Theater For The Future

I got to re-balance my creative input / output ratio in December. And it felt goooooood.

“What is this compassion? Because I don’t really know what it is. So I want to know, really, what is it?”

- Aunt Dan and Lemon

“Thinking rationally is the way to be happy and the key to learning more.”

- L. Ron Hubbard, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant

“Don’t search for the answers, which could not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (h/t Granata)

I don’t think New Year’s resolutions work for me. It’s like preemptively choosing the solution for a problem you haven’t come up against yet.

In past years I always thought, “This year I’ll do more blank and try to be less blank.” But the idea of approaching a theatrical season as a question (instead of say, a theme) or approaching software development from the reiterative question of “what is the way to build what our clients need” has yielded some exciting fruit this year.

And so I wonder: My life seems awfully recursive. A question seems like it might be useful.

The danger is in picking the wrong question. “How can I make my business more profitable?” for instance might lead me pretty far astray, though it is certainly something on my mind. At this point in this year, I’m thinking a lot about stability because it’s been a tumultuous year. My wife and several of our friends all left full time work / half-hearted careers to pursue part time work / full-hearted careers. Watching and helping them develop those full-hearted careers has, I think, been the unasked question for me in 2009. Can you survive that way, ‘living your dream’? And when you do, does it stay your dream? What of that romance can you hang on to, if any, and would you want to? And the answer was: It is possible to be more fulfilled by your work, and the difference between plenty and just getting by is in the strength of your connections to community and friends. Those are the tools that we use to overcome fear and poverty (and one of the reasons why I think it is important for me to stay in theater still).

So the question for this year deals with stability – “How can I be more stable and more sustainable?” The nice thing about a question is that it’s three-dimensional – the shape of the question shifts depending on the time of day or the context in which you consider it. My current, two-dimensional answer to that question is that “stability” for me does not mean for me a prototypical “financial security” – it means a sustainable level of activity that is full-hearted and doesn’t physically kill me or prevent me from enjoying my life or prevent my wife and friends and family from enjoying theirs. Balancing work, play, and family takes work and consideration – I wouldn’t want to ask that question frivolously.

Stability for me is linked to that question of compassion from Aunt Dan. As a designer (both web and sound), or really as a person who provides services to clients, I require compassion to do my job/life effectively, since I essentially act as an artistic and technical advisor to another storyteller. I hear what a storyteller (a director or an organization) is trying to communicate or accomplish with their story, and I create the tools or atmosphere in which that communication is possible. I require compassion and empathy to be able to translate the director’s complex vocabulary and emotional understanding of their story into my own emotional understanding of the story, and in the case of web design, incorporate the reactions and responses of many, many users into a final, finished and ideally universal understanding of a complex narrative. That question, quoted above, is the core of what I didn’t connect to with that script (which I should add was excellently produced and presented by my pals at BackStage Theatre – all artists I deeply respect.) Without compassion, I don’t operate, and my designs don’t resonate with other people, and I don’t get hired again – which of course, always may happen. Compassion for me is a sense of empathy, an often misguided but for me visceral and tangible sense that I understand the motives and worldview of another human being. I couldn’t operate if I didn’t feel some level of compassion for and from my collaborators, or an audience, or the users of my websites.

But compassion also quickly throws me out of balance and creates a vast amount of instability in my life. (I can hear the Objectivists in the room chuckling, and I’ll get to you later.) The art itself is always a solitary and personal reaction to that compassion, which comes from something internal to me, hopefully not an external, societal, or conventional response to a given design challenge (“It’s night! We need to hear crickets!”) Compassion muddies that personal relationship I have with my work, and left unchecked can muddy and complicate the quality of that work. Compassion with my clients compels me to take on too much work to fill my clients and my collaborators needs before my own. Finding the right valve that gets me to shut off the sense of compassion in favor of the sense of taking care of myself at just the right moment has always been a challenge for me. In many ways and on many days, my sense of compassion is least developed with this guy, Nick Keenan.

Changing and developing our lives and the people that we are and the Things that We Do With Our Time On This Planet is not a question of carving or molding ourselves out of clay. We’re given certain talents and certain flaws, and I believe very strongly that those talents and flaws are closely linked together – amazingly, fascinatingly so. Applying dogma to our lives that we developed before New Years past (about so-and-so pounds lost or whatee-hoo books read or blah-tee-blah engrams we need to audit before we achieve Clear) can unintentionally damage our honest experience of February, April, June, and September.

I wonder if the question will stick better than the resolution. The question is a iterative procedure that is scalable, a kind of Kaizen ritual that provides structure and allows for individual variation and diversity, person-to-person and day-to-day. Life is shaped like a question, not an answer.

Living that question is audacious humility, and I could use somma that.

Yup, been having technical difficulties with the site all day. I have taken one too many forced tea times today while waiting for my computer or the server or the network or the alignment of the planets to behave in some kind of semi-predictable way.

So to celebrate, here’s another piece of bloggy performance art to help voodoo out the bad server daemons. This one is at least in part h/t @greyzelda.

Watch and listen to this at half volume:

While also listening to this:

While watching this:

Remember, you’ll need to start the album when the tiger roars to really get them to sync properly.

