Integrating space, programs, and people

The Pillsbury House Neighborhood Center is a three-story cinderblock building on the edge of the Central and Powderhorn neighborhoods in Minneapolis. The main lobby is big and open to the public outside through the two-story high wall of windows that faces the street—except for the fact that there are three foot wide concrete pillars in front of the windows. The whole thing gives the impression of a party hidden inside a Soviet post office.

When you enter, you can see into the Day Care on your right where we serve anywhere from 12-20 kids five days a week. Then, through the atrium, there’s a lobby with couches and tables and even trees, and a front desk at which people sign in. If you didn’t know, you probably wouldn’t guess that through the door to the left of receptionist is a wide, 96 seat theatre with ample (for a small theatre) backstage area and a dressing room. Now that I’m trying to describe it for you, I realize, that the entire building, like the programs inside it, are secrets inside secrets. Cool secrets, but unfortunately, still secrets.

Upstairs on the second floor is a wide open banquet-area, an industrial strength kitchen, two reading rooms and libraries, an art studio, a teen lounge and even—though few people know it—a pottery studio. On the third floor is the integrated free health clinic (every Wednesday and Saturday you can get acupuncture and massage); the open computer lab, and lots of offices. Right now, I bemoan the fact that we don’t have any old theatre posters on the walls.

In years past, the theatre was housed in a special section on the third floor, isolated from the rest of the activity but now the theatre offices are right between the elevator and the computer lab, meaning that it is likely I will be interrupted while typing this by someone who needs help opening up a word processor program and printing their resume. I probably like it better this way—though I wasn’t around before.

I mention all of this because two weeks ago the entire staff of the building participated in the first two 4 hour sessions of our Cultural Community Hub Institute. It was fascinating and probably a shock to many people who have been around this building longer than I have, to sit in a circle with the 25-30 full-time staff members and suddenly realize that we’re all working on this together, we’re all in this neighborhood together and there’s a lot we can accomplish together. In the past, I think, the theatre staff at its largest was maybe 8 people; it was a small scrappy theatre and proud of the incredibly high-quality we could manage with what we had. But now we’re a theatre and a neighborhood center and a cultural community hub—and we’re still trying to figure out what that means. We’ve got another two Institute meetings scheduled for mid-January—and I think the size and scope of the enterprise, and the quality of the participants, was perhaps the most important lesson of the recent Institute.

Also, I should say, it was fascinating and important to share stories with people who have come from different backgrounds but wound up in this same place. Turns out that everyone—from Day Care workers to social service agents—value art in their life. It just hadn’t occurred to them before that art could also be an effective part of their work life and not just their hobby life. We’ll see how these revelations develop in January.

But, worth noting, if you’re ever in Minneapolis and need a bicycle to get around (it is officially the most bicycling city in the U.S. after all), make sure you visit our bike shop Full Cycle, which restores used bikes and sells them all while providing job skills and life training to homeless teens. When I took this job, I didn’t even know that we did that.

Every day here is really a trip.

Happy Holidays.

Are You Ready?

Discussion with Project Advisor Terry Wolverton, Faculty Supervisor for Claremont Arts Management Graduate Program


One of our project advisors on this journey is Claremont Graduate School here in California. Claremont has a Masters of Arts in Arts Management, which “blends the best of the renowned Drucker School of Management and the School of Arts and Humanities to balance business courses with advanced cultural studies. Cultural institutions in the profit and nonprofit sector are seeking capable managers with an understanding of the arts and business to head museums, theatre and dance companies, cultural centers, music and arts education organizations, and to advocate for the future of the arts.”

During the last year in the program, students must complete a capstone project—An Arts Management Consulting Practicum and Final Report. It is approximately a 100 hours semester-long project culminating in a formal consulting report. The required deliverables are status reports during the semester, a final written report plus a final presentation to the organization attended by the faculty supervisor of the student’s consulting project.

The Arts Management department will assist in partnering students with a local art or cultural nonprofit organization. Students are partnered according to their professional backgrounds and interests if possible.

Sample consulting projects can be found here.

When I was listening to Terry speak about the culminating experience for Claremont arts management graduate students I could not help but hearken back to my theatre management graduate days which were not so long ago. I had to ask the question: would I have been ready for this experience at the end of my program? It was a real eye opening question because I would have, honestly, had to say no. I still needed a critical internship experience bridging school to real world theatre work in order to apply all of my school lessons to everyday occurrences. What do you all think? Are you ready? In what ways are graduate level students ready for a consultant project in various arts organizations? What do they still have to learn? Or considering the caliber and experience of the Claremont Arts Management students does it really depend on the student?

