Theater For The Future

Holy crap. August is inevitably a crazy month for a theater company, isn’t it? Time to get our acts together!

This two-week block marks the first real test of my retooling of the web presences of three storefront companies - not necessarily the graphics or layout of those sites, but the custom content management systems that makes the sites theoretically easy to update. Why bother? Well, my thinking goes: if a website is a mouthpiece for a company, you’d want to attach the mouth directly to the brain, not to some troll like me banging on his binary keyboard and mumbling something about “hexadecimal ftp bandwidth mumble grumble.” Blogs are a nice and easy way of making it easy for companies to speak about their work, but it’s the non-bloggable events in a theater company’s summer preproduction that really necessitate quick turnaround on the ol’ website: When a cast member has to leave a production because of a plum gig, when you confirm a space and production dates at the last possible minute, when you have to rearrange your season due to, oh, a rights granting service that isn’t communicating with another rights granting service.

All hypothetical examples, I assure you.

So I’m trying to delegate and train other folks in these companies a bit, because I’m beginning to realize that NOT everyone is comfortable with the webby language of things like FTP - and I’m seeing a need in theaters to have some training in this area. (I’m tossing around the idea of putting together some screencasts on this site for some of the basics, as I’ve been hugely indebted to the excellent Ruby on Rails Screencasts out there and want to share the love a bit. Post a comment if you’re interested in any topics in particular…)

Last week I met with Libby Ford and Rebecca LaDuke of Greasy Joan & Co., to train them to be able to update the company website as, well, the gods tend to laugh at our hubristic pre-season planning, and at some point they’re going to need to do it. And it’s been clear from the past year that you don’t want a lone webmaster in those moments, as they’re often unavailable.

The training session went really well, and it was like: Relief. On all sides. Libby and Rebecca are much more intuitive when it comes to the mission and the voice of the company, and hooking them up with direct access to change the language on the site was like blood returning to a limb that has fallen asleep: A little awkward, a little painful, but oh my god RELIEF.

Meanwhile, in Rogers Park: The Side Project has ALSO been running on all engines in preparation for the coming season. A major cleanup operation is underway thanks to our new production manager, Jeremy Wilson, including the furnishing of an improved green room in the upstairs space and a massive Yard Sale to clear out furniture from the storage space. (There is still some available, I’m sure, if you’re in need of chairs, tables, or artistically broken window casings) This past weekend has been about designing a big ‘ol brochure that highlights the FIVE resident companies doing work there this year: The Side Project, LiveWire, Idle Muse, Blackbird, and Rascal Children’s Theater, as well as Point of Contention, which is mounting one of my favorite social-responsibility-themed plays, Radium Girls. The brochure also highlights the emergence of a new approach to selling a season on a storefront level: A cross-company flex pass. Along the lines of the Looks Like Chicago season deal, it’s kind of a grab bag of theater. TSP will be offering two packages this season: A Side Project Flex Pass that gets you into one show each from Side Project, Live Wire, Idle Muse, and Black Bird, and a Rogers Park Flex Pass that gets you one show each from Side Project, Lifeline, Theo Ubique, and Bohemian Theatre Ensemble.

The challenge with that amount of programming, obviously, is keeping the dates straight. The Side Project’s new space has always been scheduled to within an inch of its life, but this year it feels like: Let’s make a template for production. Let’s make a template for marketing. Let’s make a template for box office. Let’s make a template to get the word out. Let’s use technology as a lever. So that we reinvent ourselves in our work, not in how we present that work to the world.

This theory seems to be working well for New Leaf this year as well. We’re seven over-booked people and so historically those kind of last-minute surprises have always felt like real damage rather than simple conditions in which we must work. This year, it’s about efficiency and agility and this word… “Leap.”

So today was about making the final decision about performance venue and announcing our season to the press and to the world via our website. There is always that last minute flurry of proofreading and copy polishing, like something out of The Front Page. Here’s my philosophy on writing marketing copy: I ultimately don’t like doing it, I’m not the best at it on my own, but I consider it a skill that I must cultivate to be able to invite people to see my work. In fact, I don’t think of it as marketing, since that kind of bursts my bubble. I think of it as language that is a public extension of the performance. And there’s thankfully a simple test for when copy is good and when it is bad: Adjectives and Adverbs = bad, Verbs = good.

Verbs leap off the page. Verbs distill meaning and pump your heart. Using descriptive adjectives in your copy is equivalent to using descriptive indication in your performance — audiences don’t believe TELLING, they believe DOING and LIVING.

