Theater For The Future

It’s been a longer than expected ramp up to the third Chicago Storefront Summit – which will be happening on March 22nd, and I hope you’ll join us again or for the first time. In the process, I had a couple “what the hell are we doing here?” conversations with Rebecca Zellar of the GreyZelda Theatre Group, who has really stepped up to help this ad-hoc group schedule, coordinate and dispatch the various breakout sessions and communications that crop up when you try to get 100 loosely-structured organizations to talk to each other.

We realized in this discussion: the summit is very much about giving the folks who run storefronts the tools, resources and opportunities to practice leadership – both leaders charting the course for their own company as well as leaders of the entire artistic community.

The clearest example of the way the storefront generates opportunity for an artist to develop their own leadership skills is in the way they’ve been organized thus far. Each summit thus far has been organized quickly, agilely, and with an absolute minimum of top-down leadership and maximum of bottom-up leadership. Each breakout meeting has begun with an artist who asks a question like “why aren’t women well represented in theatre leadership?” or “who else is doing theatre like me?” and the loose network comes together to compare notes, draw conclusions. All the coordinators – folks like Andy Hobgood, Matt Hoff, James Palmer, Dan Granata, Rebecca and I have been working on is how best to faciliate those discussions in a way that continuously promotes broad participation. And that is a tall order. But the framework has allowed people like Brian Golden, Margo Gray, Jenn Adams, Matthew Reeder and others to generate and perpetuate more and more conversation that, I think, has been very valuable to them and many others.

The summit is in many ways a less immediately effective but more mission-critical in-person companion to efforts at theatre management brainstorming like the collaborative idea nursery of 2amtheatre.com (or the twitter hashtag #2amt if you’re nasty). The #2amt conversation became a successful methodology almost accidentally for innovative brainstorming because it quickly synthesized a broad range of perspectives on a broad range of topics. It combined the brainpower of theatre producers (@dloehr, myself, @matthewreeder, @travisbedard, @trishamead), theatre funders & patrons (@ericzieg), theatre promoters (@scottyiseri, @davecharest) and theatre critics (@krisvire, @mreida) to solve common problems from all angles at once. It was, and continues to be, an agile way to have a conversation.

It’s harder to xerox that agility in an in-person meeting that needs to balance dozens of personal schedules and time limits: but the fact is that #2amt is not an accessible conversation for most theater makers to participate in, and conversations that come out of community groups like the Summit and the League of Chicago Theatres are still more potentially actionable than the high-level strategizing and future design brainstorms that #2amt is so good at.

So: I think we have to try.

There is a question – a point of resistance, in some ways, that manifests as a reasonable curiosity – that we’ve gotten a lot when being asked about what we’re trying to accomplish through the summit: What is its purpose?

A fair question. This is what I think.

The summit is a forum to discuss and share best practices at this level of producing theatre. It includes non-equity, independent, DIY, and newborn theatres that have a comparatively small amount of institutional memory and/or institutional overhead. Our discussion includes but is not limited to finding the simplest ways of getting storefronts the help and resources they need, and then – ideally – taking cooperative strategic action within the context of other established theater / arts advocacy orgs (such as the League) to more effectively articulate the solutions that will actually help us as a community of independent theatres.

Developing our own ability to lead, indeed.

The Third Chicago Storefront Summit
Monday, March 22
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Greenhouse Theater Center
(h/t to RZ for making it happen)

At long last, details are firming up on this year’s March 27 @ 9:30 World Theatre Day celebration at the Chopin.

First, let’s review some of the awesome from last year.

And now here’s the FACEBOOK INVITE.

WHAT IS WORLD THEATRE DAY?
World Theatre Day is an international celebration of theater and the impact that theater has on communities and individuals across the globe – and it’s just now catching on in the U.S. Last year, Chicago launched the first community-wide celebration of World Theatre Day in the United States, and this year, we’re doing it up even more.

WHAT ARE WE DOING THIS YEAR?
Join us at the Chopin on Saturday, March 27. In the evening, experience a special World Theater Day performance of The House’s WILSON WANTS IT ALL or BackStage’s ORANGE FLOWER WATER. Then, beginning at 9:30 as the City’s saturday shows come down, join us for some complimentary food, music, conversation, and performances all provided by the League of Chicago Theatres, the Chopin Theatre, and folks in the Chicago theatre community.

