Theater For The Future

It’s hard to put into words what teaching at the Cherub program is like. So I give you this.

I feel positively renewed.

This has been a crazy, crazy week. And as the faculty prepares for the Cherub program (10 fully-produced shows in rep through July! BOO YA! Tony knows what I’m talking about) which kicks off this week, I’m finding myself frantically tidying up projects and getting them into happy places.

For you see, I’ll be maintaining radio silence from now until August 5th or so. Because the kids and those shows deserve my undivided attention. And what shows they are. Where else do you get to do The Permanent Way, Pool (no water), a punked-out Marie Antoinette, and - get this - Night of the Living Dead - in repertory?. Ain’t no place like it.

So, before I leave you, intrepid reader, for undiscovered country:

I have an announcement to make.

Tonight. We Launch Phase 2 of: The Chicago Theater Database.

Now before I get all mission accomplished on you, we still have a long way to go yet. This is another “sneaky peek / prototype / call-it-what-you-will” in progress program. We have structured the project to be more or less open source and community-driven, which means that the version you see now is a) ugly and b) in progress and c) read-only during the beta test period. The view mechanism and the data we’re assembling, however, is pretty robust. Dan Granata and I have assembled a team of beta-testers/contributers who are AS WE SPEAK playing and testing with the input forms and getting all the kinks worked out while they upload new data. Watch Dan’s blog later this evening for more info on the beta test program and how you can contribute.

But play with it. See if you’re interested in getting involved. We have pretty much all of Chicago’s current season on there, and we’re aiming to load in next season ASAP so that the database can become immediately useful to you in planning your next season in Chicago - who you want to work with, what shows you want to get in on, where your scheduling problems lie. Dan will speak to this more, but this is, at its heart, a research tool.

One potential use for the database we’re excited about: a strike date calendar. If you need help getting rid of lumber, props and other items, you can just plop your strike date on the database and interested and frugal scavenger parties can then see which strikes are coming up and where to be, and they may just contact YOU to help you out. And that’s just ONE use for collected data like this. We want to implement your ideas.

So, enjoy. I’ll see you all on August 5th.

WOOOOOOO!

Ever seen one of these? It’s a big binder filled with knowledge. Procedures. Contacts. Lists. Accessible Information.

In his big comeback post, Scott Walters illustrates very clearly the reasons for an artist to be proactively collecting and sharing the knowledge of what it is they do and the tricks and insights that make the work itself easier and more effective: knowledge is power.

… Those who wield power in the theatre — the administrators, the board members, the foundation staff — do read these studies, do recognize the value of the data and the ideas, and do put them into action — and that is how they maintain their power. They think more broadly about the art form. The result of lack of knowledge is a diminished power for artists, who give over control of their art to those who will take the time to study, to learn, to think.

The lifespan of an artist within a theater company is often a lot like the lifespan of a fruit fly. Artists often want to do one thing - say, perform - and get signed on to do that, and run box office, and figure out how to market a play, and raise money for that play, and keep the bathrooms clean… It’s tiring, and the passion for your work either carries you through the balogna or it doesn’t, and after five to ten years you start dreaming of a normal adult life that doesn’t involve begging and scrubbing and poverty.

For me, there is a lot of wasted energy in reinventing the wheel here. Let’s say a company is formed in 1983, and goes through five leadership cycles in that time. There’s a big difference in quality between the company with leadership that captures the collected knowledge of the company and the company that starts from scratch every time a company member moves on. It’s the difference between accruing institutional knowledge and burn out.

But when you get your feet wet, you’ll start to notice big challenges involved in passing complex knowledge structures on to a complete noob. Awful example from my own experience: Teaching a non-technical person how to mix their first musical. Let’s say your regular technical guru is moving out of town, and you have to basicially xerox them or face the loss of quality that comes with losing talent. There are two ways to go about this, neither of them ideal: You could label everything in the booth with a mountain of post-its and basically say “never touch this - or this - or this,” thereby simplifying the job. This definitely reduces stress in the training period, but it isn’t really a long-term solution - it cripples the student’s ability to explore and learn from mistakes over the long term. It leaves them to build their own foundation of knowledge, and it assumes that the choices you make in those final stressful and despairing moments of your tenure were the right decisions for the long term health of the company - which is almost never the case.