So New Leaf tends to vet copy through the group, and as a group we’re starting to get excited about that part of the work: Finding the right language, the right verbs, the right articulation of this energy we feel as a company. No, it’s not the same kind of excitement that we have about the performance, but it’s a warm up to that performance… It’s like the trumpets blowing as we roll our pageant wagon into town, signaling that the players are on their way. We have to bring our energy and wits to that work as well. And since rolling the pageant wagon around is something we do all the time, often with moderate results, you sometimes get the urge to try a completely new tactic, to axe the wagon into little itty bitty toothpicks and buy something a little more snazzy. But you don’t, because this is the wagon you can afford. So it’s about finding the right crowd to roll the wagon through, the right thing to say as you walk through. And the only way to find that real and lasting connection with the crowd is to approach them with informed honesty. To be honest, to ask that one question you really want to ask, and hope that it is their question as well.

I felt this fear and excitement as we edited the website copy of New Leaf’s season announcement over Google Talk today, and we chose words that described how we felt about our final show of the season: An original work that we are developing as a company of performers and designers, The Long Count. It’s a leap of faith for us to trust our storytelling abilities and aesthetic to the extent that we promise to create a compelling story from our own framework. Since the voice of New Leaf at least for the moment is one of transparency, and honest self-analysis with our audience, we looked for words to communicate that fear but also our trust in our own abilities as artists. And we came up with:

“The Long Count will invite the company and our audiences to leap into the myriad possibilities revealed in the future we can’t foresee.”

There’s that word again. Leap. A Verb. A Verb that moves.

There are a billion choices like this that pop up every day in August. Where can we host our fundraiser? (”How about the Holiday Club?”) Who can we get to donate raffle prizes? (”Didn’t our pal DG just get an iMac and has an IPod touch he wants to give away?”) We need music. Where can we find music? (”My friend Mark Dvorak is a folk roots musician and he’s interested…”) And so we’re working this year on making those choices faster and with less trepidation: Trusting our instincts.

So good luck making your own choices as the season winds up… Like a spring with just a little too much tension.

Oh, and yeah, I was serious. Come to the New Leaf fundraiser FRESH! on August 27th for your chance to win an iPod Touch. It’s all the fun of an IPhone without a $90/month service plan.

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.

Laura at Trailing Spouse Blues tuned me into this article which is just a wonderful working example of the theory at the core of this blog: that an open sharing of information leads to a “bigger pie” - more influx of thought, funding, and participation in theater, which leads to a reinvigorated and strengthened theater community.

When you share your knowledge you strengthen your industry and gain unexpected rewards.

I’m certainly not suggesting Coke publish the secret formula on their web site. But for a creative person sharing knowledge, especially business knowledge, will help the community has a whole.

The more knowledge amateurs, students or beginners have the greater their ability to make quality decisions. People can’t be forced to follow best practices or charge a professional rate for their work. But, more often it’s a lack of knowledge and experience that leads to such poor decision-making.

It’s hard to let go of the knowledge that we think is at the heart of our success. The note-taking system I detailed in the last post is an example of something that I do to help keep me as organized a sound designer as possible. I think it makes me better able to cope with the demands of a sound designer - where you must overlap many shows at a time in order to pay bills. At those times, it’s important to remember that our knowledge - which is the sum total of our history of choices, experience and conclusions of that experience - is both valuable to a newcomer, but it is also build and really only works for our brain. People can take your open-source knowledge and they necessarily will reshape it to their purposes. Virally, new thoughts and solutions will be created that you wouldn’t have dreamed possible. At the same time, those new thoughts wouldn’t have been possible without the seed of your own knowledge.

Sharing your best practices extends the collaborative ethos of theater into your business, not the other way around. It doesn’t guarantee the success (or domination) of a particular individual or a particular company, because it doesn’t guarantee ‘credit’ - it strengthens the entire industry first.

An update comes in from Ben at the League regarding the Promoters Ordinance, essentially, call off the attack dogs:

The vote is off tomorrow. Thanks largely to a public outcry, the committee that released the legislation decided to table the vote. To, you know, free up the phone lines again.

The League wants to clear the air a bit, since they did some preliminary work to prevent damage to theaters - apparently most theaters are meant to be exempt from the legislation even though the language itself is confusing. That’s information that certainly got lost in the uproar.

It’s true, most theaters are not affected - many fewer than I previously had thought. But some folks operating on the far fringes of theater may still potentially be affected if the legislation comes up for vote again - if not by the legislation itself than by the vaguaries involved in enforcing the law.

First, some facts from the League:

Who is not required to obtain a Promoters License?

Print and broadcast media advertising an event.