Every space in the Chopin becomes a promenade party, with a little bit of something for everyone to celebrate our corner of the world, and reach out to all the others. Downstairs will feature live music and loungey hob-nobbing with the folks who make Chicago theatre tick. In the lobby, social media connections fuel an international conversation with a host of Chicago’s international friends. And on the mainstage, Chris Piatt, former theatre editor for TimeOut Chicago, brings his PAPER MACHETE live magazine to investigate – and roast – Chicago’s historic relationships with other cities in “The Second City Complex.”

WHAT YOU CAN DO – MAKE YOUR OWN INTERNATIONAL THEATER SHOUT-OUT
World Theatre Day is all about generating cross-cultural dialogue that explores the power of theater to celebrate life and effect social change through collaborative performance. This year, we want to put you and your theater in the driver’s seat of that discussion, by encouraging you to send a public shout out to an international “sister” company of your choice.

STEP ONE – Make Contact. Find an international theater company or artist – maybe you already know them, or maybe we can hook you up with one – and think about what issues, ideas, and dialogue you would want to share them. Tell them about World Theatre Day and what we’re doing in Chicago.

STEP TWO – Talk it out. Record a video or audio greeting to that sister company, and have them send one to you. Share your thoughts about issues, listen to what your new international friends are working on and trying to accomplish. Find common ground.

STEP THREE – Share. Make a record of your conversation – a video greeting, an audio recording of a skype conversation, a collaborative art project, a photo – and post it to the internationally-contributed World Theatre Day tumblr blog, just by emailing a link to what you’ve made to http://tinyurl.com/wtdmedia, or ask us for help at worldtheatreday@nikku.net.

Follow the international events leading up to World Theatre Day at http://worldtheatreday.org/, and see you at the World Theatre Day party on 3/27!

Okay, seriously: there are so many cool projects, parties, and celebrations to encourage Chicago theater to reach out to the world and the nation coming this spring and summer, I can barely contain myself. Here are just two of them that I hope pretty much you and everyone you know in theater can jump on in and participate in.

Chicago and environs: Save the date and spread the word, please:

WORLD THEATRE DAY CELEBRATION
Saturday, March 27. Chopin Theatre.
9:30 until question marks.
Details coming soon. We need volunteers to help set up the event (sign up here), and stay tuned for yet more ways to participate in this international theatre celebration.

TCG Conference Performances
Second of all, I’m helping (along with the League TCG host committee) put together a series of performances to showcase Chicago theatre at the TCG Conference in June. We just released a call for proposals (see below) for two opportunities – late-night-party performances, and flash performances that pop up unexpectedly throughout the conference.

If your company is unable to attend the conference, this may be one of your only get-in-through-the-stage-door opportunities to get exposure at the conference. You do not need to be a league member theatre to participate, and one of our major goals is to represent the incredible diversity of Chicago theater at the conference through these performances. I hope your theater company can come up with a performance you can share with TCG Conference attendees!

The League of Chicago Theatres is hosting the 2010 TCG Conference in Chicago this June. A diverse selection of theatre companies are sought to represent the breadth and richness of Chicago theatre by creating performances that will be showcased throughout the conference in Flash Performances and at the Late-Night Party. A Flash Performance is a performance that erupts from thin air, engages an audience of 5 to 100, and then quickly disappears. Flash performances will be artfully coordinated to occur in unsuspected places (streets, hallways, el stations) several times a day throughout the conference in order to provide the attendees with a taste of Chicago theatre. A Late-Night Party performance will enhance a party atmosphere, and might include installations, amusements and performances of all kinds. The event itself will be a “carnival” style party featuring light snacks, drinks, music and multi-disciplinary performances- offering conference-goers an opportunity to unwind and let loose after a long day of workshops and networking. The goal is to give the attendees from across the country a sense of the artistry, collaboration and surprise that is Chicago theatre.

The conference will take place June 17-19, 2010. The Late-Night Party will take place on Friday, June 18, 2010. A small panel of theatre artists will select a diverse range of companies to perform. Please submit your proposal and supporting documents for consideration by the panel to Ben Thiem at ben@chicagoplays.com.

Click here for more information and to Download Application.

