Research is just Curiosity with Purpose

EQUUS PROJECTS - Economic Revitalization update!

Hub Sites

These statements describe what we are experiencing as we develop four hub sites for our work. One in Texas; one in Florida; one in Montana and one in Seattle.

It is just simplest to describe each in terms of the specific hub site anecdote.

TAKING WHAT COMES YOUR WAY

Last August we created a large performance project on Vashon Island, a small commuter island off the coast of Seattle. Both performances were sold to capacity. The project created quite a buzz on the island. All good, since Seattle was to be one of our designated hub sites !

In September we were invited to return. I had hoped to do a remake of the work we created last August, but do it better. Better horsemanship. Better development of choreographic through line. However our producer felt it would be wiser to produce a new work: new music, new costumes, new choreography. So much for deeper investigation, but as it turns out there is Seattle based funding for new music commissions and our composer is well known in the Pacific NW.

I am planning a trip to Seattle in March to plan the project, seek out potential patrons, create a buzz about the new project. And visit good friends. One of those friends produces periodic soiree featuring a guest speaker. Voila! a chance to entice a group of potential patrons who all are already interested in hearing about The Equus Projects.

We are planning our catered dinners again at our friends Sandi and Joe’s. Instead of restaurant5 eating we buy the food and pay a small catering fee for nightly dinners. And provide a chance for us to share down time, wine and good food with our hub site friends and collaborators.

MAKING THINGS HAPPEN

Seattle is unfolding with happy surprises this year because we madethings happen last year. Hours of conference calls and planning went into a cultivation event in June and many layers of planning for meals and housing for our ten days on Vashon last August.

We are taking the same approach in Aubrey, Texas. In February I will spend four days with our co-presenter Jeanette Wright. She is a masterful organizer. It was her idea to produced a performance event in Aubrey, Texas – home to many ranchers, and a wonderful population of retired Hollywood actors!! One of those actors is married to Jeanette’s dressage teacher. Valentines Day Jeanette and I will host a brunch and demo in her barn, with her horses.

What is exciting about Texas is that Aubrey is 15 minutes from Denton and Denton is the home of Texas Women's University and University of North Texas and close to Texas Christian University – all universities with terrific dance departments. Four emails later I have been able to contact faculty at each university. I will teach a master class at TWU while I am down there. And my dance colleagues are ALL planning to attend our Valentines Day party and demo.

PLANNING IT FOR THEM

It is not always this easy. Gainesville and Ocala are only 40 miles apart but it has been a gentle uphill climb to create bridges between our horse world and dance world in Florida.

We are making progress.

Last July we had a 10-day residency at White Oak Plantation in Yulee Florida. At White Oak dancers are treated like kings and it was our pleasure to invite Joan Frosch - former dance chair and now co-Director of the Center for World Arts the U of F/ Gainesville - to be our guest for several days. At White Oak we were able to spend time with Joan talking about our work, planning and processing.

She also enjoyed a Hawaiian luau with us and got to watch our creative process and a premiere performance of Un/Stable.

Joan gets our work on many levels – the dancing, the training, the physical listening and the intellectual dialogue that surrounds the integrating of sensing and knowing that is a crucial part of how we as dancers must work with horses if we honestly wish to create work that is both beautiful and profound but also safe!!

We want to produce one of our Creative Collisions think tanks in at the U of F. in Gainesville. Joan will be an invaluable help. But the U of F dance department is huge. There are many agendas and ours will not be a first priority. So intermediate steps are required. This March I will be a guest artist at the U of F for a week. I plan to teach an intensive course on site specific choreography. I believe one must be deeply accountable to one’s choreographic site. We will begin with horses as our site. That is real accountability. And then move on to lawns and stairways!!

Florida is also where we spend as many as five weeks a year in training with expert horsemanship trainers and fabulous horses. When it is 34 degrees and the ground is frozen here in NY, we can spend 7 hours a day on Ocala training with horses in the dead of January. This January we will spend five days training and choreographing. We like to invite lots of our equestrian friends to watch, give feedback and coach us. They love the creativity and admire our ability to move and make split second decisions inside a piece of choreography with equine partners. Last January we did an open rehearsal/ demo and invited a few friends. Sixty people showed up! We might just do another one of those “small” gatherings again this January!