Off-premise ticket sellers dealing in advance admission to an event.

Performers or agents of performers at an event.

PPA licensees and employees promoting their own event.

Employees of a licensed event promoter acting within the scope of employment.

Not-for-profit corporations promoting their own event.

Persons who exclusively promote events at PPA-venues or performing arts venues with (i) fixed seating only, if all patrons are seated in such fixed seats; or (ii) a fixed seating capacity of 500 or more persons.

What is an Event Promoter?

An Event Promoter is a person inside or outside the City of Chicago who engages in the business of promoting amusements or events within the City of Chicago and is directly or indirectly compensated for providing that service. The ordinance requires Event Promoters to obtain a license and provides guidelines to operate responsibly in the City to ensure the health, safety and welfare of people attending these events.

I think this information is enough to relax the tension a bit. It means that venues with convoluted situations are exempt because they are performing the work themselves - I’m thinking of Gorilla Tango and the Side Project, who are PPA licenced themselves but they host for-meagre-profit and unincorporated artists. This really wasn’t all that clear from the legislation itself, and I think the council didn’t help the situation by fast tracking the legislation without educating the public effectively. Not surprising, I suppose, but also not acceptable.

It’s critical for a young or brand new company to be able to use the venue’s promotion mechanism or even name recognition, or the culture at these institutions will stifle. Without the ability to put on a show with a minimum of marketing and liability infrastructure, Chicago’s annual crop of new theaters would dry up, and the scene itself would eventually be consolidated into larger and mid-sized theaters. That might be fine for some who tire of yet another new company who doesn’t know what they’re doing, but it means that the scene would run out of the fuel that comes from new artists, new perspectives, and experimentation by fire.

So while I think the fear is gone, it’s not enough to keep me from a suspicious lookout for the next time this ordinance hits the floor. I’m certainly glad the League is looking out for us, but this is not the first time that the memory of the E2 disaster has generated half-baked political policy that threatened to depth charge some of the most important breeding grounds of theatrical and cultural work in the city. It’s not the law itself I’m worried about - it’s the fact that the venue licensing process is already so convoluted and subject to interpretation that adding another variable is all that is required to damage work that doesn’t deserve to be damaged by the municipal government.

When this kind of situation goes down, I’m reminded of how important it is to understand the licensing laws of Chicago - including how to navigate the on-the ground woodginess that occurs as the law is interpreted by enforcers and community leaders who have different understandings of laws that aren’t written clearly. And maybe this should tell us that it’s in our best interest to be proactive in setting a political agenda for ourselves. We can write - and propose to the City Council - better legislation ourselves that achieves the city’s fear-of-liability-driven goals of safety and accountability without sacrificing the frugality and creative flexibility that makes our community tick. An ounce of prevention prevents a pound of cure - and our surgeon just tried to use a battleaxe to remove the unsightly mole of irresponsible promoters and unsafe venues.

Thanks for the link, RZ.

The Chicago Promoter’s Ordinance is up for a vote, and it includes a new requirement for insurance that could be devastating to small event promoters. It’s aimed at the music industry, but since they’re aiming a legislative bunker buster, this kind of legislation inevitably impacts small theater venues as well. From what I understand in the ordinance, it looks like the legislation is so unclear that it may be another situation where some Chicago Theaters get thrown into aKafkaesque licensing limbo, and some may wrangle out of it politically. Looks like some larger theaters already have, like the Auditorium and the Chicago theater - which have both wrangled an exception for venues of over 500 seats.

Exclamation Point.

Glad the big guys got the hand up, and the notice. Well played.

This vote goes down WEDNESDAY, so let’s get informed, get the word out, and take whatever action you can … now. Three major resources to get informed: The ordinance itself is posted on Jim DeRogatis’ blog on the Sun Times site, there’s an an excellent TOC interview with Alderman Scott Waguespack and the lobbyist site on the promoter’s side, savechicagoculture.org has some specific calls to action.

Waguespack claims that this will only saddle most performance venues with a $700/year insurance bill. He clearly hasn’t seen my annual budget and how devastating even that expense can be. I can produce certain shows for less than $1000 - so it may mean that I produce one fewer show a year.

Sometimes the transparent-as-dirt Chicago machine system of doing business works for the art, and sometimes it hobbles us with poorly written legislation. And theaters are rarely prepared enough to spring into action with the three days notice we receive.

So let’s spring.

And since Chicago has an Olympic proposal in, any words of support from national international readers on the SaveChicagoCulture.org comments section are welcome. Chicago’s leadership is new to the whole international community idea, and they tend to listen to outsiders before they listen to, you know, constituents.