Deadline for submissions is March 5, 2010

UPDATE:
Rebecca Zellar of @GreyZeldahas thrown up the Summit on Twitter
Bob Fisher aka the @devilvethas offered to host a small roundtable on how to produce in non-traditional spaces on 1/17 (details coming soon on his blog).
A number of other roundtables are in the works on the topics mentioned in the topics listed below (Jenn Adams [@halcyonjenn] and @MargoGrayare putting together a discussion of women in storefront theatre), and we’re looking for volunteers, facilitators and participants via Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere to help us put together more.
Tony Adams (@Halcyontony) has set up a public Google calendar (ICAL / XML) which you can use to stay on top of ALL the storefront summit breakout meetings. We’ll of course also be setting up Facebook events so that you can bring folks who will thank you for bringing them.

I think my favorite part of the Storefront Theatre Summit this evening was when Don Hall came up to me at the end and suggested that the way to make the conversation really heat up for next time would be: (drum roll)

… to form sub-committees.

Okay, I’m paraphrasing him a bit. But the nice thing was: these small project-based follow up meetings that he, our resident uncle devil’s advocate, suggested … were part of our plan from the beginning.

Generating meaningful conversation in the storefront community is a tall order. In the room tonight we had 25-year-old companies, 10-year-old companies, and 1-year-old companies. We had folks who were looking for help with board development, folks who were looking for collaborators, companies looking for better relationships with venues, companies looking for ways of being a better venue, organizations who were looking to get their services into the use of companies that need them, and folks who didn’t belong to companies at all yet.

So tonight was about discovering more detail of the lay of the land. We started with a simple round of introductions – Who we are, what we’re working on, what we need help on. Then we took a second pass to really focus in on the core of what community collaboration was about – what skills are we missing in our organizations, and what knowledge could we offer each other to make up the difference. This set off a dozen or so mini-conversations about a wide range of subjects, and after New Colony Board member Matt Hoff (our designated note taker for the evening) is done posting the conversation to the facebook page, I think a lot more connections and partnerships are in the works.

I’m believing more and more in this simple recipe for fueling productive collaborative conversation about complex subjects: 1 part comfortable and frank face-to-face meeting, 1 part online follow-up. Too much of either and you don’t get the right kind of explosive force.

The face-to-face isn’t – and can’t be – about accomplishing something in the room & banging it out, but it is about forming real connections, identifying common challenges efficiently, and establishing as much trust, context, and basis for comparison between parties as possible. We’re humans: we need the faces, voices, beer, music, and sense of being in the same boat before we dump that boat in the river that we all need to cross.

Once you have that trust, too much face time will wear the conversation out and create too much pressure for immediate progress. You need convenience, energy, research, and time to develop the ideas. We do that on our own schedules, in our own pockets of opportunity. But as we all have found, starting online doesn’t get things done even faster. You can’t generate alignment, trust, and real group clarity from a conversation in a blog’s comments.

The face to face meeting generates the partnership and the alignment. The online follow-up generates the progress.

I’m looking forward to seeing these companies found themselves, develop strong boards, put on crazy large festivals (I counted four at the table, including the up-and-coming national and international Chicago Fringe Festival), develop unique and richer ways to engage their audience through a blog, learn to raise $5k in a single event, display collective legal force to gain more productive rights agreements with licensing companies, and put up shows with great production values in non-tradtional spaces with zero, nada, zilch budget. These are things we asked for help on from each other – and these are things that folks on this room could help with – if not by a direct hookup, than by tried-and-true plan of action developed from years of experience.

It was an inspiring group of people to speak with.

There was something I needed to hear tonight, and it came from BackStage Artistic Director Matthew Reeder, whose main stated concern was finding methods of preventing burnout. And I realized: that’s what I’m doing this month. I’m not working on shows for the most part, I’m not really running around trying to catch meetings. I feel like a lazy ass. But as a person with adult onset workaholism, finding ways to stay lazy means giving myself an action to play, or I get self-destructive.

Matt, ever the great director, gave me in his plea for help the action I need to play, which is: I am spending this month preventing my own burnout. And self-imposed vacation has suddenly never felt so fun.

I think a lot of the attendees had these little moments of clarity tonight. And so I hope you join us to discuss your goals, skills, and needs online (and format refinements for future summit meetings) and participate in our next regular meeting or one of our subject-oriented smaller meetings, which we’ll be announcing via the Facebook page.

