I’m in Chicago at the moment, attending a small but intensive convening for Project Audience, an Andrew W. Mellon funded initiative seeking to improve the application of on-line technologies to engage audiences with the arts. Participants include individual arts organizations like the Seattle Opera and the Louisiana Philharmonic, discipline-specific service agencies like Theater Bay Area or Music for Tomorrow, and community-wide arts funding/support initiatives like Seattle’s ArtsFund or the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.
The group is working to find collaborative opportunities to rethink existing strategies, and perhaps even co-develop new tools, to (as Mellon’s Diane Ragsdale put it last night) connect people with people, and people with art, and people with artists in more dynamic ways.
The question already lingering in my head (and in the early conversations last night) is this: Can we effectively serve a broad mission to engage anyone and everyone in expressive opportunities, when we really represent the specific interests of a small subset of such opportunities (either the professional nonprofit arts, or our particular organization)? When such boundaries are often irrelevant to audiences — who might find equal satisfaction attending a professional nonprofit event, singing or playing music at home with their friends, or dancing and drinking in a local nightclub — how can we build systems that support that full range of activity, while our boards and bosses demand strategic focus on the bottom line?
I know it can be done. But it requires a different approach to marketing, management, and engagement than we’ve come to know. It will be interesting to watch the conversation unfold.
it’s vaguely prisoner-dilemma-ish. if we all cross-promote, we all win. we together can cultivate a stronger audience. perhaps our community is small enough that the change is possible. we’ll see!
Andrew, you say “I know it can be done. ” Oh? What makes you think so?
I can understand why we would WANT it to be do-able, allowing us to preserve our “high culture” performing institutions (which are structurally ill designed for high engagement approaches) while reassuring us that such institutions remain culturally relevant at a time when more people want more participation. I understand the wish. There’s lots of doodling around the edges – in education programs, in “community outreach”, but these seem half measures that avail us, well, half. But I see few models in the performing arts world where participation penetrates to the artistic core.
A few weeks ago I visited the Music Center in LA for an “Active Arts” open rehearsal in Disney Hall. On stage, in succession, were three ensembles, all adults, all amateurs. The first was a 14 person snare drum chorus, the second a jazz ensemble, the last an 80 player flute orchestra. All played with great focus and attention, and imperfectly. But the joy ran off the stage and filled the hall, which itself was filled with beaming families and friends.
It was El Systems for grown ups. That’s what we need.
Active Arts, the brain child of Josephine Rameriz and Ming Ng, is not a marketing approach. It is a new way of imagining how cultural institutions can enriching the artistic loves of citizens. That’s what needs to shift to make the new thing you wish to occur possible.
I was wondering if you could actually be even more specific as to who is attending this discussion? I work at an organization in Chicago and would love to know who was representing us at the table. Thanks!
I was lucky enough to meet Matt Lehrman of Alliance for Audience and Showup.com, when he guest spoke at an audience development conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
I commended his approach to using innovative technologies to reach out to wider audiences, and most importantly those who perhaps need more of a push to enage with the arts. My only concern with a centralised events listing service, a one-stop-shop to arts and culture, is the fear that this might detract from the experience of discovery. Arts and cultural experiences are a personal, emotive and at times emotional experience, one which is meant to move you, challenge you and present a new and artistic way of looking at the world.
Online platforms, websites and social media, are fantastic ways of communicating with audiences, visitors and customers, as long as the communication goes both ways. Here in Scotland, where I work as an audience development coordinator for the Highlands and Islands, the remote and rural areas of Scotland, the challenges we are met with are not that the information isn’t getting out there, because it is. But it is communicating the value and the benefits of getting involved, participating, and engaging with arts and culture.
I work primarily in encouraging, mostly volunteers, within the arts sector to use the tools of audience development to really interact with their audiences, to understand them, their needs, their wants and their desires. Technological advance is great, utilising that to benefit the arts and culture, is even better. But this won’t solve the problem of getting people to the venue, to participate, if we are not engaging them in the mystery and discovery, the excitement that comes with the experience.
Sian