JUST SUGGESTING

Helena, Montana is a new site of The Equus Projects. In October we created a large performance piece with 16 riders and 20 horses. Lots of people saw us. Our creative time was far too short and we would like to return to show that we can make a different kind of work.

In Helena we have some unusual and very strategic supporters. Anne Perkins is the founder and chair of the Human-Animal Bonding Program at Carroll College. She is a PhD in Psychology. She invited me to give several lectures to her class while we were on site creating in Helena. She is interested in how we communicate with horses and brings to our work the mind of a scientist. Perfect of Creative Collisions!

When we left Helena in October I was wondering how/ what we could do in partnership with Anne Perkins. A week later one of our equestrians wrote to invite us to come and teach in Bozeman. I immediately emailed Anne suggesting we piggyback a Bozeman visit with a 3-day brainstorming in Helena. Better yet, let’s do a demo of our work with horses – small, informal, narrated – in Helena. Invite potential patrons. Create a plan for residency focusing on movement and the human and equine connection. Maybe a possible series of lectures for next fall. Set the foundations for a large performance project in 2011. But connect it to a research project with Carroll College. Just suggestions.

Research is just curiosity with a purpose. I think much oif what we are doing is following our curiosity. And doing research. Now that ought to be fundable!

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For more on multi-localism visit www.DanceLocally.com.

Learn more about The Equus Projects at www.dancingwithhorses.org

The Equus Projects is a recipient of The Field’s Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists (ERPA) Phase 3 Implementation award. The Field’s ERPAprogram receives funding from The Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Fund. For more information, please visitwww.thefield.org or www.economicrevitalization.blogspot.com.

Helena, MT: a case study of beginning a multi-localism hubsite

The Equus Projects has a unique way of touring.

We do not own our own horses.

For each project we use horses owned by equestrians in the community.

This makes for a very deep engagement with the local community.

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Below is an over view of a recent tour in Helena, Montana where we used 20 local horses:

In early October The Equus Projects spent a week in Helena creating an hour-long performance piece for dancers and horses that mobilized a cast of 16 local riders and 20 horses.

Our on-site creation time for Join Up! was only 7 seven days. That seven-day creation marathon was the culmination of six months of preparation. It was that preparation that best exemplifies how The Equus Projects engages the community and how that engagement results in some unusual and innovative solutions to touring challenges.


Finding Horses and Riders

Unlike many of our past projects, we had no existing network of riders and horses in Montana.

March – May: We send out emails to Helena area equestrians asking for participants. We make use of a fairly extensive on-line network of riders who all train in natural horsemanship and heard back from over 30 riders expressing their interest in being a part of the project. Riders post videos of their horses and their riding on Youtube. Eventually our list narrows down to a group of creative-minded, athletic riders who were available for a solid week of rehearsal in Helena.


A Fabulous Local Liaison

July: Helena equestrian Amy Palmer trailers her horse 12 hours over the mountains from Helena to Snohomish, WA to take an equestrian clinic with us! Amy offers to be our liaison with the performance site and arrange for the Tri-Arabian Club, a group of riders who have Arabian horses – to audition for us. We send ahead riding patterns. They rehearse, film and post on Youtube.

August-September: Amy Palmer sends photos of the performance site - cavernous metal building on the grounds of the Lewis and Clark Fairgrounds: Metal walls and packed dirt floor, the space is used for rodeos and bull running.


Performance Venue

Clearly we need to arrange for some theatrical lighting!! The Myrna Loy has its lighting instruments being used for an in-house show. We find the fabulous Marty Severson, lighting designer/ soundman from Great Falls, MT who has worked with everyone from the Obama campaign to the Rolling Stones!!


Creation

Join Up! was constructed in ten sections: an opening for 10 liberty horses (horses without riders) and 4 dancers; several small sections for dancer, horse and rider; and five large group rides with dancers woven into the intricate riding patterns. The equestrians ranged from reining cowboy to dressage rider.