SAVE THE DATE
Chicago Storefront Summit III
Sunday January 31st – Evening
Location TBA

Yup, it’s here. Or, more accurately, it’s on facebook.

After going through notes for the first storefront theatre summit, we’ve just launched a couple tools to try this whole “let’s all coordinate and meet” thing on for size. If you missed the first summit, December 6th at 7:00 pm at the Dank Haus in Lincoln Square is the next one (feel free to invite other theatre companies – one or two representatives from each theatre company would be ideal), and we hope you’ll share your thoughts.

Why facebook? Because we all use it. Why build something new when we can just build off what we already have?

A couple resources on there that are worth a look:

1) Regular Meetings as coordinated by Facebook Events. One of the biggest pieces of feedback generated by the first summit was that there is a desire for regular meetings among the storefront community – if nothing else, just to see what each other is working on. They’ll likely be set on a monthly or bi-monthly basis at this second meeting, and then will be reminded by a Facebook Event.

2) Notes. Whit Nelson has compiled notes and thoughts from the first summit, and a discussion board has been set up to take a community crack at some challenging questions. This is the online arm of the discussion – the face to face will also help us more quickly work through and build trust and alliance, but the discussion boards is where vast amounts of research and experience can be compiled – and read by folks new to town. Do those resources exist elsewhere? Absolutely. But this is where they can be digested for a young storefront theatre to more quickly align themselves with existing support infrastructures, such as the DCA, the League of Chicago Theatres, Chicago Artists Resource, and other storefronts.

There’s still a lot of ‘getting to know you’ work to be done here – while the blogging community pretty much understands where each other are coming from, there’s a dozen or so disconnected companies that we could hear more from. These questions (‘what are your best resources?’, ‘what are your biggest challenges’) are designed to help pry open the procedures and identities of all these theatres so that conversation can be fruitful for all.

3) Friends and Fans. These are the folks, folks. We need to know who each other are for this conversation to be really productive. Oh look, someone built that for us. Theatres who participate will be ‘fanned’ by the storefront summit page, and individuals will be on there as well. People to meet, Theatre to see.

See you December 6th!

One apparent result of Chicago theaters’ collective reactions of the economic climate change was to predictably shift rehearsals away from August and December to reduce overhead during those budget-sapping months, which resulted in a massive glut of show openings that began about two weeks ago and will continue pretty much unabated through November.

I feel lucky that the four shows I’m working on in various stages this week are all awesome.

• Stoop Stories – Goodman (two performances today!)
• Lucinda’s Bed – Chicago Dramatists (cueing this morning!)
• The Man Who Was Thursday – New Leaf (finalizing cue list!)
• End Days – Next Theatre (first rehearsal this week!)

Here is one of them for you.

(and yes… this is also a reminder: Come talk to me about what your theatre wants to do for a video for Theatre-a-day, and help spread the word that we are looking for a video mini-feature from EVERY theatre in Chicago – one a day until June. The countdown will begin when we can put together 20 videos to start us off.

In the works for that project: Stage Channel and several theatres including New Leaf are offering support in the form of training, flip cam usage, and other resources. Details coming soon.

So perhaps you haven’t heard yet:

The TCG National Conference is coming to Chicago in 269 days (as of this post).

At the recent host committee planning session at the League of Chicago Theatres for Chicago’s contribution to the festivities (many many cool events, opportunities, and ideas are in the works for all sizes of theaters, and we’ll need your help putting them together) someone made a pretty simple observation: 269 is approximately the number of active theaters in Chicago.

So someone else threw out the idea: What if we created a youtube channel, and featured a video of a Chicago Theater each day until the conference? 3-5 minutes, something that gets at the heart of what makes each individual theater unique. Like the World Theater Day Tumblr feed, those videos then become a living document of all kinds of information and voices in the Chicago scene. As the TCG Conference makes plans to arrive in Chicago, they’re also getting a really accurate cross-section of the full breadth of Chicago Theater – yes, the Goodmans and Steppenwolfs, but also the Timelines, the Griffins, the WNEPs, the Steeps, the Ruckuses and the Factories. Take this video from the Neo-Futurists, which sums up nicely the energy contained in their shows:

So I put it to you Chicago: Can we make this happen? Can your theater put together a low-investment, quick and dirty feature video that perhaps communicates the content of your work, or the communities that you serve – the heart of what makes your theater exciting and unique? Maybe this video is something you can put together quickly, maybe it’s a clip of something you’ve already made, maybe it’s a 5-miniute flip cam video (I promise you: you know someone who has one. We’ve got three.)

