of artistic movement. Sharing experiences with non-classical artists galvanizes me to reevaluate my contributions within classical music. This is not unusual. Even at our most divergent, performers from different backgrounds have many of the same goals and needs.

The creative cycle extends behind the scenes as well: administrators, too, struggle with artistic dilemmas. In trying to forge something enduring but exciting - a forward-looking community in which art can thrive - they are restrained by pressures of ticket sales reports, budgets, personnel coordination, and board meetings that few performers experience firsthand. Adding to the difficulty, relationships between office and stage can be complex, and misunderstandings are frequent. We can start small in bridging that gap. Perhaps business or administration courses could be required for performance majors. A seminar could be held about the creative demands placed on artists. We could organize a few more no-holds-barred venues for experimental projects. One item in particular should be immediately addressed: the dearth of secure forums to discuss industry frustrations, where colleagues from all disciplines can offer constructive solutions. Supportive networks are so important. Too often, in the interest of politics and jobs, people keep problems to themselves or share them only with like-minded coworkers, fostering resentment and destructive "us versus them" mentalities. With positive input, however, the smallest effort can offer infinite opportunities for development and collaboration.

Let's not forget that most people in the arts have embarked on careers of ideals. This can be divisive, as one person's ideal can undermine another's, and close-held convictions can lead to passionate disagreements. In moderation, though, such friction is a good thing, since creativity is one of the few qualities made more worthy by conflicting beliefs. We can strike a healthy balance. The future of the arts will be driven by the age-old battle between reverence and rebellion - but neither side should win.

To hear more from Hilary Hahn, read her online journal.  
To learn more about NPAC sessions such as "The Art of Living or Living for Art: A Survival Guide for Artists", visit the website.

by Greg Sandow
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More than 20 years ago - when I was writing about new classical music as a columnist for The Village Voice in New York - I got a call from someone in the New York City government. He was working with a city program that reserved some downtown lofts for artists, and he had a question. Sting had applied for one of the lofts. Was Sting an artist? Should he get the loft?

I asked what the problem was. The answer was simple enough - Sting was (horror! horror!) commercial. So how could he be doing art? And yet his music didn't sound unartistic. What to do?

I think if I were asked this now, I'd suggest that the city shouldn't try to balance art and commerce, and instead might simply have a means test. If you made piles of money, no matter whether you're Sting or Lorin Maazel, you should find your loft on your own. What I did say was a softer, less confident version of that. I couldn't solve the problem, I declared, but if they rejected Sting, I hoped they'd reject big-league opera stars, who in their way were just as commercial as any pop star (and were comfortably wealthy, even if they didn't earn pop-star fees).

So why am I telling this story? To introduce my thought that art and the arts aren't the same thing. Art is an activity, sometimes sublime, and also the result of that activity. By now we know - or certainly we ought to know -- that it might be found anywhere, in vacant lots, in silence and graffiti, in overheard remarks (see the poetry of Jonathan Williams, an advocate of outsider art, who died not long ago), and in popular culture. The arts, by contrast, are a set of interest groups, whose claim to glory (and to funding) is that they speak for art, which is only partly true. They don't speak for all art, and when someone speaking for the arts - by which I mean for the interest groups - says that only the arts can offer meaning in our society, we've strayed so far from reality that we might as well be jumping off a cliff. Especially if we're looking for a younger audience!

Here's an example. Dana Gioa, the chairman of the NEA, gave a widely circulated commencement speech at Stamford, in which (among much else) he longed for the good old days, when art was in its glory, and opera singers like Robert Merrill could be heard on network TV... But Robert Merrill didn't have a brain in his head. I can say this affectionately, because I love opera, and Merrill can ravish me with his voice. But he had nothing to say in his singing (something that certainly was noticed back in the day), and to imagine that putting him on TV brings art in all its glory to an audience of millions is really pretty funny.  Contrast what happens now, when we have pop stars like Bruce Springsteen, who write their own words and music (something Robert Merrill couldn't do), who sing about serious things, who both reflect profound things in our culture, and influence them (see for example the book about Springsteen - Springsteen's America: The People Listening, a Poet Singing -- by Robert Coles, one of our most profound and literate psychologists). And who go on 60 Minutes, talking about society and politics, in a completely serious, compelling way. Is that a step backward? I'd call it a big step forward, at least if you want art to mean something, and to help form both our consciousness and our reality.

