Late last year, I started work as the part time Administrative Director of a small community arts organization in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. I took the position because of a desire to ground my work locally and to dig in to a single organization rather than stay at the 35,000 foot level that consulting so often requires.

And what a revelation it has been! This mostly volunteer-run, financially hand-to-mouth organization is doing impressive artistic work, and has been for almost 35 years. But among its most impressive feats is the tight-rope act of making ends meet. The board bet that someone like me serving as “professional” staff could provide the grounding for a more stable operation. The jury’s still out on whether the budget can sustain that – and the current climate for nonprofits isn’t making it any easier.

For example, The Nonprofit Finance Fund just released its 2012 State of the Sector survey, which asserts, among many other interesting observations, that “…many nonprofits are still facing fundamental challenges that threaten the stability of the sector and the well-being of the people they serve.” Their data show that funding is tenuous at best for more than half, and many have trouble meeting community demand for their services.

The environment is challenging, no question. But it’s also true that arts nonprofits- even small, community-based ones- have a growing array of resources at their disposal. In addition to the financial advice and support of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, nonprofits have access to a number of business services organizations. Fractured Atlas, for example, provides a range of support services, like education and health insurance, to artists and arts nonprofits. Grassroots.org, for another, provides the Nonprofit Tool Box, a mix of services including free web hosting, a volunteer-run graphic design service, and online marketing assistance to all types of nonprofits.

Yes, I use these services, and they help. Yet, when I look around at my small organization and its small army of enthusiastic volunteers and supporters, I am struck by how much of a difference the passion of our artists make. The support services make it possible, but the artists make it worthwhile.

Calling all performing arts presenters on college campuses, academic departments (music, dance theater), and performing arts
and other nonprofit arts organizations! WolfBrown, with the Student Engagement Working Group of the Major University
Presenters consortium, is accepting Case Study Nominations to be included in a resource for campus-based performing arts presenters on exemplary practice in student engagement. Selected case studies will be featured in a national publication. Please complete and submit the online nomination form by April 30.

The goal of this project is to compile and disseminate good practice to the field. Any campus-based performing arts presenter,

performing artist, student organization, or academic department may nominate one or more case studies. Case studies might include:

• Student marketing campaigns that have yielded good results
• Programs through which students engage directly with visiting artists
• Programs through which students create artistic work, or learn about creativity
• Programs that involve students in planning or producing programs
• Effective student ticket discount programs
• Other examples of student engagement in the performing arts

Nominations should be exemplary in some way. In other words, some evidence of success should be provided that demonstrates why the nominated practice is innovative, replicable, or successful. WolfBrown and the Student Engagement Working Group will review the nominations and select a diverse group of case studies for further research and writing. For more information, contact Jennifer Novak-Leonard at jennifer@wolfbrown.com.

About the Student Engagement Research Initiative: With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College is leading a multi-site research effort aimed at gauging how to maximize students’ performing arts participation and attendance, including a focus on the particular challenges around classical music. The study will culminate in summer 2013 with a national convening of students from MUP campuses to analyze and form action recommendations out of the research.

It seems that almost every live performance I attend ends with a standing ovation. My British friends, with a tinge of cultural imperialism, are quick to point out that this is a uniquely American phenomenon (another hypothesis to refute). I propose to mount video cameras in theatres and concert halls over the course of a year, and capture on video (for slow-motion time-lapse analysis) exactly what happens starting from the moment the program ends. A cross-disciplinary, stratified sampling approach would allow for comparisons across opera, musical theatre, dance and classical music audiences in the US and UK. This would allow for careful analysis of who stands up first (including their precise seat number), and then follow the patterns of who rises next, and next, and so forth. Is it random, or do they fall like dominos? Do balcony people, who paid less, stand up at the same rate as big-spending main floor people? Can one discern patterns of social influence (i.e., those who stand up because the people around them have already stood up)? Is the “snowball effect” (i.e., when audiences rise in a cascading pattern from front to back) a spontaneous outpouring of admiration or a collective act of frustration over obstructed views? How many patrons remain seated, against all odds, in what surely must be one of the bravest acts of defiance known to man? Follow-up interviews with both standers and non-standers would shed light on whether the standers are applauding the artists or actually applauding themselves for spending so much money on tickets. At the bottom of the barrel is a somewhat dark hypothesis that more and more people can’t tell the difference between a good performance and a great performance, and therefore choose to stand regardless so as not to appear uncultured. We should all know better than to ask questions we really don’t want the answers to. Then again, the “urge to know” can be overpowering.

