I’m in the middle of my eighth summer teaching at this place, so I’m teching – no joke – 10 shows right now, but I wanted to take a moment to draw some attention to some folks.

So this whole Chase grant thing is complete. And Chicago theatres made their mark, and in several of the 15 cases landed in the top 200 of companies (thus receiving a $20,000) in creative ways that didn’t buy into Chase’s marketing mechanism. That’s $300,000 that Chase just dumped on typically small-to-mid-sized Chicago theatres. I find that fact to be awesome. However, I’ve also been a fairly vocal opponent of the community messaging behaviors that the grant tends to encourage, so the folks that I did end up voting for demonstrated some capacity for making the ask for votes their own.

The Neo-futurists first prompted me to support them by leveraging their campaign during the run of a show that directly and ingeniously interrogated the links and points of contact between arts, corporate structures and marketing (check out their “word from our sponsor” videos). In addition, they focused their requests for votes to facebook-ready laptops available in their lobby, rather than impersonal, overwhelming and disconnecting e-mail blasts.

Another group, Will Act For Food, outlined the specific uses they intend for the funds which included benefits beyond production value and replacing other grants such as Illinois Arts Council funding that have dried up or been delayed. Essentially, they added some transparency to the ask, which in turn makes them somewhat accountable as beneficiaries of the grant to achieve some measurable results out of their windfall. I hope that all companies who get funds from a community-voted grant demonstrate the same level of accountability to that community who votes for them, just as you would file a grant report to a granting association. That structure, I think, helps young non-profits with loose infrastructures gather some long-term support in times like these.

But all that’s just my opinion. It was a hard decision, and not one done without some hand-wringing, but my company New Leaf decided not to participate in the campaign because the methods we’d have to employ to win such a grant at this stage didn’t fit our vision of how we want to cultivate relationships with the community.

But let me tell you what does fit our vision: 84 People voted for us anyway despite the fact that we didn’t ask for their votes. And I’d like to thank them personally now. I don’t have access to the entire list (I’m curious to know if winners / administrators DO have access) but I’ll make do with what I can.

Thank you, Rebecca Zellar, for casting the first vote for New Leaf.

And thank you to everyone else who spoke up for us while we focused our energy elsewhere.

Your ongoing relationship and in many cases partnership with us is worth more than $20,000. A lot more. And I just wanted to say that.

A few nights ago Dan Granata and the Chicago Artists Resource threw a little Chicago Theatre history lesson over at the DCA storefront space (“Do it myself: Five Decades of Theatre that Works“) featuring three veterans of the storefront movement: Steve Scott of the Goodman, Jackie Taylor of Black Ensemble Theatre, and Sharon Phillips, Managing Director of the legendary Body Politic.

The whole event was taped and I’m sure a bunch of us who were there will be posting the full video once it’s out there. For theatre nerds and folks who want to someday produce in Chicago, it’s a concentrated dose of both the sense of family and interconnectedness that exists in the Chicago theatre community. At the same time, it’s a timely reminder that the essentially young, DIY spirit of Chicago leads to a lot of history repeating itself.

One thing that Sharon Phillips said really stuck and clarified for me the core components of the ingredients of a thriving theatre company in Chicago, which frankly could be applied anywhere. These ingredients are so simple as to be a bit of a “no duh” but the revelation of them was more of a “awesome, so the rest of the noise can be let go.”

There are three things every theatre company needs to thrive:

1) Heart.
You can call this what you want. Passion, Love, a “Fuck you I’m doing this” attitude. It’s the force that makes a company move to this town with an axe and Meisner training to grind. It’s the force that makes that company drop $6k on their credit card to put up a show in a hole in the wall. It’s the force that then makes that same company five years later confident enough to make the claim “No freaking way am I dropping $6k of my own money on this anymore. People need to PAY for this work.” If you don’t have enough of it, you close. And yes, it makes you look crazy.