Next Steps: More insights from our other project advisors!

Patricia Garza
Center Theatre Group
Department Manager
Education and Community Partnerships
pgarza@CenterTheatreGroup.org

The Importance of Prototyping

While building strategy for our online video push something glaring has occurred to me: it's way easier to attract partners for a project when you've already got something to show off.

EXAMPLE A
Me: Hey man, we're launching a really exciting project that'll see us produce and upload dozens of videos over the next 18 months. Wanna talk about how you can be a part of this?

Random suit: (no response)

EXAMPLE B
Me: Hey man, we're launching a really exciting project online and we'd love to have you involved. Wanna see some examples of what we've done so far?

Random suit: Let's take a look.



In the end I guess what I'm saying is that prototyping is an important phase in the development of any new project, not just because it's a time to work out the kinks before the actual launch, but because it can provide materials necessary for attracting the right kind of partners. I mean, to be perfectly honest, I don't know that I'd want to work with someone who would jump onboard without seeing the goods.

It'd be like jumping in the sack with someone who you've only ever talked on the phone with. Not a good idea if you take your love life seriously at all. Which is why I'm posting a naked picture of myself below. Have sexy holidays everyone!

A new gear in the new year

So, while I missed the once-a-month deadline for posting on this blog on behalf of Pillsbury House Theatre by one day, my excuse is simply that there are so many things happening in this building right now that I’m having trouble keeping track of them all. I started as Communications Director here on July 11, but it feels like it might as well have been yesterday.

Right now, the hallway where I work is finally quiet because all our artists and artistic directors are in a rehearsal room working on a new play workshop in partnership the Guthrie Theatre. Over the course of the next three weeks, we’ll be having three more new play development workshops and readings. Tonight, we open our NAKED STAGES performance series, the culmination of a 7 month development fellowship for emerging performance artists. Last month, we produced the second 2010 CHICAGO AVENUE PROJECT where star local artists (including Minnesota local boy made good Josh Hartnett) team up with neighborhood kids to make plays, and we flew in performance poets and singers from New York to share the stage with underground hip-hop artists and dancers from Minnesota for our LATE NITE SERIES. Then, there’s our “regular” mainstage performances (anything but regular) and preparing our 2011 season—we’ll be producing the area of premiere of Tarell McCraney’s IN THE RED AND BROWN WATER, and our first show of the season, BROKE-OLOGY, will be entirely “Pay What You Can,” meaning that all our audience members will be picking their own ticket prices for the entire run of the show.

Regardless, I resolve to make up for my blogging omissions in December. Consider it an early New Year’s resolution.

The thing is that all the projects I listed above don’t even include the main reason I took on this job as well as the reason for the “Think It, Do It” grant: The integration of the theatre with the Settlement House/Neighborhood Center in which the theatre is housed. Every week I’m involved in conversations with Day Care workers and After School program staff and resident artists and others about how precisely we can integrate the arts into everything we do with and for the neighborhood.

Needless to say that we haven’t figured it all out yet, but we’re getting ready to shift into another gear. After months of planning we’ll be starting our Cultural Community Hub Institute, led by community arts consultants Bill Cleveland and Eric Takeshita and Macalester Professor Harry Waters, Jr., in mid-December. Every employee in the building, from the HIV outreach workers to the professional puppeteer, will be in the same room, asking the same questions, and working toward the most creative, innovative answers possible.

I’ll let you know what happens. Promise.

Don't Look At Me

Curious is Think-Itting on a new model for resident artistic company.

Part of our research includes visits to 5 different theatres.

While there's still one company we hope to visit that we've not yet managed to make a good connection with, travel is already underway.

Curious Founders Chip Walton (our AD) and Dee Covington (Education Director) recently visited Steppenwolf, conducting video interviews with Martha Lavey and David Hawkanson.

In January, John Jurcheck will visit Portland's Artists' Rep; Christy Montour-Larson will hang with The Civilians; and I'll go to Trinity Rep.

We wanted a diverse representation of region, longevity and size of company and focus of work.

One theater we queried was in flux and not ready to have us poking about in their company.

Which I can understand. As we've poked about at our own company, shifting our conversations from art to an omphaloskeptical investigation of the Company itself, there's been a lot of emotional agitation.

As we've encouraged each other to be courageous and call out what's not working, we've brought to the surface these feelings of dissatisfaction. Positive, I think. But most of these issues can't be addressed this season. So we steep. And not all of us are feeling okay with that.

On a recent visit, Susie Medak (Managing Director of Berkeley Rep) told us she sees it as part of her job to push staff out of their comfort zone.

Done.

Now what?

What are your experiences of organizational change?