If a genie rose in a stream of twisted blue smoke and offered me, free of charge, an all expenses paid research study of my dreams, I would know immediately what to say. It would be a longitudinal study of three groups of young people in ordinary neighborhoods: those who become engaged with the arts, those who engage with science and technology, and others who are not particularly engaged. My army of co-researchers and I would track how these activities affect every aspect of these individuals’ lives. We would harness the growing powers of social media, asking young people to text us whenever they were engaged in their art form. A programmer of stunning insight and ability would work side by side with a gifted graphic designer to produce displays that showed a day, a month, or year in their lives. We would have the equivalent of topographical maps of what their artistic projects connected them to: real places, people, websites, books, movies, and performances. We would have the equivalent of MRIs of their imaginations. After early adulthood, we would visit them at regular intervals (like Michael Apted’s documentary Seven Up). We could look at their work, leisure, civic engagement, volunteering, and what they passed on to children or the people they mentored. In the end, we would have one way to answer, for one time and place, to two questions that preoccupy me: “What differences does living an engaged imaginative life make?” and “What differences does engagement in the arts make to the way we live our lives?”

I’m not afraid to admit it – I’m a fan of TV dance shows, especially So You Think You Can Dance! So, at the top of my holiday research wish list is the opportunity to work with SYTYCD to develop a segmentation model of their audience- not based on demographics, but based on viewers’ motivations for watching the show, what they get out of it, and whether they attend live dance or if they dance themselves.

Drawing from WolfBrown’s research for the National Endowment for the Arts published earlier this year 36% of people who say they are involved in dance do so only through recordings or broadcasts. This is a big bucket of activity that encompasses the dance competition shows (and which I hypothesize may be largely driven by them) that we know very little about. The challenge lies in finding the people who are only involved in dance through recordings or broadcasts. Data on SYTYCD audiences would give me access to this exact population (as well as to those who watch on TV in addition to attending live dance or dancing themselves).

SYTYCD appeals to me as a former dancer, because in a way it lets me relive some of the highs and lows of when I danced myself, but the day my husband (whose TV viewing is otherwise dominated by sci-fi) rewound the DVR to re-watch a performance on SYTYCD (because it “moved him”), I had some tangible evidence that these shows might be opening more people to the power of dance as a form of artistic expression.

I think a segmentation model for dance that incorporates the motivations and values of the dance-on-TV-only crowd, as well as those who attend live performance and dance themselves, would be an important tool for the dance field as a whole.

Happy Holidays!

With all of the recent interactive, community-based creative endeavors (e.g., Popup Magazine, Aaron Koblin‘s distributed works), and the allure of the all-night project (e.g., 24 Hour Plays), the research project I wish for is to engage a larger community in exploring designs for a next-generation arts space through an all-night hands-on event. Let’s get a mix of skills and knowledge levels into a room and see what happens!

This all-night design workshop would gather a group of community members (i.e., laypeople), arts administrators, and a few “experts” (e.g., urban planners, architects). The event would take place in an open and mutable space, such as a warehouse or an old airplane hanger. Participants would break into different teams associated with particular artistic disciplines. Through conversation, drawing, and building (materials to be determined), the teams would examine the design issues around their selected building typology. One team would look at museums, another would focus on concert halls, etc. The event would culminate in a presentation of design ideas by each team and perhaps even a voting on “best design.”

Though “Design the Next Generation Arts Space Sleepover” would not end up producing a finalized facility plan, the highly interactive and cooperative nature of the process could generate unforeseen and unique design ideas, as well as community buy-in and support for new building projects.

Thank you for considering my request.

Yours,

Rebecca