We organized our days into rehearsal modules: Dancer warm-up 8:30am; Equine warm-up into work ona group ride until noon; small sections during midday; Lat afternoon logistics meeting; 5:30 dinner followed by the Tri-Arabians 6:00 - 8:00 pm.


Horsemanship Training & Equine Expertise

Given the number of horses and riders we were working with, we knew we would need an equine director and advisor. So we invited our long-time equestrian mentor, David Lichman, to join us for the week.

David helped with the equine choreography, offered horsemanship advice to every member of the cast, made sure the dirt footing was dragged, had the metal fencing moved to achieve better sightlines and rewired the sound system.

For us, David's horsemanship served as a binding attachment to the horse community. David's respect and enthusiasm for our work was apparent. His superb horsemanship set the bar for the performers.

Work Schedule andMeals

With a rehearsal schedule that had us working from 8am til 8pm, realistically there was no time for leisurely restaurant meals.

Solution: Amy Palmer arranges for a small clubhouse on the fairgrounds to be our home base and orchestrates a full service soup kitchen!Amy's Kitchen fed hungry equestrians and dancers breakfast, lunch and dinner for six days. Throughout, Amy was assisted in planning and cooking by Equus Projects Site Coordinator Kristen Schifferdecker.

Meals on site made it possible for us to spend mealtime and snack breaks with our cast. Offering them meals was a small thank you for all the time they gave to the project.


Community Engagement

Our work does draw passionate community engagement. It is not so much what we do but how we go about doing it that makes for this depth of community engagement.

Here are some guidelines that might make be useful points of inspiration, suggest possibilities and translate into practices you could use for your own practice.

Over 1500 people saw our work in 7 days!!

Each day busloads of 5-6th graders, seniors and community people arrived at 1:00 to witness an Open Rehearsal. Our Open rehearsals morphed into narrated demos offering excerpts from the various pieces we were creating and insights into the choreographic challenges our work presents. The demos were like mini reality shows in which we shared with our audiences not only the creative process but also the backstage dramas that go into creating a performance with dancers and horses !!

The day of our opening, the newspaper had advertised a free performance and 450 people showed up for our 1:00 Open Rehearsal !! That night Join Up! Played to a sold out crowd of over 600.


Community Engagement

Our work does brings about a depth of community engagement.

Here are some touring guidelines that might translate into useful practices for your own touring.

1) LOTS of advanced planning:

Months and months of advanced planning is actually a form of PR announcing that you are coming to town! It creates word of mouth about the work and gets people excited about the project.

Our advanced horse planning happens much before the presenter's outreach into the community and months before the official; PR for the project is announced.


2) Finding local networks to work with:

Use locals as advisors, helpers and liaisons. We have found that locals can be great ambassadors for our work and serve as very effective liaisons to our presenter.


3) Find creative solutions for touring necessities such as meals:

We rarely go out for meals. For most projects we find a local who is interested in catering, we buy the food and sometimes provide muscle power to prep meals. Meals are an excellent time for artists and locals to visit.


4) Spend time with local community OUTSIDE of the work

We spent lots of time hanging out with our equestrians before rehearsals, after rehearsals, during equine training session in which they become our mentors. They offer us advice as to how best use their horses.

In Helena several key individuals became very involved in the creative process and offered numerous fabulous suggestions.

Discover ways that the community can be your teachers.


5) Plan to return

Wherever we tour, we come with the attitude that we would love to return.

Coming into a community with the desire to come back and do more, creates the sense that we value what the community offers us.

Sharing with locals the intention to return creates an opportunity for locals to brainstorm about future performance and teaching opportunities. It gives the community a sense of ownership in the work. It often brings us into contact with potential patrons.

In Helena the plan to return had a very specific goal: We made it known that we were building "hub-sites" outside of our base in New York. The Helena horse community has already begun brainstorming projects for us and invited us to return in July to teach a clinic in Bozeman, MT.

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For more on multi-localism visit www.DanceLocally.com.