This is the sound of a thought.

One of the things that became clear at our New Leaf Brunch Launch this week was that, while our friends and audience clearly love the approach of a season question (yay, score!), it wasn’t yet clear to them exactly how New Leaf chooses each question, each year.

The answer: For us, the season question is always the question of everything. Now.

Last year was a year of new beginnings for us. “How do we build a future from a present we didn’t expect?” New Leaf was finding itself switching gears into a new kind of work, a new kind of intensity. In our personal lives, our company members were finding that the allure of career – even a part-time, low-income career, but One That Was Calling To Us – was becoming increasingly more attractive with age, somehow more necessary than a life of stability in service to ideas that we didn’t quite believe in.

So we left those jobs, and that safety net. We leapt into the freelance sector. We connected with our creative calling, and found ways of making that work necessary, and lucrative. We shopped around for non-group health insurance, and although it hurt, we paid for it, because it meant freedom and a new kind of security.

In our artistic work, we explored death, and we confronted ourselves with the inevitability of our own deaths. We explored the cost of a life left unlived, and we interrogated ourselves and identified the aspects of our unlived lives that would become regrets given the chance. We discovered the hard-won value of a path chosen instead of defaulted into, and we forced ourselves to choose our own path, and we forced ourselves to blaze that trail into a wilderness that was… Calling to Us.

And so here we are. A tribe, together, in some pretty rough and unexplored terrain. We’re a theater company that is small with a big reach. We’re creative workers with less regular (and less soul-sucking) employment who have the tools to build a lifestyle, but we need to get to work sowing opportunities and reaping small bits of income, or we will starve. It is clear: our question is changing.

So from this atmosphere forms a new question, with new work that we must do to crack open that nut and really make us look and examine our lives beyond our work. A new question that constantly pushes us to renew.

For me, I’m starting to see the patterns in how we communicate, and the patterns that form into psychic blocks. I haven’t been a blogger for very long, but I have been involved in the public discourse of theater arts for a few moons, and I’m seeing a new round of exciting energy that reminds me of a similar round of exciting energy. This new round comes primarily from this galvanizing and energizing series of posts from the New Colony, calling for a long-term manifesto and summit to organize and legitimize storefront theater in Chicago to take the helm as a trend-setting theater community. This is not the first time a flare has been fired calling for Chicago to take the helm as a world leader in creating new, exciting theatrical work. But because it comes in a time where many are chanting that call to action together – we have begun to tell that same story together with and through our lives – it feels like there is real momentum, that we are approaching a tipping point.

A story is never a complete truth, but it is always a compelling truth. A story ignores much mundane detail in the name of focusing our attention on what matters, on what needs work, on what needs focus. The story says “our work and our leadership is not as diverse as we are,” “our work is not risky enough, not bold enough,” “our work does not feature enough new voices, and so old voices retain too much influence.” A story is idealism, codified and written, with the beginnings of practical applications of that idealism – bold new ways of being – wrapped up in the myth and the fairy tale.

I empathized with this story of the New Colony’s – an entire framework for viewing the situation of Chicago storefronts – and, predictably, I was reminded of my own experiments at forming initiatives and coalitions. This is when I was an even younger arts advocate and as someone entirely new to engaging with public discourse. I recently looked through some old notes I had created for an ad hoc organization I was trying to put together – the Storefront Theater Alliance of Chicago, or STAC, I think we were calling it. I remember the meeting I had with several trusted folks in other small companies to plan out and carve a mission for this alternative organization that would represent the specific needs of independent theater – advocacy I didn’t feel happening and so I didn’t believe existed. I remember the moment when the plan all fell apart… we decided on our mission, a mission we could all get behind. And we looked up, just to check, the mission of the League of Chicago Theaters, and I saw:

Our mission and the League’s mission were the same thing. Nearly word for word. We were working towards the same goal. We were asking the same question from two very different angles.

That was, I think, a week before I first emailed Ben Thiem at the League and really started engaging him in conversation. Learning what he was working on, and giving him (public) feedback about the programs they had put on that had made a big impact on me. (Larry Keeley created this amazing manifesto for Chicago Theater to effectively simplify, unify and modernize our marketing and unite the community behind a few key initiatives that would break open the watermelon of new audience development, so to speak. I still keep that powerpoint hosted here. Read it. It’s a good story.)

That conversation led me to think deeper about the needs and situations of theaters beyond my own, and gather data, and see how my energies could be used to further other people’s stated goals – goals I believed in. Instead of writing a new story from scratch, I’d become an editor, a shaper of other stories, helping other advocates test messages and unite the community behind common purpose.

My question was changing, can you see?