Heart is the primary fuel of all theatres in Chicago, in that when a company doesn’t have enough of it any more, shuttering the theatre is not long behind. This life cycle is in some ways a bittersweet gift: if a theatre loses its heart, better to close before the integrity of the theatre is lost than to keep it alive beyond its usefulness with more artificial business practices. Unmanaged heart is often in direct competition with a stable, well-incomed lifestyle.

2) Close cooperation between artistic collectives
If nothing else, this is the factor that has made Chicago a unique theatre town. Having this level of cooperation is the one benchmark that determines if Chicago is the best place in the world to generate new work and new artists. I should add that I don’t think that Chicago owns the core principle of cooperation, and if another city comes along with the same level of city-wide collaborative culture then THAT will be the best place in the world to make theatre.

After learning a lot more of the historical context of the last thirty years from Steve, Jackie and Sharon, it’s clear that there was a surge of this kind of cross-border cooperation during the early seventies that supported the massive success of Steppenwolf and David Mamet. Just from the example of Black Ensemble Theatre and the Goodman of the time, there was all kinds of cooperation happening in those years from casting to emergency venue maintenance to business development to fundraising. Sharon Phillips told a story where Body Politic had run out of money for the last show of their season, and all the other theatres in town put an envelope for $1.50 donations to Body Politic in their programs, effectively saving the theatre through community support.

At some point, the level of cooperation began to peter off in the 90 and 00s, decades which saw the number of theatre companies in Chicago rise from around 120 to 300. Cooperation is harder when there are more relationships to manage. The existing relationships ossified within the older theatres, and it became harder for a new, small company to find a place in the market. After several 5-year lifecycles of small theatres, the community effectively ceased to remember itself and began to trade in legends of the Steppenwolf rehearsal church basement in extravagant, hushed tones rather than the remarkable, yes, but human-sized spaces and events that they actually were. The three panelists and much of the audience noted a change in the air in the last few years, however – a sense that the community is coming together again. Maybe it’s simply that economic crises breed more cooperative theatre, but I hope this means that we can learn to cooperate on the more fundamental level that existed in the 70s. That will require one thing of us: that we know, care, and invest in each other. Which leads to the final ingredient.

3) A deep, lasting connection with a unique audience
This is the final, elusive ingredient that becomes very challenging in a 300-theatre town, and I think it’s the area where most of Chicago’s theatres have to improve or face destruction. There are a handful of theatres that have have incredible success with the connections to their audience, connections which have developed after years of consistent excellence and resulted in passionate, sometimes rabid support from their fans. In particular: Court Theatre has the strongest geographic connection with its audience, the in many ways isolated neighborhood of Hyde Park, and its programming matches the demographics and intellectual tenor of the neighborhood closely. Having sat in on several of their talkbacks in the last year (in full disclosure, I’m about to open a show there tonight) I can say with confidence that Court has one of if not THE most enviably engaged audience a theatre could have. Talkbacks have become a point of empowerment for the audience, and over years many patrons have gotten used to seeing their feedback and perspectives during previews result in changes in the work itself. It makes those talkbacks very well attended.

But not every theatre gets to be the only game in a neighborhood like Hyde Park, and for the glut of theatres that operate on the north side of Chicago, uniqueness comes not with pure geography but with stylistic and thematic uniqueness. Sometimes that uniqueness comes in the form of investing in the aesthetics of individual genius – like the Hypocrites’ Sean Graney, or the Organic’s Stuart Gordon before him. Sometimes a collective of artists can articulate an aesthetic beyond the vision of one individual: Timeline Theatre is another theatre that marries a reputation for quality with a narrow focus on programming inspired by history. That flexible focus on history as touchstone for the core audience is important to keep in mind. While many other theatres excel at storytelling – hundreds of them, in fact – that touchstone trains the audience to keep engaged with the specific theatre company rather than the shows they happen to be doing at that particular moment.

My own theatre, New Leaf, as we close our ninth season operating in Chicago (Curse of the Starving Class closes tonight), is at a crossroads with this final piece of the puzzle.

We have found a way to articulate and be proud of our passion.

We have created a way, somehow, to create consistently excellent work. I can call it what it is because of that heart.