Here’s what I see as the potential benefits of this project:

• Create More, Think Less.
  Translating the energy of live performance or the way we put live performances together to the video format takes a certain amount of creativity. It’s super-easy to not do it well, and like anything, it takes practice, and takes a strong conceptual impulse to do right. As someone whose theater has gotten a lot of mileage out of a low-cost trailer video, I can tell you it’s a good skill to develop if you want to have an audience, no matter what kind of marketing budget you have. It doesn’t need to be polished – though it can be if that’s your identity – it needs to simply communicate who you are and what you do and what it’s like to be there.
• It’s an effective visual census
  I have this nagging doubt that one of our biggest challenges as a theater community in Chicago (though the problem is shared by other theater communities) is that each theater, especially small theaters, has a delusion of uniqueness. Yes, of course we are unique – we’re different collectives of artists, with different resources and interests – but we are often off the mark when we try to pin down and communicate WHY we are unique. It’s clear to me after the past few years that data alone isn’t enough to convince us of this. Of the seventeen-or-so new companies out there this year, even in a post-Rob Kozlowski/CTDB world – I’m still seeing a predictable amount of repetition of purpose, mission, positioning, and communications. (Don’t feel bad if I singled you out here – you’re so very not alone. But… fix it.) There is a lot of “we are going to change the entire world. Through theater.” But as we all learned in our first acting class: Show Us instead of Telling Us. Putting our faces and our work out there in a public, shareable format lets us collect and really see ourselves and what we are really capable of creating in a greater context, and releases us from the temptation of hiding behind shiny words. It lets us learn by comparison, while also showing the country the true diversity of what we have here.
• It equalizes the playing field while Chicago Theater itself has a platform
  One of the dangers facing the theater industry is that the financial structures that currently have a ton of money and influence aren’t necessarily the models that will survive in the future. The climate is changing fast for the arts: The dinosaurs may die out, and the rats and cockroaches may have an evolutionary advantage. Even if that idea is dismaying to you, you gotta deal with it to survive. By showcasing all of chicago theater’s various models and approaches in an equalizing format (everyone can get to youtube, but not everyone can fit into the Side Project), we get much closer to a real theater lab environment – we can see what is truly exciting, even if it doesn’t currently have the marketing power to push itself into the forefront of the conference.

Contact me via email or via twitter with your video, or if you need help. Spread the word, and let’s help each other get real, rich exposure to every theater company in town. And stay tuned as we put this together – I think the results will be exciting and eye-opening.

This post brought to you by Ian Martin of Atomic Fez Independant Publishing, who bought me a bottomless cup of coffee at a delightful brunch this morning. My hands are still vibrating with excitement and caffeine.

An exciting announcement from the League of Chicago Theatres today:

In Jan. 2010, the Chicago Theatre community gets a city-wide patron database.

Boom. Right? There’s the necessary checks and balances to retain patron privacy and list autonomy. But even League member theaters who have *not* been tracking data will now be able to use this pre-built and pre-calibrated system as part of their League membership. As someone who both knows how to build a versatile database but still finds his company using a big obnoxious excel spreadsheet for this task, I say yay.

Theoretically, the big list would allow for the tracking of deep patron data – such as city-wide theatergoing habits of individual patrons. This would be a massive first step for small storefront theaters who are trying to gather real, actionable marketing data.

On a large scale, it’s also conceivable that this kind of data gathering could really shed light on exactly how big the Chicago theater-going audience is – and how big it needs to be to support operating companies.

I found some interesting thoughts on the TRG website, as well that comes from data culled from other cities that have tried this system – such as this finding that rented mailing lists and a season subscription campaign don’t exactly lead to success – specifically, rented lists can usually only scrounge up a 0.4% subscription rate. Huh. I knew it didn’t work, but I didn’t realize it was equivalent to setting all those season brochures on fire in a hobo oil drum.

Way to go, League. You’ve earned this:

(h/t ZeFrank)