I did more research, I talked with friends who had done even more research. Eventually, through Dan Granata, I read the stories of the beginnings of the League way back in the first revolutionary storefront movement in the 70s. I began to see that my efforts were part of a cycle of group behavior, and realized that if we didn’t understand the story of people like Lois Weisberg we were never getting anywhere… Storefront arts organizations have this way of proliferating and periodically you would have three or four ask the question of why storefronts didn’t cooperate to leverage their energies for cultural change. You had a lot of people get discouraged very quickly in the face of financial and political and personal limitations. I got a little obsessed with counting things in the hopes that the full picture would yield clarity, because I could see – from my initial perspective, I was not seeing the entire picture. But progress starting happening, slowly. Deb Clapp was named as the new head of the League, and on this one day Deb sat down with many of the same folks that had been involved with STAC – plus the Goodman and some other larger theaters – and bam, we planned Chicago’s World Theatre Day celebrations in a couple hours. It was easy to unite and cooperate, because it was for the collective benefit of all.

I felt that advocacy, suddenly, and felt myself becoming a stronger advocate. And I’m still not seeing the entire picture.

Here’s the thing – I believe in what the New Colony is asking, and I think – still – that they are presenting questions that we must all choose to act on. (So do it, seriously. Let’s stop putting it off in the name of our own immediate needs, get coffee together and hash this shit out, a common goal and a common purpose, because the world is waiting for change to be articulated and germinated.) Let’s also try to bring everyone to the table so we see how big this question really needs to be. Let’s learn the old questions so that we can adapt them into new questions. I believe in the transformative power of story, because I’ve seen its effect on my life, on our lives, on our city, on our country. The stories we tell rewrite what we become, somehow.

And so this year, I still believe in the old question – I still believe we must build a future and that our present is rarely one we expect – but I believe it with more experience and more choices under my belt. Some of those choices and some of that experience may be untrustworthy – I’m only human and so my failure to revolt doesn’t necessarily mean that revolution isn’t necessary.

But even the faultiness of stories yields amazing fruit. I still believe, for instance in the fanciful and perhaps hubristic story that I daydreamed about at UMass with my upper- and lower-classmen friends – that we would get to be part of an American cultural renaissance, an explosion/confluence of new science that illuminates art and art that illuminates science. Oddly enough, I believe that the act of telling myself that story again and again has somehow manifested itself in my life and my community. And the story of renaissance – that particular series of intellectual and creative reactions – has this ability to align us towards the possibility of radical creative thought (as opposed to radical destruction). It starts us running in the same direction, and starts us building and creating.

And so I ask the question: What are the stories I’m telling myself? Are they lies, or are they truths that I don’t understand yet? And how are those stories changing me, even as I fail to understand them? Do I want them to change me?

Do I need to tell myself new stories in order to become the person I want to be, or to create the community and world I would like to live in?

Choosing stories to change the world is positively mundane in the realm of theater… every artistic director does it, in their own way, every year. But even mundane things can explain the universe we live in – if we examine them closely enough.

I learned that from Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. It’s a good story. You should read it.

This post is cross-posted on the New Leaf Theatre Blog. The coffee ingested to produce it was provided by the incomparable Margo Gray. Thanks, Margo!

Right before my summer teaching gig, I threw out a brief tease on twitter about a web project I was working on (the brand new BackStage Theater Company website and blog) and what it means, okay, I’ll say it, for the future of content-driven websites for small theater companies.

What’s wrong with how theaters do things now, you ask? Well, it’s too much work, frankly, for mixed and muddled results. Traditionally, even simple web features for organizing production information have required a kind of wonky content management system or database to allow non-tech-savvy company members to update the website without breaking it in the process. In practice, however, without a self-explanatory one-stop-shop in place (that doesn’t require knowledge of HTML, FTP, Photoshop, and MySQL) the burden of updating that kind of site inevitably falls to the single person who created or assumes responsibility for the site, not the people that the site represents. As a result, the solutions I’ve seen out there (that don’t require keeping a high-powered design firm on retainer) fall into two camps of despair. Some are traditional, static sites that are updated irregularly and do not evolve into the waters of web 2.0 because of the high time cost of making changes. Others are entirely built on the read-it-now-or-forget-about-it blog model and sacrifice long-term infrastructure and the accrual of a body of work for the immediacy of now.

You know who you are, and it wasn’t your fault.

Both approaches need a way to talk to each other, so that the catalogue of old wisdom – past productions and company history – has a place to talk to the new vibrancy of what is exciting today and next week. Our entire world feels like it’s doing this right now, which is why you’re getting all these young hipsters digging into the history of the depression, WPA and CCC right now.

I’ll get into the technical details in later posts (you know, so you can steal the idea for yourself, or use it to convince your board to hire me and my merry band of outlaw graphic designers, marketers, and hackers) but for now, I’m going to focus on the features of something new I developed with the help of the < a href="http://backstagetheatrecompany.org">BackStage project, something I think is a winning equation:

Wordpress + Flutter + TheaterCalculus™ = A great content management system for your theater or personal portfolio.

Wordpress – you’ve heard of this, perhaps? It’s arguably the most extensible blogging platform out there, with an active open-source community that creates bajillions of plugins that fill 95% of any arts company’s web presence needs, like:

• Self-hosting a website
• Customizable themes that allow for completely self-branded sites
• A ‘pages’ infrastructure that extends wordpress beyond the features of a blog and allows all web content to be editable.
• Most-used plugins do everything from protecting blog comments from spam, to Search Engine Optimization, to integrating your Constant Contact and Google Analytics accounts with your website.