But wait! How can Springsteen be an artist, if he's a pop musician, and therefore (horror! horror!) commercial? To me that question is based on a misunderstanding both of commerce and of art. Or at least of the history of art. My field is classical music, and you can't study its history without noticing that many great musicians of the past were commercial, including many of the great composers, or maybe even most of them.

I've just been reading a lively little book - Liszt: My Travelling Circus Life, by David Lee Allsobrook -- about one of the greatest pianists of the 19th century, Franz Liszt, and his two tours of England in the 1840s. He made those tours purely for money, flacked for a piano manufacturer, whose pianos he endorsed, and packed his programs with popular opera arias and comical songs, all to please an audience that would have run away from more serious music, by the likes of Mozart or Beethoven.

Handel was thoroughly commercial, and wrote his famous oratorios only because the market for his operas had dried up. Beethoven tried to be commercial, though he wasn't very good at it (he threw a fit when the premiere of his Ninth Symphony didn't make much money). Verdi and Puccini were commercial stars; Rossini was one of the greatest commercial successes in the history of any kind of music. And the list could go on. Brahms made his fortune by writing popular piano music. Why was commerce, for an artist, OK in past centuries, but bad in this one? Someone's going to say that our culture has degenerated, but I don't buy it. Things were better in the days of slavery? Should we look back with admiration at an age when women were their husbands' property, just because people (or so we think) liked better music then? Picasso knew exactly how to sell himself. Should we condemn his art?

And no, I'm not forgetting that many artists - including, just for instance, Webern, one of my favorite composers - stand (or stood) apart from commerce. But we also should understand the nature of the commercial world today. In the arts (and certainly in classical music) we all too quickly think that there are just two choices, to be commercial, and to create only what the market wants, or to be an artist, and be true to our inner selves. But that's not at all how it works. Pop music is a good guide here. Not everyone making pop records tries to sell 10,000,000 copies. Many people work in alternative genres - alternative rock, dance music - and don't expect to sell anywhere near that. One of the leading people on the edge of dance music, Aphex Twin, sells about 50,000 copies of his CDs. Another dance artist on the same label, Clark, sells just 5,000. And not many people calculate their position in advance. More likely, you make the music you want to make, and then find who's going to buy it. Maybe you sell ten million records, but more likely you sell many fewer - 100,000, 50,000, 10,000, 500.

And is commerce really bad? In pop music, it can be noxious, but for honest artists, it's also a way to reach the people who love your music. And are the arts really free of it? Again I'm going to speak about classical music, because that's the art I know most about. A few years ago, I saw a public conversation at Juilliard, between Reneé Fleming, one of the world's top sopranos, and Stephen Sondheim. Had either of them, they were asked, ever had to compromise their art for commercial reasons? "Very often," said Fleming, who then gave chapter and verse. In order to make recordings she cared about, she said, she had to make others that her record company wanted to make, recordings they thought would sell. Sondheim's answer? "Never."

So here we have Reneé Fleming, an opera singer working (or so the myth goes) in the sacred precincts of high art, and Stephen Sondheim, working in the commercial world of Broadway. And he's the one who never compromises! Fleming also was very funny about the role she was singing back then at the Metropolitan Opera, the lead in Massenet's Manon. "That's not art," she said, or words to that effect. "That's fluff, that's just entertainment." We'd be silly, in any case, to think that what arts organizations do is always art. Again, a classical music example. Orchestras and opera companies, not to mention big classical record labels and classical radio stations, are terrified of their audience. They're afraid to program things that their audience won't like. Yes, they do it sometimes, but they always know that some large part of their audience might not like anything new or adventurous - and that it would be commercial (that word again) suicide for them to do too much of that. Then you have some part, maybe a biggish part, of the classical music audience - see Roger Paterson's blog for this (he's a radio guy) - that loves classical music because it's a refuge from the rest of the world...that's not art. It's nostalgia. Or at the very least it's not a mindset that'll endear classical music (as it currently manifests itself in our culture) to younger people intensely engaged with the world around them.

