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In 2013, PearlDamour and Haymaker, two performance making ensembles, received a grant from the Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET) to support a series of exchanges around audience development and aesthetics.   This blog gives a window into three summits the companies designed and attended over the course of the year – one in Raleigh-Durham, one in New Orleans, one in cyberspace via Skype.

Since the exchanges were happening over the course of a year, with the companies and their priorities growing and changing throughout, we find it most interesting to explore this blog in the order the exchanges happened: first in Durham, then in New Orleans, and finally, in Cyberspace.    The Durham exchange is arranged by day, the New Orleans and Cyberspace exchange is arranged by topic/particular musing.

While the topic of  “who is our audience” travels through the entries, this blog also presents a portrait of two ensembles – one younger, one older – at specific threshold moments in their creative lives.   Haymaker, a 3 year old ensemble self-producing original work in Durham, was dealing with creative and administrative burnout issues stemming from producing original work while holding down day jobs;  PearlDamour, a 16 year old ensemble, was in the middle of managing one of their largest projects to date with minimal administrative support.  Over the course of the year, as we worked through questions we had around audience development, we found ourselves giving each other much needed support around company sustainability:  exchanging on how to support individual growth within company growth and reflecting on the value of scheduling in bursts of productivity and periods of rest and reflection.

Below, you can find selections from our original grant proposal.  As you explore the blog, you will see the ways in which the conversation expanded from our original ideas.   While the official grant period is over, PearlDamour and Haymaker will continue to collaborate as PearlDamour moves towards the premiere of MILTON in Milton, NC – check back here in June and September of 2014 for updates.

Thanks and Enjoy,

PearlDamour and Haymaker Theater

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PEARLDAMOUR/HAYMAKER:  Excerpt from Original Exchange Grant

PearlDamour and Haymaker are two companies focused on creating meaningful connections with their audiences using experimental performance practices in non-traditional spaces.    Currently, each company has a piece in development – Haymaker’s What’s That Cost: The Federal Budget and You and PearlDamour’s Milton – aimed at investigating the practice of creating and performing experimental work in non-performance spaces for non-theatre ‘going’ audiences. Together, with the support of NET’s Exchange grant, the companies propose spending a year creating new work, exploring engagement strategies, and reporting on the successes and failures of a shared dilemma: How do we address the disconnect between the art we make and the audiences we want to see it? Between June 2013 and March 2014, Haymaker and PearlDamour will convene three times to discuss and develop ways to create and engage, to introduce each other to new artists and audiences, and to assess each other’s work and practices.

PearlDamour and Haymaker are both experimental in our performance practices, favoring non-traditional performance spaces and intimate audience relationships in order to trouble the standard actor/spectator relationship and achieve a meaningful connection with our audiences. We are comfortable in these experiments with form and content, in part because our audiences are, in general, educated in the ways of experimental theater. But comfort is not what we want to be feeling right now. We are ready to examine our practice on unfamiliar ground, opening ourselves up to the challenge of making work for new audiences who may NOT have a shared history in experimental performance.

Each company is now engaged in projects that offer a terrific opportunity for us to do just that: PearlDamour’s Milton has the ensemble traveling to 5 different cities named Milton to interview residents in order to build a piece that connects the 5 Miltons and is performed in each one; Haymaker designed What’s that Cost specifically to be performed in a range of non-traditional performance spaces and for non-traditional theatre audiences. PearlDamour is eager to develop Milton with Haymaker as its host and “scout team” in Milton, NC, while Haymaker is eager to continue the evolution of What’s That Cost with help from PearlDamour and the new audience in New Orleans, LA. Our NET exchange will be framed by these projects.

The exchange will be shaped by three summits. The first summit will focus on internal dialogue and skill sharing between PearlDamour and Haymaker.  We will discuss performance making and audience development techniques used by each company in past productions and review primary sources to find new techniques (using such texts as Shannon Jackson’s Social Work and Jo Carson’s Spider Stories), with the goal of building strategies for the year to come.

Having identified our goals and strategies in the first summit, the second and third summits will focus on creation, exploration, and engagement. Haymaker and PearlDamour will work jointly on their works in progress. PearlDamour will observe rehearsals and performances, and help Haymaker to further develop What’s That Cost, and will organize at least one showing of their piece at a non-traditional venue for a specific audience.  Haymaker will help PearlDamour by going on an initial “scouting trip” to nearby Milton, NC to get the feel of the town and identify local community gathering places not easily identified in a web search.  They will also accompany PearlDamour to one of their later trips to Milton, NC to help, observe, and assess the work practiced there.