Flutter – Flutter is a new and very promising plugin for Wordpress that extends the ‘pages’ and ‘posts’ functionality of wordpress to provide some powerful and more importantly, easy-to-use and easy-to-update database functionality. What does that mean for you? Well, in the case of BackStage, we’ve added two sections to the wordpress sidebar here that are for “Shows” and “Company”. Each one leads to a standardized form that contains all the little bits of knowledge – the schema – that a company needs to decide and collect for each production along its life cycle. Because the form is powered by wordpress, adding a show to the site is just like filling out a blog post. Because the form is more complex than a blog post, with more fields, the show data can be calculated and presented in a unified way over the long term – and even allow you to change the way the data is presented later without re-editing 75,000 blog posts. Flutter also comes bundled with some awesome features.

• Powerful image management, including automatic thumbnail generation, caching and cropping
• Edit in place functionality (this has got to be my favorite – don’t have a ton of time but noticed a copy error? if you’re logged in, just click on the text – on the site – edit, and hit save.

TheaterCalculus™ – Yup. This is the part I’ve cooked up – a Wordpress theme mix-in that does a lot of the repetitive tasks of maintaining a theater website. Based on the Chicago Theatre Database’s flexible and comprehensive database schema – which we derived from production data from over 1,000 shows and 300 companies – I created a series of à la carte Flutter forms and adapted the logic from several theater company websites that can be adapted to fit a large number of applications. Basically, this is the brain that helps the website follow along with how theaters work and helps automate some of the more repetitive website-updates.

• Enter three critical dates into the show form – Opening Night, Closing Night, and Extension Closing – and the website will calculate clear and helpful language based on the current date – “Opening in November!”, “Now Open!”, “Closing Soon,” and “Extended through March 29!”. Better yet, shows that close can move themselves over to the past productions page and off the home page
• Review / pullquote, photo, video, and cast & crew bio forms helps keep production assets organized and connected to their sources. As marketing strategies tend towards cross-promotion, having a form that reminds you to enter your cast’s portfolio websites – and everything else you need to capture to promote your work – is a nice tool to have in the kit.
• Like any database-driven site, there’s an advantage in being able to display the same information in multiple contexts throughout the site – say, a tagline of a show. If there’s an error in the tagline, static sites required you to update four or five pages, which caused even more errors. By having all show info in one place, the site does the work of distributing it according to your marketing and web usability strategy.

There’s too much detail to go into in a single post – this has been a system I’ve been working on for over six months or three years, depending on how you measure the amount of time I’ve been thinking about the perfect CMS for theater. So I’ll be coming back to TheaterCalculus as things develop. I’ll be launching a few other theater websites (companies and individual portfolios) in the coming weeks using it as the underlying architecture, and so hopefully we’ll all be able to see just how flexible it can be.

This post provided to you by BackStage Theatre Company, naturally, and also sound designer John Leonard, who was nice enough to buy me a coffee even after I stole his idea from a wiki and wrote about it. If it’s the discovery I think it is, I’m going to need to buy him many, many, many, many coffees laced with some nice single malt.

Buy Me a Coffee?

Very happy news came in a couple days ago from @mltachco: The New York Innovative Theatre Awards (they that evaluate the off- off- broadway scene) is trying out an Outstanding Stage Management award this coming season.

Nice job, off- off-ers. Hey Chicago, can we make this happen already?

From their press release:

Since the very inception of the IT Awards, we have wanted to develop a means of recognizing the unique, necessary and often overlooked role of the Stage Manager. As a part of the celebration for our 5th year, we are excited to be able to present the inaugural Outstanding Stage Manager Award.

The IT Awards will be the premiere ceremony to showcase the people who are the “glue that holds the whole show together from before first rehearsal until after strike. Our work as designers, performers, and directors is NOTHING without stage managers to understand, interpret, support and execute it in a real-world context.” — In Defense of Stage Managers blog

(that’s me. hee hee!)

After years of research and consulting hundreds of theatre practitioners and especially Stage Managers, we have developed a process similar to our honorary awards, but one as unique as the award itself. The two-part process includes both judge’s scores and an application that will be reviewed by a committee.

Beginning in January of 2009, as a part of their assignments IT Award judges were asked to evaluate how the technical elements of the production flowed together. Those scores will help inform the committee who will review applications and make the final decision. The application asks for examples of the Stage Manager’s organization and leadership. Two letters of recommendation are also required from people who worked with the Stage Manager on the production.

The OSM (Outstanding Stage Manager) Committee is made of eight individuals that include stage managers as well as directors, actors, press, producers and crew. OSM Committe Chair, Stephanie Cox-Williams said “There are awards for directors, lighting designers, sound designers, set designers, actors, etc., but without a Stage Manager to put all of the pieces in motion, correctly and on time, those elements would not make a cohesive production. The IT Awards, is taking a big step forward by recognizing the unsung heroes of the stage.”

All productions registered with the IT Awards for the 2009 season and that had opening dates after 1/1/09 are eligible to submit an application.