And then - moving back to the rest of our culture - we have Bob Dylan, who decades ago realized that he didn't want to write novels, and didn't want to write plays. All he wanted to do is write songs, and sing them. (You can see him saying this in Martin Scorcese's tremendous documentary on him, No Direction Home.) So that's what he's done, in album after album, and concert tour after concert tour, whether anyone was listening or not, no matter how many albums he sold, no matter what critics said. He made familiar songs unrecognizable in his live performances. He turned away from his fame, and wrote songs. If that's not how an artist acts, what is? Dylan has done what Schoenberg (the 12-tone composer) said that artists do, produce art because they can't help it, the way an apple tree produces apples.
But Dylan's not part of "the arts." (Neither is Bruce Springsteen, whose impeccable art-like work is documented in the DVD on the making of his Born to Run album, included in the 30th anniversary Born to Run boxed set.)

And many younger people aren't recognized by the arts, even though they're artists. Consider an important essay by Henry Jenkins and Vanessa Bertozzi, "Artistic Expression in the Age of Participatory Culture," published in Engaging Art, edited by Steven J. Tepper and Bill Ivey, a largely tentative examination how changes in our culture affect the arts.
 
But Jenkins and Bertozzi mostly aren't tentative. They introduce us to a 17 year-old high school student, Chloe, who makes costumes based on characters from anime, or on singers in Japanese rock bands. She studies Japanese at a nearby college, and delves deeply into traditional Japanese novels and poetry, of course doing all this on her own. Her high school didn't teach her any of it. There's also a woman who, when she was in high school, used comics to come out as a lesbian, and now is a successful comix artist. And a 14 year-old whose art is designing what she wears to school - a different look every day, no matter what the other kids might think. And a kid who recorded music in his bedroom: "I used a belt buckle and a glass ashtray and made just like a clinking sound. My mom is an elementary school music teacher so she gave me children's instruments, like a recorder and little sand-blocks you scrape together to make percussion sounds." He put together tracks on his computer, posted them to MP3 sites, and eventually got signed to a record deal. His band is Grizzly Bear, a star attraction in far-alternative New York clubs; in March it appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Though Jenkins and Bertozzi quite properly treat these kids as artists, there's one hesitation in their essay, a decision to avoid asking "whether making media is the same thing as making art." To even note that question seems to me like a step backward, a bow toward lines artificially drawn by the arts that have some kind of official sanction. Paint a painting - that's art. Assemble a collection of pink objects, and show it in a gallery - even that will be acknowledged. But make a comic book? Record noises in your bedroom? Dress up differently each day? Suddenly that's "media," and might not get official sanction. This is one way that "the arts" preserve their sense of their importance (and along with that, their claim on funding).

But I think these kids are artists, just like the college-age son of a friend of mine. He's a musician. He has a band. He made an album, and released it on vinyl - yes, as an LP record - though the songs were available as downloads. Once the album got some attention, a small indie label picked it up, and released it on CD. But the original idea was to have it for sale only on vinyl. This musician also does noise music improvisations, which he releases on cassette! This - and the same goes for the people Jenkins and Bertozzi write about -- is how artists act, doing things to please themselves, and deliberately moving away from the mainstream, something not exactly unknown in the history of art. Think of Guillaume Apollinaire, early in the 20th century, walking a lobster down the Paris boulevards. He did this as artistic self-expression, though his claim to art was his poetry. In our age - after a generation of performance art -- the lobster might be art all by itself.

So my friend's son is an artist, but I doubt the arts know about him, just as they don't know about the kids that Jenkins and Bertozzi write about. That has to change. Especially if the arts - which we now have to define as only part of the larger world of art, and most definitely not as all of it - want to reach a younger audience!

How to do that would be yet another long oration. But it starts with getting smarter, avoiding empty middlebrow talk of sublimity and masterworks. (Maybe only the classical music business talks that way. I hope so!) In fact, to reach a smart younger audience, those of us in the arts will have to talk about how smart the art we represent is, how it's offbeat, even quirky. And how creative people can participate in it, by playing with it in their bedrooms.

Which, to me, is wonderful. At the very least, we'll have more fun than we're having now.  

To hear more from Greg Sandow, read his blog.
To learn more about NPAC sessions such as "Taking Art off the Shelf: What Do Today's Audiences Really Want?", visit the website.

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa
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If I tell you that I'm over seeing the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at City Center, please do not misunderstand. I mean no disrespect to either of these venerable institutions. I'm merely grappling with a revelation (no pun intended) that lit into me one evening last season as I sat near the back of the theater and, with my 55-year-old eyes, attempted to make sense of those acrobats of God leaping, spinning and sashaying on a stage that suddenly seemed as far away as heaven. It was a stage too far, wonderful dancers, working their hearts out, too far, and I'd had about enough of that distance as I could stand.