There’s another approach, akin to the development of a curriculum for self-study: the guru creates a comprehensive list of all the pieces of knowledge that one would need to do the job.

A) Acoustic Physics - How Sound Works
1) How sound waves mix in the air
2) The controllable properties of sound - Volume, Direction, Frequency, Timbre, Duration/Envelope,

B) How the Equipment Works
1) Microphone Pickup Patterns (what microphones “hear”)
2) Speaker Dispersal Patterns (cabinet distortion, directionality, phasing problems.
3) How Theatrical Sound Equipment can distort and shape sound waves
4) Mixer routing - Inputs, Faders, EQ, Inserts, Trim, Bus/Group Outputs, Auxillary Outputs

C) Cue Operation and Programming procedures
1) Mixer Manual - for Mute Scenes / VCAs or Scene Presets
2) Sound Playback Manuals - QLab, SFX, CD Players, etc.
3) MIDI and automation - getting equipment to trigger other equipment for simple show operation

D) Common “Gotchas”
1) Everything plugged in?
2) Everything plugged in in the right place?
3) Best signal testing practices - start at one end of the signal path and move carefully to the other.
4) The psychology of monitors and mic placement - getting the performers and the producers on your team with the common goal of the best possible audience experience (or, “If I turn up your monitor there, we either won’t hear you in the house, or we’ll hear you and squealing feedback”)

To be sure, each one of these items could be a dissertation in themselves, and this is more overwhelming for a blank slate student. However, it creates an ongoing resource for the student to explore and research over time and as their experience expands. It also doesn’t set a time limit on the training period - it allows peer-to-peer learning to continue beyond the tenure of the burnt-out ex-company member.

The MOST important thing is of course to create this knowledge resource well in advance of those often gut-wrenching final two weeks of a company member’s tenure. Capturing this information while stress is a factor is a good way to get a crappy knowledgebase. If you’ve ever been trained as a temp, you know what I’m talking about - If you need to know A - Z to properly do your job, some folks will teach you A (”Turn on your computer”) and then B (”This is the Power Button”) and then when that goes off without a hitch, they’ll spring Q on you (”And so then we just need to you to file the 990 Form with Accounting”) without explaining, oh, H (”Accounting is near the elevator”), or M (”990 Forms are tax forms for non-profits.”) or even C (”We are a company that audits non-profits”). And some folks assume you know too much and will rifle through the instructions for X-Z (”Just tell the president your progress by the end of the day.”) and they’re out the door. There is never enough time for the trainer to go through A-Z. And yet real damage happens to companies in both of those moments when A-Z isn’t effectively communicated or learned by the trainee. The corporate world can easily absorb that damage, but theater companies can often die off or suffer direly in fundraising in those moments when leadership changes.

So manuals can cushion the blow as the company grows - or even simply ages - and folks move on. Some of the manuals that I have written for The Side Project include:

• How - and when - to update the website
• Run Sheets - how to preset and run a particular show
• Box Office procedures
• How to share files over the internet so that group collaboration is less time-consuming
• Brand manuals (use this font, use these colors, use this page layout, use this logo, and the branding rules that you can bend, break, and the ones you can never ignore)
• Marketing distribution (a checklist of places to put posters and postcards)
• Production Timeline & Checklist (what needs to get done, and when it needs to be done)

What I’ve learned about these documents is that they usually need periodic revision - so the best time to write them is as the processes are being put in place or being revised. By writing a manual as you perform the task, you can often do a better capture of clear step-by-step actions and have a better retention of all the dependent knowledge that is helpful in performing your role.