We believe that we are the first awards organization to recognize Stage Managers along with all of the other production elements. It is an exciting step, but an unprecedented one so feedback from the applicants, the OSM Committee and the OOB Community at-large will be an important part of this process going forward.

So this was on my desk two days ago. An inbox of low-priority filing that went back to October 2007. Yikes.

I realized, as this particularly busy season draws to a close (at the Goodman Owen stage alone our season included the premiere of Million Dollar Quartet, Ruined, the O’Neill Festival, Ghostwritten, most of which were tech-heavy monoliths), that it has been over two years I’ve done a real spring cleaning. It’s really only in June or August when we find an appropriate moment to do this kind of invasive cleaning and reorganization – where you open everything in your house up, one piece at a time, blow out the dust, and ask yourself the question: do I need this anymore? If I had this object or system around to solve a problem, does the problem even exist anymore?

July and most of June’s always devoted to the 24-7-30 Cherub program, last year’s cleaning was postponed by the immediacy of three large Goodman projects – Gas for Less, Turn of the Century, and the Latino Fest, and the year before that was devoted to planning, traveling, and getting our family to our wedding in Nova Scotia.

This year, I have cause to clean. (ha ha to KF). My wife just turned in her notice at her day job, a day job that has both paid the bills and caused immeasurable stress and disappointment in her life over the past two years. Instead, Marni has trained herself in a wide variety of graphic design and skills along with a group of like-minded creative types, and begins freelance design and project management work for a number of clients, including this design firm, doing work that challenges and empowers her. The choice to leave traditional, corporate employment at a time like this is not an easy one – we’ve needed to scramble to find health care, for instance, which by itself could cause someone to turn back. But the known benefits and promises of opportunity are many: flexibility in hours means our schedules will no longer be opposite, and we’ll actually get to see each other awake from time to time, and it’s amazing how much more energy and happiness you can have in your life when you do something you actually find enjoyment and value in.

Leaving the day job means that Marni’s coming back as a teacher at Cherubs this summer, and will be leading the fundamentals of design class. This is an amazing job – basically teaching 10 high school students who already love theater the language and tools of design.

So I’ve been devoting a lot of time to maintenance lately: cleaning the house, sorting through hardware, fixing the internet, archiving scripts and old work projects, repairing and upgrading equipment, getting rid of the stuff we don’t need anymore…

Bit by bit.

Getting our house ready for a new life.

When we first got the proposed design for the Newleaftheatre.org site in 2004, the marketing team of the era was in absolute awe. We were sitting in the spacious, well-lit trendy “living room” of one of our company members’ friends design firm (won’t tell you which one – we’ve been lucky enough to have three such relationships in our eight-year history) and we were each handed this shiny binder with images of orange bevels, warm handwritten text, and black-and-white stills from our current production. It was SNAZZY. For a company that was tiny and had no money, this pro-bono design was the get of a lifetime. We still get comments, in a market five years older, about how great our site looks. That site has caught the attention of artists just landing in Chicago, and we get the privelage of working with them first… because we had a web presence that was simple and sleek and showed us off.

Cut back to 2004. I’m sitting there, trying to figure out the world of marketing as an artist, and I came to that meeting with a question. I was to be the webmaster once the site was rolling, and I wanted to be ready. I had been learning this neat new (to me) programming language called CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets.. The possibilities of CSS seemed to fit right in with such a sleek design – easy to read code meant that the site would be simple to update under many unforseen circumstances. For example, a vertical production photo instead of a horizontal one. I asked the question: “Would this site be coded in CSS?”

Sure, it may have been a rude and rube-ish question to ask a hot shot designer who just handed us the keys to a beautiful pro-bono design. And I felt that rush of guilt immediately, and I backed down.

And you know what? I’m STILL cleaning up and working around and limboing under that jerk’s code five years later. Look at it! Go to Newleaftheatre.org, click on “view source” and look at it! It’s a freaking mess! Table code every which way, embedded font tags that make the simplest updates cumbersome and confusing… The very definition of an unextensible site. Over the years – as I’ve learned more – I’ve slowly updated under-the-hood in little half-day bursts to allow for a database-driven site (which in turn compresses a half-day of updating the site everytime we put on a new show to about half an hour), and fancy things like photo montages, twitter integration. But the thing that prevents all these things from really gelling? Not enough time to massage and fix the shoddy programming that underpinned a beautiful site.

So, you know I love you. I don’t want you or your theater to have this fate. So here’s some tips and ‘gotchas’ to look for when your board and marketing department get a crackin’ for a new website.