Which led me to muse about the possibility of seeing the Ailey troupe in an entirely different way. Why not up close and personal? Why not a special show, every now and then, when we could get to watch one or two Ailey marvels dancing something small and intimate in a setting where we might actually be able to track the thoughts crossing their brows, the nerve synapses firing in their muscles, the divine flow of their breathing? What about the possibility of seeing an Ailey dancer do the kind of choreography that might not have to be writ large to read across distance and make an impact, the kind that might take us on new journeys of discovery? What a boon that would be for the dancers themselves, for adventurous choreographers lucky to work with them, and for people like you and me. And what a lure that might be for new audiences.

Part of the problem for me, I realize, is that I started out as a young dance fan watching (and later reviewing) companies like Ailey and New York City Ballet and then quickly plunged into the postmodern milieu. Thirty-plus years into professional dance writing, I find myself looking at major, mainstream dance companies with the sensibilities of someone raised by wolves. I love these wolves because they have never stopped demanding more from themselves, from their art or from their audiences. Now I am spoiled, and I demand more from everyone and everything.

What I demand, in this instance, is closeness.

Some related thoughts come to mind, in no particular order.

Dixon Place
The last time I sat on one of those front-row sofas at Dixon Place, a batch of dancers (Lynn Neuman's Artichoke Dance Company), wielded switchblades and moved noisily within a paper enclosure. They cut holes in the paper just inches from our faces. Later, the Amazon-built Cary McWilliam deliberately lunged in my direction, stopping short of landing on top of me--but not by much. Her arms were braced on either side of me, and she just hung there. Instead of responding with a massive heart attack, I was thrilled by the immediacy of this action. Only later did I ponder the consequences: With cellphones silenced and tucked away, how quickly could anyone have reached 911?

Okay, I realize that the possibility of getting slashed or flattened by jet-propelled dancers is not exactly attractive to potential dance audiences.  Let me back up and try another approach.

When I see a show at Dixon Place, I'm close enough to the performers to catch a hit of their enormous energy and to really see just what it is that they do. My friends, there's nothing like that. If you want to interest new audiences in the work of dancers, make sure to give them a few experiences up close. I don't care if you have a huge dance company. Think like a drug pusher: little samples, little hits. Works every time.

They'll never forget it-even without the knife-play. Instead, it might be something quite benign, like Doug Elkins's Fraulein Maria, in which The Sound of Music is hilariously, brilliantly condensed and reinterpreted for the itty-bitty stage at Joe's Pub. Or it might be a showing of Aszure Barton's work-in-progress, A Traveling Show, which recently made the best use of a smaller-than-her-usual cast on the petite stage of the East Village's charming Duo Theatre. Size matters-as long as it's small, and close.


Yanira Castro
This woman has a reputation. For making audiences stand up, move around, have dancers move around them in close proximity. She also once herded and confined her audience in plexiglas boxes and bid them sit on backless benches with not a sliver of space between one person and the next. When you attend a Yanira Castro dance, you can't just sit back (literally) and take in the show. And this is all to the good. For one thing, it reminds me that I am a body, not just a mental sensibility, and that puts me in a different relationship to the bodies that I'm observing. I can't swear that this has had a salutary effect on most dance critics...sigh...but I like the direction it's moving in.

She's not the only choreographer working this way, of course. William Forsythe's You Made Me A Monster had viewers standing defenselessly while a trio of hulking, crazily-moving dancers pelted through and pushed by. The first section of Tere O'Connor's Rammed Earth had dancers moving among audience members whose folding chairs were strewn across the floor, facing various directions. Added to the usual profound joy of watching Hilary Clark, Heather Olson, Matthew Rogers and Christopher Williams work their craft was watching that craft slip out from behind your left shoulder.

Miguel Gutierrez brought us all up on stage with him for Everyone. Sure, we were still neatly aligned in rows of folding chairs, but only a few rows, and we were rarely more than a few feet from him and his increasingly rambunctious dancers. Daniel Linehan (at Dance Theater Workshop) and, more recently, Alex Escalante (at Danspace Project) and Aynsley Vandenbroucke (at the Baryshnikov Arts Center) arranged us in a communal circle enclosing their action. And there are many more examples, especially from artists creating site-specific work.