Treating manuals like a simple dumping ground of everything doesn’t work, though - they need to be more or less a complete overview of day-to-day operations, but not an exhaustive archive of everything that has ever happened ever. That’s too overwhelming to be useful. So some diligent and forward-thinking editing is always a useful habit to get into.

For these reasons, the ideal medium for a company knowledgebase is often a wiki - a living, interconnected document that allows certain basic knowledge resources to be outsourced to say, Wikipedia or other blogs & websites. Knowledge can also be organized into a structure to make critical data more clear and supporting data settle into nested structures.

At New Leaf, we’ve used a wiki and a company discussion forum in tandem for about three years, and it’s proven to work very well with our own human natures. Most day-to-day company discussion happens on the forum, filling the forum with a rich silt of acquired knowledge, planning, brainstorming, and chat. It’s almost a daily journal for most of us, a big net that captures all our ideas. We have also worked out a quick sorting and archiving process that we do as part of our production post-mortem process. When a particular nugget of knowledge from the forum discussion proves permanently useful, it finds a home somewhere in our company wiki - the repository of permanent knowledge for the company.

And on the wiki, the information is clearly organized for future company or board members. It kind of looks like this:

New Leaf Department Knowledgebase
Artistic
Play Readings
Marketing
Development, Fundraising & Grants
Production
Box Office

Agendas (these contain items that require discussion in our next face-to-face meetings so that everything gets captured)
Company Meetings
Production & Design Meetings
Marketing Meetings
Board Meetings

Meeting Minutes
Company Meeting Minutes
Post Mortem Minutes
Marketing Minutes
Committees Minutes

Timeline & To-Dos (Each of these is a calendar for each production with template dates, like “Opening -3 Weeks”. We just plug in the dates before each production, and voila, we have a list of everything we need to get done.)
Production Timeline
Box Office Timeline
Marketing Timeline

Knowledge Base
Knowledge Base - Web Tools, Important Contact Info, Stuff to Know in case of emergency
Company Bylaws
New Leaf Culture - The way we like to do things, and why
Production History
Who We Are - Mission, Vision, Values. Learn them. Love them. Live them.

Over the past few years, we’ve had the typical internal turnover at both companies that happens as artists grow up and live their lives - and new artists with fresh ambition pursue their artistic lives as a part of the company. The forum / wiki / knowledgebase process has proven its worth through the shifting membership to our newest company members. As they have time, or when they’re confused about how something works, our old discussions and accrued knowledge resources can be skimmed through and learned as needed. This is often an exciting process for a new company member, like opening up an old tome filled with old words and old thoughts. It is a training period filled with knowledge and cloaked in mystery. Can you imagine that in a corporate environment? Our old show notes create a clear picture of our context and our history - and steeping in that knowledge has helped us avoid the dangers of repeated mistakes, without limiting us to a knowledgebase of post its that limit the agility of our current operations. Understanding and remembering the old risks we’ve taken inspire better risks to be taken next time. I’d wager that our effective capturing of knowledge has helped us stretch our annual budgets as well, because we have a memory and a process that allows us to allocate money towards our artistic growth and our newest risks rather than sinkholes of productions past. Best of all, creating the knowledgebase was a dirt-simple, efficient, low stress, and even fun part of the process.

Scott’s speaking the truth again: the key to better lives for you professional artists out there is taking responsibility for your own artistic goals, and empowering yourself with the tools and the knowledge you need to achieve and reach beyond those goals. For me, the thing I needed was a way of remembering where I’ve been. Breadcrumbs along the trail, so to speak.

Patrick over at BackstageJobs has a very enlightening new feature (oof. accidental pun.): an interview with longtime Chicago electrician and more recently hot shot Lighting Designer Keith Parham.

I’m curious: How interested are you in hearing about folks behind the scenes? Designers, directors, dramaturgs and anyone engaged in navigating an artistic process day by day are endlessly fascinating to me, but I consider myself biased.