1) Be very careful with conflating the identity of a graphic designer and a programmer / web developer. It is actually rare to get both in the same person, and boards tend to like designers but forget the programmer. (though now that’s starting to shift: Social media means there’s now a primary focus on web developers — but everyone still assumes that they also design, which many of them don’t) To really confuse the issue, designers also often think they can program (you know I love you guys), and programmers often think they can design (you’re my peeps). If someone says they are both, look at both sides of their portfolio. You need BOTH when you’re creating an online identity, but given the realities of long-term theater budgets, I’d argue you MUST have a good programmer or you will be fighting bad programming decisions for the life of the site, and that will cost you in time and missed opportunities. You also want to make sure that in addition to submitting a nice proposal (ooh! It’s velo-bound!) and coming in under budget and on time, your designer and programmer are hearing you and thinking creatively about how to translate the identity of your company into both a functionality (programming) and a look (design). It’s the same thing as theater, and board-types from the corporate world forget that when they put on arts marketing hats. (Don’t get me started with the corporate world and web presences – they know they need one and that theaters are bad at creating them but 90% of them don’t know how to achieve that on a granular level.) You know what designer/director trust feels like in your company, and you know what a designer who can’t execute their ideas looks like. And what do you do when they design beautifully but can’t execute? You hire them a technician – an ME, a sound engineer, a Technical Director. Same theory applies here.

2) The Good-Fast-Cheap-(Pick 2)” rule applies. As much as I just bitched the dude out, I do think that getting an experienced designer on a pro-bono basis absolutely pays dividends over the long term. Pro-bono means that the designer – for once in their career working for the man – is allowed to play and push their own creative limits, so you can really end up with staggering work if you cultivate the right relationship. To that end – If you’re getting Good and Cheap (gotta have cheap, right?) DO NOT THINK THAT YOU CAN PUSH FOR FAST. Budget plenty of time to get the results you want with little investment. The designer has to take you and your deadlines seriously, but for instance – don’t fall into the trap of the ‘partial launch so that we can hit this deadline.’ This is just asking for trouble, because your developer will usually need to develop two working sites within the time frame that they would normally be building one. Two mediocre sites do not equal one good one. When you sacrifice good, you will burn them out, and then they will drop you like a hot tamale. Check in with them. Find out what makes them excited. Continue to engage their interests, and they’ll keep working with you – just like any collaborative artist.

3) I swear to god, no one does this, but it’s so much more important than getting the right the visual look of a site. When a process neglects Content Management training, designers tend to push their Content-Management-of-choice on you, the client. This allows them to fake you out a bit and get you off their back – when they’re on home turf most designers have great agility and can *appear* to provide all three pieces of the magic triangle: Good, Fast & Cheap! You Win!

Not so fast, Sonic the Hedgehog. Allow enough time in your timeline to make sure that you understand under-the-hood programming choices. You should budget time to have a rep from your company research & discuss the relative merits of each Content Management System (CMS) with the preference but without the bias of the designer/programmer. Some CMS’s that might be proposed:

- Dreamweaver / Text editing. Run away, already. Dreamweaver is an HTML tool, not a CMS, and updating the page will require HTML skill. That means crazy maintenance time and/or costs and a greater likelihood that your updates will break the page.

- Designer maintenance. Not a viable option for the theaters these days, and if you went pro-bono, it’s a laughable thought. The goal here is that the CMS should be easy enough to use that any company member can update the site – because at some point, marketing will be a burden.

- XML or database-driven site interpreted by PHP / Ruby / Javascript. Now we’re talking. Requires some very basic coding knowledge in some cases, but data is separated from design so your updates will not mistakenly break the site. In this case, what goes into the database (the “schema’) and what gets hardcoded into the site should be a subject of some scrutiny, since your programmer will probably not get it right on the first guess. Extending your site later will require another visit from the programmer in most cases – and increasingly, as new technologies like Twitter pop up every long weekend, that could turn into a sustainability problem. Unless you REJECT change.

- Joomla or Drupal. Perfectly servicable CMSs with built-in databases, though it can be confusing to some – including me, and I know five web languages. Try it out first. Tony will recommend Joomla every time. Tony, you’re a crazy person for this reason.

- Wordpress, again with a built-in database. My flavor of choice because of its ease, ubiquity, and extensibility, but it needs some tweaking to wipe away the wordpress “look” and would also need considerable modifications to power say, ongoing box office functionality. I’m biased, too, remember. Again, try before you buy. We did quite a bit of this sort of tweaking with Dan Granata’s new net-home, Theatre That Works.

This post was (once again!) sponsored by Elizabeth Spreen at Ghost Light, who bought me a nice late-night mug of Genmai-cha. The toasted rice tea reminds me of Iwate, Japan. Sigh. Thanks (oh so belatedly), Elizabeth!

If your income stream is anything like mine, you kind of feel a one-two punch at the end of the tax year for simply being an artist in America (though clearly Canadians also have issues). Most theaters don’t employ artists on a full-time basis, nor do they pay a lot. Assembling an artistic income means 1099 / Independent Contractor income and that means no matter how little money you make and how close to the real, scary poverty line you are: you’re in business for yourself now. You get to file a schedule C and pay self-employment tax. The punch that you feel is the realization: I already GAVE my financial stability to theater… now I have to give again because it actually paid me less money than it took for me to survive?

Ah, doesn’t whining make you feel better? I recommend a good whining / coffee / bite your pillow break every half hour or so while doing your taxes.