Learn more about The Equus Projects at www.dancingwithhorses.org

The Equus Projects is a recipient of The Field’s Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists (ERPA) Phase 3 Implementation award. The Field’s ERPAprogram receives funding from The Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Fund. For more information, please visit www.thefield.org or www.economicrevitalization.blogspot.com.

What I Learned About Theater from Restaurant School

Hello economic revitalizers! Looks like I’ve mimicked Jon’s learn-and-tell format. This is Connie from Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant, an actor-run ensemble theater company. We create live episodic performances about a fictional ensemble theater company that runs a fictional restaurant. But, the food is real. The actors themselves make the meals from scratch, and we serve family-style to the audience seated at communal banquet tables. (Read about how we create our menus on The Jew and the Carrot.)

Last year, with concurrent project support from the ERPA program and a scholarship from Women Chefs and Restaurateurs I was able to attend the Culinary Management Program at the Institute of Culinary Education. I like to think of it as a form of extreme dramaturgy for my role in the show as restaurant manager. I went hoping to apply the for-profit business model of a restaurant to our artist-driven theater company. Sounds simple enough, right? With some time to reflect, here’s what I learned about theater from restaurant school:

Lesson #1: Our problems are not unique.

The class met three times a week. Two out of three classes were taught by Vin McCann, former VP of Boulder Creek Steakhouse Group and current owner/operator of the Wells House in the Adirondacks. Vin’s favorite thing to say was, “The restaurant business is a disease.” By this, he meant that it was a risky, labor-intensive, heavily-regulated, low-margin, business with a high burnout factor, and that the only reason to do it is if you just can’t help it. Sound familiar?

Like theaters, restaurants have limited seating and face the problem of limited distribution. Each restaurant has an optimum sales volume given the seating capacity and the service style of the house. This is the point when sales plateau because you cannot turn tables faster or raise prices further without losing customers. The only remaining course to increase profitability is to control food and labor costs. We were quizzed on this concept, with the bonus question “What is the optimal cost of labor percentage?” The answer was supposed to be as little as possible, but I wanted pay my ensemble members as much as possible. I answered the question wrong on purpose.

Because of this inherent limitation, restaurants have a lifecycle. It averages about seven years. After that, a new restaurant needs to open in order for the business to keep growing. Pause. I wanted to strengthen and give longevity to our existing group, not grow for the sake of growth.

Vin’s second favorite thing to say was “We are not artists.”

Lesson #2: We are not artists.

Our class represented the most diverse collection of oddballs (geographic, economic, cultural, education level, age, you name it) that you could possibly put in a room together. But we all wanted to open a restaurant. One classmate, a Bahamian former bar owner, wanted to provide for the public what her grandmother provided for her family. By piling the table high with good eats and offering a warm welcome, she could give people the feeling that they had enough. For the fabulous club kid from Vegas who was getting a restaurant for his 21st birthday present, it was the promise of a glitzy design all his own and the spectacle of tall food served by runway models. For the Korean who wanted to open a fried chicken shop, it was an essential philosophical response to life: Since the one thing human beings have to do in order to stay alive is eat, you should do that one thing well. Most of my classmates had a strong vision and felt personally compelled to do their work despite many practical incentives not to.

But we are not artists?

No, because we have to serve the diners (aka audience). It doesn’t matter if a genius chef knows that a certain combination will make a better dish if no one will eat it. It doesn’t matter if we like red when the customer wants white. Above all, we cannot fall in love with an idea. We have to be willing let it go, fast, and re-coup our losses if it just isn’t working. We are not creating something for our own self-expression.

I wondered if maybe artists couldn’t afford to be artists anymore either.

Lesson #3: The best restaurateurs are stage magicians.

The third class each week was taught by Steve Zagor, the director of the program and former manager of Shelly Fireman’s Trattoria dell’ Arte. He was a not-so-closeted theater geek, who liked to try out his different accents on the class and erupt into spontaneous role-play situations in which you were obliged to participate. Steve’s favorite thing to do was give examples of extreme hospitality, and to point out situations where, with no extra cost, you could impress your guests with how much you care that they have a great time.

