2012!

People are floating a lot of names for 2012. Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee. There isn't a lot of impact behind any of the names -- I happen to think Mitt Romney is going to emerge the victor as the conservative base splits amongst Palin and Huckabee.

But.

This week there's been rumors about a Lou Dobbs run, and there's also this week Glenn Beck's continuing his 9/12 Project insanity by becoming a "Community Organizer" (har har it's so meta). If these folks enter the race, I'm willing to put all my money behind Lou Dobbs being the Republican Candidate. He comes across more genuine than Romney, smarter than Palin, more memorable than Pawlenty, more marketable than Huckabee, and more stable than Beck. He's still a very solid conservative without getting trapped in too many of the excessive crazy that all of the other candidates have on the record (except Pawlenty -- Palin's desire to be rid of witches, Romney's "double Guantanamo", Huckabee's HIV-Positive quarantine camps, and basically everything Glenn Beck says). Lou Dobbs can appear on The Daily Show or MSNBC and still be treated with a respect that very few of the other candidates can still muster.

I'm not going to make any forecasts until a year before the primaries, since I love forecasting and I love being wrong. But I will say that having to watch a Dobbs-Beck debate moderated by Brit Hume is the sort of thing that makes me think the Mayan Calendar thing might be right...

Conversation II: Feedback

This week, my company held a workshop production of a new movement work called Syzygy. Because the piece was a workshop, we held feedback sessions after each. Rather than being an artist-directed Q+A, it was a great experience of directing questions toward the audience and hearing surprisingly cogent, helpful feedback on design elements and movement choices.

But I started wondering about something, probably because I've been working on a report on The Search for Shining Eyes. That report includes an analysis of the research conducted by Audience Insight LLC about Americans' relationships to classical music. Specifically, the research was an in-depth look not at the audience that attends orchestra evenings, but at the audience that doesn't.

How do we reach the people who aren't coming to see our events without a market research staff behind our backs? Or even, how do we entice those who come to our shows and then sneak away. Our group has a Facebook Page and a twitter feed, and we always ask for feedback/reactions/discussion. Nobody does. Our Facebook page has the potential to be a conversation between our company and our audience, and I don't think it isn't happening because we aren't there--the moment we could get even one response to talk we'd have a discussion going. Instead, our Facebook is just another RSS feed to help you find out about events.

I'm going to keep stewing on this one. It seems very important. After all, we blab about "community" and etc. but if we can't get our audience to talk to us, then unless we pin them down and force them to speak we might lose opportunities to connect.

Building Community And Its Creativity

In my time blogging here, my one honor has been being in communication with a small group of intelligent, passionate people who are interested in developing the cultural conversation in and around communities. Whether looking at it on a national scale, or from a theater angle, for from a rural small community scale, we've gotten to stretch our legs discussing the theories of arts development in the United States.

So. A friend of mine who is in the Peace Corps in Senegal mentioned to me that she is embarking on a set of projects in a small town in Senegal (approx 20,000 residents). She chiefly wants to tackle cultural gender issues, and create an outlet for creativity that she says is stifled in the local schools. She asked me for advice.

I am drafting her an email with my own pearls of wisdom, but I wanted to ask the general community its thoughts. If you're reading this blog, you've probably spent time thinking about issues related to this one. What's the practical advice/solutions/directions you'd want to pass along?

I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends

Let it never be said that this blog is not grateful to its friends: Ian Moss at Createquity gave a shoutout to this blog today, and so I'd like to say thanks to him for his support earlier in the process and the kind words.

Also, I'd like to give a shoutout to Ah Fafa Lala, a new collaboration between Johannesburg and NYC arts groups (including possibly my own soon) that so kindly directed its members in this direction.

Thanks for the support! More content soon, I promise.

Theory of Change I

Mission Paradox blog asks:

What's your theory of change?

How does your presence, or your organization's presence, in the arts somehow make the arts different from what they were before?

How does your presence move your art form forward?

I'm currently working on a more elaborate theory of change, taking into account a report I recently read about how small communities build thriving arts programs. ( http://www.mrac.org/resources/pdf/ThrivingArts.pdf ) The points that I've so far been working on are such:

1) An artists' association with the place he's in.
2) An artists' association with the audience he interacts with
3) An artists' association with the other artists in his community
5) An artists' association with seemingly unrelated arts associations (food appreciation groups, amateur science clubs, church groups, etc.)
6) An artists' association with figures and institutions of power and influence (banks, corporations, political bodies)
7) An artists' association with education and how the future of culture is formed

As of right now, I'm working on exactly HOW those associations spark change, but at the moment, it seems like if you're an artist and you're looking to change those things, those are the associations you need to build.

Association with other artists and with your own audience are very clear to most artists, but I wonder how aware most arts groups are about the importance of the rest.

The NEA, NRO, and WHO-SICE

Via >100k, NRO's Michael Knox Beran has an interesting op-ed about the NEA. Read the article. It's not very long, and it's written in the simplistic tone of voice that the NRO brings to most of the subjects.

Aside from a slight overdose of contempt, there's actually an important kernel of truth in the article. The following is the reaction as I posted in the comments section:


I wonder if the new White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Engagement is going to steal Rocco’s thunder of any reform for the NEA. I mean, if you’d have asked me a month ago what the NEA shoould be doing, I’d have said finding innovative new approaches to bringing creativity to communities and funding them in their early years, but if WHO-SICE (I pronounce it “Whose Is?”) takes on that role, then the NEA will become more of a caretaker of big, established venues.

The core point that I agree with is that the NEA has become a very unimaginative body, which is why Obama has to create a whole separate office to deal with “innovation.” The bold and imaginative direction that he[Beran] sees it going is in restoring the civic focal point–which in the report by the Minnesota Regional Arts Council is an important arts developmental point.

I guess where I would differ with Beran is on the capacity of the NEA to change. I think rather than a structural problem, what Beran is pointing to is a problem of administrative culture. What remains to be seen is whether a new Administration and a new appointed head can shift the culture far enough to change its behavior.

UPDATED: Looking back on this post now I realize I conflated the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation with the rebranding of the White House Office of Public Engagement. I leave the error simply because I wish it had been called WHO-ISCE, so I could imagine a grumpy longshoreman musing as to the identity of a person he's never met before and only just noticed.

On The Subject Of Fear

Watch this video. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Beutler spend a fantastic hour using Brian Beutler's experience being shot to talk about fear.

The fear they speak of is in multiple veins: the fear of a community outsider (whether racially outside or economically outside) as well as the fear of a member of a broken community. I can't possibly recap the conversation, but the bottom line is that we talk about the fear of the outsider, and at the same time, that same fear is hidden within that community, under the surface.

And as it pertains to gangs, it is fascinating to talk about the fear up until the age of about 15 that Coates describes, of young folks who don't know yet know how to integrate into their community. Up until high school, we have the chance to offer them a different way, and that fear is what we have to address. That's the core of the issue. The fear of those who live in a broken community.

And of course, on that drum I will continue to beat, I think this is a fantastic example of the conversation we need to be having in this country; a Charlie-Rose style conversation, where the goal is to understand and not to convince. This is also the conversation that President Barack Hussein Obama called for, way back when we were upset about Reverend Wright.

UPDATE: The moment after I hit that "publish" button I finished rereading my last post about this "conversation" and saw the words:

"More, America. We need more discussion."

I'd just like to say that in this important discussion about race, it needs to be held together. One man banging off a post about race and then another person banging off another post about race is not what we need. We need two (or more) people in a room, confronting themselves with each other.