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By Patrick Donnelly
New performing arts venues generate excitement. The opportunity to attend
different events and enjoy new gathering places animates the public, and
local arts organizations either love or lament how the additional real
estate will influence their own operations. Even if a community’s response
to a new theater isn’t perfectly uniform, the project itself conveys a
message of vitality and self-assurance about the area — a message that
builds pride within and can attract newcomers from without.
Understanding the Impact
Pride notwithstanding, the effects of constructing a new performance venue
in the developed world have changed in the past few decades. Fewer and fewer
localities nowadays lack a soft seat space. Whether a high school auditorium
or a municipal concert hall, most communities already have an assembly place
of their own that hosts lectures, plays and music events. An additional
venue, rather than bringing something novel to town, augments these existing
space(s) with predictable consequences: It upends scheduling precedents,
changes the rental market and influences the programmatic decisions of local
organizations.
In other words, new construction generally competes
with or replaces existing venues. This is a red-ocean strategy, to use the
parlance of some business planners — it’s fishing where the other boats are
located. For reasons of such in-fill, it has become harder to ignore
neighboring organizations when erecting a new theater in the 21st century.
The army of consultants that currently plans such projects focuses heavily
on making the new space deliberately fit in (or dominate) the locale,
relative to the venues already there.
Project consultants can provide range of services to
help new building owners evaluate the organizations with which they will vie
for clients. In particular, consultants are very good at enumerating things.
Audience base, economic impact, budget requirements, travel distances,
ratios for restrooms and parking — numerical data that can be gathered
through library-type research is what theater planners collect with aplomb.
The importance of such information cannot be downplayed; indeed, few
assembly spaces could move from feasibility studies through the design phase
into construction without this knowledge.
What consultants cannot effectively do is form a
long-term relationship with the competing arts and venue managers, a
relationship that centers on working knowledge of the shared business
environment. Across the long term, consultants have no compelling reason to
interact with organizations that aren’t their clients. They gather and
analyze the data, and then move on. The relationship between project
consultants and “the competition” is finite, if it exists at all.
Building Bridges
A wise arts-venue manager will recognize this circumstance as an opportunity
to dig deeper and learn more. Organizations that have been putting on events
in town for 15 years have an understanding of the community that will
enlighten the project team, whether about programming preferences or
apprehension regarding the new building. Finding ways to interact with such
neighbors (a more polite term than “the competition”) takes little
imagination. Meet them over lunch to talk shop. Sit at the same table during
service club (Rotary, Jaycees) meetings. Attend each other’s fundraising
events. Chat about ways to collaborate, or how to steer around each other’s
activities.
A good example of this occurs in southwest Michigan.
Most of the presenting and producing theatrical organizations in Kalamazoo
County participate in a monthly forum for sharing ideas, voicing concerns
and keeping in touch with peers. Known as Theatre Kalamazoo, their nine
members operate somewhat informally, with the general goal of making theatre
more accessible to the public. Their mission is well-focused:
“We take great pride in promoting the diversity and
richness of theatre in Kalamazoo County. We seek to foster a spirit of
cooperation and support among theatre organizations. We believe the more
successful theatre is produced in Kalamazoo, the more it benefits all. To
that end, we pledge to coordinate season selection in order to offer the
community the broadest and richest possible theatre offerings, offer
discounts to our shared patrons, share ideas, talent, and resources, and
most of all, increase awareness and instill good will and pride in the art
of live theatre.”
As the relationship between the members has grown,
Theatre Kalamazoo has expanded their conversations beyond patron discounts
and efforts to preclude any two troupes from choosing the same play title.
They’ve obtained grant funding for collaborative advertising, and buy public
radio underwriting credits, newspaper ads, and print pocket calendars en
masse.
When a member that rents venues looks for an alternate
location or new home, the options get discussed openly. Arts advocacy has
also been served well by the group — when a local ordinance that proscribed
all nudity in public performance came before the city government, Theatre
Kalamazoo members coordinated a response that helped rework the bill.
Rapport of this nature between arts leaders doesn’t
flourish in the short term. Community outsiders cannot create it, short of
becoming insiders. Nor can project consultants build this kind of network—it
can evolve only through relationships tempered by time. For a venue manager
laying the groundwork around new performing arts facilities, this
association can be invaluable. It taps into other influential viewpoints,
and identifies ways to partner for mutual benefit. It clarifies who your
friends are (and aren’t). Importantly, it promotes the building project to
those who can best appreciate it.
Creating the competitive edge around a new performing
arts center uses no fixed formula. Venue owners have an obligation to avail
the project of all resources that will make it succeed, whether through
professional evaluations or more grassroots methods. Consulting local peers
should be one of these methods — even if it means buying
lunch. fm
Patrick Donnelly is director of the Roselle Center
for the Arts at the University of Delaware. |
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