Mare Trevathan

Launching Northlight On Campus with a Supportive Faculty

Our after-school portion of the Northlight On Campus (NOC) collaboration with Fairview South School in Skokie started on Monday, Nov. 15 with 25 students participating.  We are offering the program on Monday afternoons which is lovely because it’s the early release day for students.  This means that (1) there are no other after-school activities that day, and (2) teachers are required to stay on campus that afternoon. So, we are in a position to have the undivided attention of our students, and the ability to have teachers drop in and visit us.

A bit of background on the program: We wanted to give an underserved suburban school free theatre programming that would impact every student in grades 6-8 over the course of 2 years on campus.  The reality of Fairview’s situation – and it is a common reality for a number of junior high and middle schools in our area – is that the school has not had any theatre programming for students in over 15 years.  Also, their students filter into a high school with a very strong theatre program, so their 8^th graders are arriving as freshmen unprepared.  We wanted to make sure that there was exposure to professional theatre and opportunities for students to get involved in theatre arts on campus.

Off the bat, what surprised me about Fairview was the interest of the teachers.  I met with five teachers and the principal before we started the program, and they were all encouraging of our collaboration.  They asked how they could get involved and if they could observe our teaching artists to learn from their work. The level of kindness and curiosity on the part of the faculty is humbling. We are forging important relationships not just with the students, but with the faculty, and that is incredibly rewarding.  We had three teachers and the principal observe the first day of NOC.  It was the best kind of observation.  They were there to encourage and support the students.  The teachers proudly pointed out students who needed this outlet for their creativity. I did not anticipate that the lack of theatre programming had not only been impacting the students but the teachers as well.

I look forward to seeing how this relationship develops with such engaged teachers.  It has become a new goal to create more opportunities for teachers to get involved in our programming.  I have not worked with a school where so many faculty members are eager to collaborate with us, so I want to make sure we seize this opportunity.  

Thanksgiving

More than once this holiday weekend I winced at the cynical attitude toward new work floating around online, theater critics and award panelists shrugging and declaring a dearth of good new writing. The promotion of adventurous new work has ever been an uphill battle, an achingly familiar topic of countless conference break-out sessions and drunken rants at the corner bar but this is a weekend of thanksgiving, and to contradict the crossed-arm nay-sayers I feel an itch to write that there's much to be thankful for, and tops on my list is working with Clubbed Thumb on SuperLab, which is now up and running and hitting its stride.

SuperLab got some attention in the press a few weeks back, which is nice, but what wasn't really acknowledged is what makes this lab series particular -- what makes it, ahem, super. I mean, theaters develop new plays all the time, and separately from one another Clubbed Thumb and Playwrights Horizons produce more developmental workshops than we do together. What makes this program new is the way it strengthens the relationship between two theaters who share artistic values and a devotion to advocating new American work, but who far from share a budget category or an infrastructure. Maria Striar has eloquently compared us to the "ibis and the hippopotamus," a symbiotic relationship found between two totally divergent animals. I feel like this collaboration highlights a functional pattern in our theater ecology: a theater dubbed "downtowny" and a theater dubbed "uptowny" sharing notes and working toward the same goal.

Perhaps the mindmeld that Maria and I have developed is reflected in the fact that we never once discussed that SuperLab is a writer-driven program; we both assumed it would be so. Each step of the way, we're taking our cue from writers, shaping each lab around the moment-by-moment needs of a writer's process. At the completion of our first SuperLab, Madeleine George's play SEVEN HOMELESS MAMMOTHS WANDER NEW ENGLAND, I left with a stride in my step. Maria's blog entry describes the work we did in the room, to which I would only add that part of the success of this first go, in addition to seeing sharp, lovely play get even sharper, lovelier, we saw a great alchemy take shape between two theaters. This collaboration can only fly thanks to our staffs working side by side: Alec Strum and Kelly Hires from the PH literary department; Lisa Donadio and Alaine Alldaffer from the PH casting department; Diana Konopka, Maria's cohort and left brain at CT; and Sarah Krohn, who's helping with casting on CT's end. We're also blessed with Ann Thayer, SuperLab's Project, tirelessly acting as the liaison between both companies and each creative team.

In the last month, we programmed our next three labs. In December, we'll be spending time with Andrew Dolan's play THE MANY MISTRESSES OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, directed by Hal Brooks, and also Janine Nabers's play ANNIE BOSH IS MISSING, directed by Davis McCallum. In January, it's David Adjmi's 3C, directed by Jackson Gay. As I type this, we're in the middle of casting and designing these labs.

For these people, for these plays, I'm thankful.
--Adam Greenfield