Sites for Bored Eyes
Which brings me to the issue of space. Let's go wild and realize that wherever you have space, you can have movement. How cool is it when creative movement responds in a fresh way to the fresh realities and challenges of a space that is not already officially designated for dance! Why are we not seeing more dance breaking out all over town-in the supermarket, for instance, where a group of visual artists replaced cans of peas with cans decorated with their own designs?  Dancers, start looking at every space as your potential stage. Even if you don't have the legal right to use that space, you have the right to play with it in your head, and maybe that will bring a new charge to the work you do in conventional spaces.

We need to plop dance down in the middle of people's lives, right in front of their faces. That way, it will no longer seem to be some elitist thing-apparently, a huge no-no in America-where you have to be dressed up, physically and mentally, in order to attend and comprehend. Take dance to the people, where they live.


The Nerve of You
I have this theory, based in my experience in psychic practices--and, I suspect, many years of watching dance intensively--that we're subliminally, deeply connected to the performers we watch. It goes back to what I wrote earlier-that we are bodies, too, and our nervous systems and our spiritual selves are altered by what we see and by those subtler realities that we do not detect in any conscious way. We truly understand a lot more about dance (and dancers) than we realize we do. This is especially powerful when we see dance up close.  Works with theater and musical performances, too. I don't know about you, folks, but I crave this, and I think it's the cure for America's alienation from body and soul and dance.


To hear more from Eva Yaa Asantewaa, read her blog.  
To learn more about NPAC sessions such as "Beyond Audience Development: Innovative Strategies for Performing Arts", visit the website.

An American consulting firm is offering statistical advice to programmers. Should playwrights be worried?

Program Notes Across the Pond!  Originally posted by George Hunka on the performing arts blog for the UK's The Guardian Unlimited:

Playwright Jason Grote, who will be attending the National Performing Arts Convention in Denver this June, blogged last week on the topic of one of NPAC's breakout sessions, "Stop Taking Attendance and Start Measuring the Intrinsic Impact of Your Programs." The session is based on a study released by the consulting firm WolfBrown in January 2008, "Assessing the Intrinsic Impacts of a Live Performance". (Confusingly, for a report that wants to present precise figures, the date on the cover of the report that I printed out is "January 2007".)

Grote, I think, worries too much. While study authors Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak seem to know quite a bit about marketing and statistical matrices, it turns out they don't seem to know very much about art (they call a work of art's context "grease on the wheels of impact", which had me giggling). More than anything else, the report reads like one of the wifty rationalist projects that Jonathan Swift effectively destroyed in the third book of Gulliver's Travels.

In order to assess the impact of a work of art, Brown and Novak came up with six "impact constructs." A "Captivation Index" "characterizes the degree to which an individual was engrossed and absorbed in the performance"; an "Intellectual Stimulation Index" "encompasses several aspects of mental engagement, including both personal and social dimensions, which together might be characterized as 'cognitive traction.'" Seemingly objective, but not really: as usual, the authors' artistically conservative slip is showing. The "Emotional Resonance Index" "measures the intensity of emotional response, degree of empathy with the performers and therapeutic value in an emotional sense." Brecht's decidedly non-empathetic theatre isn't even in their sights. A form of drama like that of Howard Barker or Sarah Kane, which denies that theatre should be "therapeutic" at all, is likely to be entirely off WolfBrown's radar.

Responding to Grote's demurral at another blog, Brown demonstrated his own high ranking on the Irritability Index. "Mr. Grote's knee jerk reaction to the idea of the study, without even reading it, is an unfortunate illustration of how some artists and curators hide behind the kryptonite shield of their artistic license while their institutions grow sadly out of touch with audiences and community," Brown protested.

Neither a work of art nor a marketing study exists in a vacuum, of course. While the authors believe that the study's impact scores "should not be used as a means of evaluating or comparing artists or the worthiness of their performances", Wolf and Novak hope that the information "might be used by presenters in understanding the consequences of their programming choices and reaching higher levels of effectiveness in their work". It's naive, though, to think that ultimately programmers and curators, in a time of shrinking support for the arts, may not accept and reject work for their seasons based upon the narrow "impact constructs" that WolfBrown defines. They might even hire WolfBrown to conduct a study to see what kinds of work they should programme.

But that's what the study is - a sales brochure offering WolfBrown's services to the attendees of the conference. Most presenters and producers are smarter than that, though. Before writing out a check to WolfBrown, they'll spend the money on a new production instead.

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