Before I get started: This is not meant as a catch-all tax guide, nor should you use it as one. I am not a CPA. I am also writing this in 2009, and the tax law changes every year, sometimes drastically. Think of this as a catalyst for your own personal investigation and deeper understanding of how the tax code applies to freelancing artists. If you’re looking for an artist-friendly CPA, I highly recommend getting one locally via word of mouth. I’m also a little “too little too late” for this year, so hopefully this will help serve as a guide to help you capture the information you’ll need for next year. Those of you in the Chicago still in need of help area could also file an extension ASAP (most CPAs are only taking extension clients right now) and look to @rockstarcpa, aka Martin Kamenski of Collaboraction Theatre.

So the trick to Schedule C is the claiming of deductions – expenses – that legitimately offset your as-yet untaxed income and prove to the IRS (in terms it understands) that no, I’m eating Top Ramen for crying out loud, I didn’t turn a $14k profit this year that you now need to tax me for. You’ve accrued more expenses than you may think in the pursuit of your artistic work, which is why it may feel so ridiculous that you’re being taxed on this income. After all, the money is gone now, right?

Hopefully not, actually. In preparation for your next year, make sure you find some way of imposing a rule on yourself that you squirrel away a certain amount of each check into savings over the course of the year or pay estimated taxes at the end of each quarter. The first way, you keep the interest, the second way, the government does. Either way, you’re talking about a couple packets of Starbucks VIA, so do what makes you happy. It makes the tax crunch a lot less stressful to deal with when you’re only worried about filing paperwork rather than hustling for scratch to pay the tax man.

So about those deductions. I use my debit card almost all year long rather than cash. It’s really annoying for splitting the bill, but I find that getting a receipt for everything is both a good budget reminder and takes care of my paperwork for me. I sort and file these receipts all year long into deductible and non-deductible expenses in a little coupon file like this one, one for each year. Best part about the folder? It’s a deductible office expense. I also keep track of my budgets, expenses, and anticipated freelancing income using the cheap and pretty useful online software Buxfer. It’s easy to tag transactions into pre-sorted deduction categories, and balance my checkbook from my iPhone. The upshot of all of this: You’re going for a stress-free tax season. That’s much easier to achieve when you do all the sorting and filing work in little easy chunks all year long rather than in one chaotic panicked mess on April 14th.

These are the deductions I track:

Business Meals. Not every meal, but every meal that I took because I was discussing work related to my 1099 income: Production meetings, design meetings, interviews, planning sessions, all that jazz. It always ends up being a bigger percentage of my meals than I expect. You only get to deduct 50% of these expenses, but the collaborative art of theater often makes us go out together to chat when we could be bringing a sandwich from home, so it’s a cost of doing business. I always write who I was meeting with and what we discussed on the receipt or in a Buxfer note, because you can be sure I won’t remember later.

Office Supplies
For a designer, this can be a pretty big expense. For me, it’s CD-Rs and play binders, for some it’s model building or drafting supplies. In the paperless age, however, it’s nothing compared to the allure of…

Resume and Job-seeking expenses
Oh yeah. Headshots. Portfolio expenses. Kinkos. Anything you spent looking for work, and especially for you performers, that’s a lot a lot a lot of potential deductions.

Section 179 Depreciation
This one is cleverly titled to be as confusing as possible, but it roughly translates as a deduction for the full cost of medium-term assets (Computers, hard drives, PDAs, Software) that you bought this year. Since these assets often die after 3-5 years, Section 179 allows you to depreciate and thereby deduct the entire portion of these assets that you use for business in a single year. Needless to say, if you own a computer or hard drive or seven that you use exclusively for business, as I do, this is the golden child of deductions.

Business Travel
If you’re lucky enough to get regional or even national work, you probably don’t need my advice. However, this can be a useful deduction. Taxis, Hotels, Travel Meals, Parking Fees and Plane Fare are all deductible in the pursuit of the almighty dollar. Track ‘em.

Business Mileage & Use of a Personal Car
No, you can’t deduct your regular commute, so get that out of your head. But if you’re freelancing and go to a different location to work, that is deductible, as are Taxi fares and Parking costs that you incur for freelance business purposes. (For instance, my “day job” source of W-2 income is downtown, so when I park there as part of my regular commute, I do NOT get to deduct those expenses, but if I travel to Wisconsin to design a show, I DO.) What the IRS would like here in your records is odometer readings all year long, which I find to be an unsustainable practice when you use your car for both personal and business use. The key here is specific written records. I find myself keeping a really good calendar record of everywhere I go day-to-day, so I cross reference round-trip mileages for a number of theaters in the suburbs where I work with my calendar. A simple spreadsheet later, I have a table of about a dozen places I drove for business over the year and the number of times I drove there, and voila: a pretty close estimate of my business mileage. Also, if you really want to make the IRS happy, make writing your odometer reading into a dashboard notebook an annual New Years tradition. How they want you to do this and while also not drinking and driving is something they leave up to you.

Professional Research & Subscriptions – This is something you should definitely talk over with a professional, but I encourage you to track your expenses here, whether or not you can deduct them. Artists spend a lot on research in the course of the year. We see other shows and buy tickets, we go to awards ceremonies and trade shows because we it’s good for our career. We rent movies and purchase books and music and all kinds of art to investigate dramaturgical history or artistic technique. Actors and dancers need to maintain themselves physically, so a gym membership is a reasonable business expense. If you spend money on it because you’re using it as research or material for your work, it is deductible. Be reasonable now. Your Nintendo Wii is probably not helping you with your flexibility all that much.