Like theaters, restaurants provide a live, subjective, temporal, experience.

The best restaurateurs know that the product they are selling is theater and not food. Customers rarely complain about the food, and most often comment about the service. External marketing and advertising is most effective in bringing in initial business and first-time customers. After that, it is all about internal marketing intended to bring in repeat business. A great meal (aka play?) doesn’t always make a great story. Complainers are powerful, and customers remember and repeat the worst experiences because they make the best stories. But when the manager notices you don’t have an umbrella and goes out of his or her way to surprise you with a complimentary one, you will repeat that story. Personal attention also makes for good stories.

We had to write service scripts for what a customer should experience from the moment they made a reservation to the moment they walked out the door. Are there good signtlines? Is the chaos of back-of-house operations concealed from front-of-house? How does the menu (aka program) orient you to the experience? What does the place smell like? (There is a whole industry of manufacturing scents to impact consumer behavior: Ladies, this holiday season, watch out if you detect vanilla being pumped through the vents. It makes you buy more.) How is the table set? How is the server trained to reply when asked for extra lemon? Are the bathrooms clean? Does someone say goodbye? Do you send a thank-you-for-coming email?

All of this script-writing is called “four-walls marketing”. The term makes me as squirmy as “audience development” or “donor cultivation”, with its connotation that money is always an underlying ulterior motive for kindness or consideration.

Where is the sincerity in this? See Lesson #4.

Lesson #4: Compensation is not the most important key to retaining staff. Or, the reason to go into the restaurant business is to have fun.

The most important person to keep happy in a restaurant is the dishwasher. The seamless operation depends completely on him or her, and he or she is generally the lowest paid worker. Restaurant workers tend to be either unskilled low-wage workers or those with career aspirations in other industries. Many actors, not coincidentally, are waiters.

More than compensation, the statistics show that the most important factor in retaining staff is a positive work environment. People like to feel like they are a part of something that matters, like they are empowered to solve problems, like they are hosts rather than servants. Happy staff create a welcoming environment for the customer and are key to the longevity and success of the restaurant.

Lesson #5: People are willing to pay for theater!

No one knows the real price of a theater ticket in the not-for-profit sector. Tickets are so heavily subsidized by contributed income that audiences have no idea what it should actually cost. Restaurants have done a much better job of relaying this information. A word of advice from their industry to ours: Never offer discounts. It is a slippery slope that causes people to devalue the experience.

People pay for theater every time they go out to eat. Consider the theater of the New York City hamburger. A hamburger that costs the same amount to make ranges widely in price depending on the venue. I gladly pay twice as much for a hamburger on an interesting geometric plate with nice lighting accompanied by soft music than a hamburger in a dive bar. And I still think that’s what it costs.

In a restaurant that is doing great, food costs account for 25-35% of sales. The difference between the cost and the price is the margin. This margin is why I haven’t given up on this pricing experiment yet. Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant seeks to price our theater tickets at four times the food and beverage cost. The payment for the theater is in the margin, and it is more than we are used to getting from ticket sales. I strongly believe that we theater artists are uniquely qualified to create live experiences that are more memorable and transformative than any restaurant. We just haven’t taught people how to pay for it yet.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS!

Lesson #1: Should theaters have a lifecycle?

Lesson #2: Does a theater artist have a bigger responsibility to him/herself or to the community?

Lesson #3: Assignment: Write a script for what an audience member experiences at your theatrical event. Hint: It starts before and continues after they are seated for the play.

Lesson #4: How important is it to sustainability that actors in a production have a voice?