We have forged incredible connections with the rest of the artistic community, and are fed by those connections on a daily basis. New Leaf’s artistic friends are incredible supporters – from the guest artists on our stages, to companies we collaborate with like Backstage, Theatre Seven, The Side Project, the Goodman, WNEP, TUTA, The Plagiarists, Strawdog, Will Act For Food, the League of Chicago Theatres, and the ongoing Storefront Summit.

What we have not done is found that unique touchstone that will allow us to make theatre for a unique group of people, an audience that shares not just our passion for the theatre and storytelling but a passion for this kind of theatre – theatre that celebrates and renews and reinvents the space in which it is made.

Maybe I need to invite a bunch of architects to the show.

The recipe is simple: Figure out the people that you do this for. Do it well for them. Keep doing it well for them.

Yup. Still here. Still cooking. Big news on the horizon, no less.

One of the things that’s cooking is coming up quick – on May 3rd 5pm at the Goodman, there’s a big ol’ exposition and awards ceremony of the work done by theatrical designers in Chicago. Perhaps you’ve heard of it: The Michael Merritt Awards.

Several designers will be honored at the ceremony (notably set designer Collette Pollard who will be receiving the Michael Maggio Emerging Designer Award, and a celebration of the work of lighting and set designer Michael Philippi who passed away suddenly this year)

My personal favorite bit of the event is the huge designer showcase, where dozens of designers in the Chicago area will display their portfolios to the artistic leadership of the city.

Interested? I know am. Check out the press release details below if you’d like to either present your own work or check out some great designers to hire. Oh, and it’s on facebook, too.

The 17th Annual Merritt Award for Excellence in Design and Collaboration program, posthumously honoring and celebrating the work of lighting and set designer Michael Philippi (Desire Under the Elms, Death of a Salesman), “an esteemed longtime collaborator and friend”, will take place on Monday, May 3, at the Goodman Theatre.

Scenic designer Collette Pollard (The Illusion, Stoop Stories) will receive The Michael Maggio Emerging Designer Award. There will also be a presentation of three student scholarship recipients representing The Theatre School of DePaul University (scenic designer Williams G. Wever), Northwestern University (costume designer Jeremy Floyd) and from Columbia College Chicago for The John Murbach Scholarship for Collaborative Design (lighting designer Wade Holliday).

The doors open at 5 p.m., with a viewing of the fourth annual ‘Theater Design Expo’, showcasing the works of over 50 Chicago-area emerging theatrical designers and a portfolio review of graduating design students from some of the finest programs in the country.

Goodman Theatre’s Artistic Director Robert Falls, a founding member of the Michael Merritt Endowment Fund Steering Committee, will lead a panel discussion from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. about the Goodman’s experiences working with Michael Philippi in recent times and during Bob’s past tenure as fledgling artistic director of Chicago’s Wisdom Bridge Theatre Company. Philippi’s design collaborators Michael Bodeen (Composer, Sound Designer), John Boesche (Projection Designer) and Ana Kuzmanic (Costume Designer) will join in the dialogue. Nathan Allen, Artistic Director of The House Theatre of Chicago, Dixie Uffleman, Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Production Supervisor, and House Theatre Designer and this year’s Emerging Designer Award recipient, Collette Pollard, will also bring their perspectives on creating and sustaining a new theatre company in Chicago, then and now.

The awards presentation will begin at 8 p.m. Attendees will enjoy a Chicago style supper buffet by Conn’s Catering complete with beer, wine and soda from start to finish until 10 p.m. Tickets/Exhibitor Fees are $20 per person and $5 for students. For ticket reservations, phone (312) 369-6105 (credit card orders are accepted) AND email robmilburn@ameritech.net to reserve an exhibit space.

The Goodman Theatre is centrally located in Chicago’s Loop at 170 North Dearborn Street, in close proximity to I-55, I-90/94, I-290 and Lake Shore Drive, as well as all major CTA rail lines and many bus routes. Discounted parking is available for $19 at the Government Center Self Park, located directly adjacent to the theatre at the southeast corner of Clark and Lake Streets, and parking coupons will be available at the registration table in the Goodman Theatre lobby.

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!

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)