IRA Contributions – Why pay taxes when you can be saving for poverty-in-retirement? You ain’t gonna be a ballerina forever. Another benefit I’ve found about squirreling away some of my 1099 income is that it means I have a glut of savings that I can throw into a traditional IRA at the end of the year… some of which will actually increase my refund at the end of the year. Stocks are also in the toilet this year, which means that unless the economy really falls off a cliff your donations will go farther when the economy rebounds. Check with an accountant about the pros and cons of traditional vs. Roth IRAs… They are DIRT simple to set up online. I was surprised.

Other deductions you should track closely:

Tax Filing Expenses including software, filing costs, and CPA professional fees. I guess this is how the government absolves themselves of the guilt of making the tax code so complex that you need a professional to file if you have a non-traditional relationship with your employer.

Credit Card Interest on Business Expenses ONLY - sometimes.

Cellphone Usage for business purposes – as with all personal / private usage, deduct business usage only.

Professional Dues & Fees – I got my IATSE Union Card this year. It was espensive, but it’s quite the deduction.

Charitable expenses – Track all your donations of materials to 501(c)(3) organizations, and make sure you get a donation letter for the agreed-upon value of your donated goods. Update: thanks to @rockstarcpafor this catch: You cannot take a tempting, tempting deduction for donated time to an organization. Donated goods and materials only. Also, do not deduct political contributions or anything that you received a benefit in kind for, like that CD I got with my NPR donation this year.

State, Local Taxes and Registration Fees – Different states allow you to deduct different taxes, so this is definitely one you’ll want to investigate more. For instance, Illinois does NOT allow you to deduct annual car registration fees, other states do.

Home Office
This is one that every CPA and tax software warns you that it’s like playing with Audit fire, and I tend to agree with them. However, it’s a huge potential deduction IF you have a dedicated space of your home that you use exclusively for business. The concept here is: figure out the percentage of square footage in your home that you use for your home office, and then deduct that percentage of your home expenses: Rent, Utilities, Mortgage Interest, Association Fees. This is an oft-abused deduction, so handle with care and seek specific advice to your situation. Remember too that you can deduct 100% of any office-related expenses like furniture that you use entirely for business purposes. Getting the trend here? Do not deduct your personal stuff, DO deduct your business stuff, the rest is just capturing and estimating the relative value of each. If you own your home, there are also some long-term ramifications to using the home office deduction.

One thing that’s really important than can be confusing when using tax software like TaxCut or TurboTax: Most business deductions can EITHER be deducted on schedule C as business deductions OR you can deduct them as part of your itemized deductions offsetting your W-2 tax-withheld income. Obviously the advantage is to apply deductions as much as is appropriate off your Schedule C income, since the standard income deduction is pretty healthy on your W-2 “day job” income. And be careful when moving column A to column B that you don’t accidentally deduct expenses in both places, because that of course is a no-no.

See? This is SIMPLE. Taxes are EASY for EVERYONE to do, especially artists whose livelihoods neatly fit into predescribed non-corporate deductible behavior like BOTTLED WATER DELIVERY. I am being SARCASTIC.

I’m gonna wrap up with a little bit of social commentary about an often-overlooked, but significant deduction that I think artists would be more vocal about if they had ever heard of it. It’s called the “Qualified Performing Artist Deduction” and it’s a doozy. It’s so obscure and mostly useless that most CPAs I consulted in my early theater years had never heard about it. If you are “Qualified” for the deduction, you are allowed to deduct all your job-related expenses IN ADDITION to the standard deduction, even on your non-schedule-C income. However, to qualify you need to jump through some gut-wrenching hoops that I wouldn’t wish on anyone:

- You need to have made a minimum of 2 $200+ performer-related W-2s during the year
- Your performing-related deductions must have been 10% or more of your income
– Your adjusted GROSS total income cannot be more than $16,000 for the year – and married couples taking the deduction must not have a COMBINED income of $16k in a year.

Here’s where I get incensed… that $16,000 limit is awfully close to the poverty line, and don’t get me started about not doubling the limit for married couples. I’m glad truly starving artists can actually take this deduction, the problem is all those folks who are still starving and make more than $16k in a year. The limit on this deduction – as far as I can gather – has not been amended to adjust for inflation since the Tax Code was overhauled in 1986, as similar deductions are on a regular basis, although Sens. Schumer and Feinstein attempted to in 2006. So bully to them. It’s such a weird tax code exception – an exception literally made for only one kind of worder – and so on the one hand it’s one of the only tangible examples I can think of where the government has actually tried to treat performing artists differently and give them a leg up. On the other hand that assistance is so half-hearted and I’m sure politically unstable that a prerequisite for that leg up is that you chop the leg off first.

This article was sponsored by @marebiddle, who not only bought me a cup of home-made Kona coffee that fed the adrenaline drive required to write a post on tax code, but also specifically requested that I follow through on it with a simple “Please…”. Thanks, Mare, and good luck!