Lesson #5: What tangible thing besides food could you offer to audiences as a basis for ticket pricing?

www.avantgarderestaurant.com

What a year of market research didn't teach me

Jon from Stolen Chair here. We are just two short days away from launching the country's first Community Supported Theatre (CST). While we had initially intended to make the launch event the first members-only gathering, earlier this week, we decided to open it to the public (don't miss it!), just the latest refinement we've been encourage to make in our thinking since the CST opened for sign-ups Nov 1. Before that opening, we had spent 14 months preparing, conducting extensive market research, or at least the most extensive market research that a small non-profit theatre company can conduct. Nevertheless, in the three weeks since the website went live and the brochures got distributed, I can't imagine experiencing a steeper learning curve. Here are three things we learned, boiled down to some simple axioms:

• Teach: It takes most people a long time to understand what the CST actually is. Once people get it, we've had universally positive reactions, but it's not as simple as "You like chocolate and you like peanutbutter. How 'bout trying one of these here new-fangled Reeses Peanutbutter Cups?" We've had to learn to approach this introduction in much the same way a teacher plans a lesson, breaking down step by step goals for each successive impression so that the consumer gets the complete picture without being overwhelmed by details. This means, however, that, like any good teacher, we need to know our audience well enough to tailor our approach to each "learning style."
• Listen: Though the ERPA process gave us plenty of time and support to finalize the terms of membership in the CST, in the 3 weeks since sign-ups opened, our consumers have asked for 4 different ways to CST. Though we might never have thought to add these ourselves, interested consumers can now (1) join via an installment plan, for those who have difficulty paying the year's fee up front (2) purchase a membership as a unique, experiential gift for someone else (3) offer the CST as a perk for up to 10 employees and (4) access all of our online community building even if they live outside of the NYC metro area and cannot attend events.
• Talk: Though we're still waiting for that New York Times profile on the CST (come on NYT, where are you on this? You could write about the country's first Community Supported Theatre or trace the evolving facial hair habits of Billyburg Hipsters...which did you write about?!), we have received some great press for the launch and a whole lotta buzz on Twitter and the blogosphere. None of this came through traditional publicity channels (press releases, eblasts, etc), though. All of it emerged organically through conversations I had with artists and social innovators who were already talking about similar ideas. As we learn time and time again in the world of PR, pulling people into your orbit always works better than pushing your news.

Community Supported Theater goes BIG!!

It's allover twitter apparently and getting national press left and right. I love it.

Here's the nytheatre.com podcast that we taped last weekend with the incredibly supportive Martin and Rochelle Denton.

And a Chronicle of Philanthropy piece is coming out on Wednesday.

And one of my faves, Andrew Taylor, blogged it last week.

And finally? Watch Jon Stancato of Stolen Chair at The Field's WNYC Event on September 21st talking about the CST.

ERPA Clip 5 Jon Stancato/Stolen Chair Theatre Company from The Field on Vimeo.

They haven't even officially launched the CST yet but any second now!! Get on the goods and become a part of the first CST.

Who likes you?

There is so much to learn from the music business!!

NPR did a brilliant one hour On the Media on sampling, girl talk, making $, and fans. I love what Amanda Palmer of Dresden Dolls has to say about selling tshirts ($11,000 via Twitter in 2 hours when she was bored?). And this Band Metrics thing? delineates single-users, fans, and supporters? Helps us understand the full spectrum of who likes us and why.....(Band Metrics beta site is down it seems but stay tuned!)

And here's our own Nick Brooke, music sampler extraordinaire, at WNYC explaining how he is using music samples to raise some dough, build his fan base, and create his next show.

ERPA Clip 4 Nick Brooke from The Field on Vimeo.

The Field Awards $55,000 to Artists!!!

Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists (ERPA) asked, "How can artists make new money for their work?" ERPA challenged artists to propose inventive, replicable, and sustainable models to help revitalize the creative economy.

After more than a year of entrepreneurial investigations, seven ERPA projects were adjudicated by a panel of veteran arts and business leaders to receive up to $20,000 in funds from The Field. The results are in...

Implementation Awards provide grants of $10,000 to $20,000 to continue developing and implementing each project under the auspices of The Field. Awardees: Connie Hall/ Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant, JoAnna Mendl Shaw/ The Equus Projects, Jon Stancato/ Stolen Chair Theatre Company, Caroline Woolard/ Our Goods

Replicability Awards offer stipends of $1,500 with additional professional development support from The Field, intended to help document and communicate each project's findings to the greater artistic community. Awardees: Kahlil Almustafa, Nick Brooke, Rachel Chavkin/The TEAM

View the full Press Release!