Both groups will depend on each other to help design and then assess audience engagement before, during, and after the presentations of their works.  Haymaker will come out of this exchange with a performance of their work of their work in New Orleans in an unconventional setting, and an assessment of the engagement process before, during and after the performance.   PearlDamour will come out of this exchange with their research done in Milton, NC, and, if the schedule aligns, a work-in-progress showing of part of their show MILTON in the Process Series at UNC, assisted by Haymaker (especially in the area of audience development and feedback).

Additionally, the summit will allow the artists to network in each other’s community and discuss audience engagement with artistic producers – sowing the seeds of ensemble collaboration within the Southeast, one of the fastest growing regions in the country. Haymaker will introduce PearlDamour to development opportunities in the Durham area, PearlDamour will introduce Haymaker to local producers at the New Orleans Fringe, the New Noise works-in-progress series, and the many ensembles (young and mature) that are working in New Orleans now.

 

New Orleans Exchange – Day #.05

A Note from Lisa

Today we walked into Catapult, the shared space of Artspot Productions, Mondo Bizarro and New Noise (where Haymaker will perform their new piece on Thursday), and Sean La Rocca, Managing Director and Resident Composer for Artspot Productions, was talking on his cell phone and sweeping the floor.  And Emily said — Hey! That guy stayed at my house when New Noise presented Runnin’ Down the Mountain!

And I realized —

Haymaker volunteers to perform in PearlDamour’s How to Build a Forest (Fall 2012)
Phil Cramer, of New Noise in NOLA, was one of the performers.
PearlDamour and Haymaker begin this NET exchange (Spring 2013)
New Noise decides to tour a house party version of their show Runnin’ Down the Mountain to places in and around Appalachia.
Haymaker volunteers to host them (Spring 2013)
Haymaker comes to NOLA to continue exchange and perform I Know You Are But What Am I?
Catapult / New Noise offers to host them (Fall 2013)

And so on and so on….

Yesterday Haymaker also got to meet with Will Bowling of Goat in the Road Productions, who also works for NPN and is an active NET member.  I set up the meeting mainly so they could learn about how NPN works, but as it turns out the most meaningful part of the meeting was comparing the growing pains and growing triumphs of being a young company (Haymaker is 3, Goat in the Road is 5).

It makes me realize how much I love just setting things in motion…..knowing that there is no way in hell to know where it’s all going to lead….whether that is setting a project in motion or a set of meetings……it’s about, I suppose going into it with the right intentions, ready to improvise…..

Really looking forward to the performance today…..

I Know You Are But What Am I?

11-11 Draft Performance

Last week, in preparation for our trip to New Orleans, Haymaker presented a draft of I Know You Are But What Am I to a small group of willing participants. Below, Akiva, Dan, and Emily share some reactions to that draft performance, and what they are excited to try during the two draft performances in New Orleans.

Akiva:

I hate audience participation.

Is a line I say in I Know You Are But What Am I.

But it’s in there because I feel it. For all the work I do breaking down divisions between performers and audience, for all the times I’ve made a play where an actor talks to an audience member or asks them to do something, I have to admit that most of the times when I’ve attended a show that wanted me to participate, I’ve pulled away. And I don’t think I’m alone in this opinion – I’ve seen people in our audiences (on this show, even) pull away when we ask them to join in.

So in the interest of full disclosure, “I hate audience participation” had to be a line in this show.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, but very early on in the piece, I sit with the audience rather than staying at the front. It’s an “actor participation” show for me. I try to melt back into the audience and let myself become a passive observer again, a role that feels very easy for me. That’s my system for controlling complexity, a way to be a part of an interactive medium without interacting too much.

But every simplifying system in this show also confines. So my experience of being in this audience has been about giving up that system to try for a genuine interaction. My system is a lie from the beginning. When I tell them that I hate audience participation, I’m engaging in it. I don’t melt into the audience, I declare myself in it. I’m a hypocrite.

Still, when we “took off” at the end of our first performance of I Know You Are But What Am I, it felt like a release. I didn’t feel like a performer or a puppetmaster guiding an audience. I felt like part of a group experiencing a genuine interaction together.

I didn’t expect that. Maybe I was still falling back on actorly detachment. But it felt like something new to me.

Dan: 

Sometimes I forget audience is not singular.

I blame rehearsal for this. It’s where I think of the audience as a herd. We’ll move them here…and then they’ll probably do this…and then they’ll grasp this idea, etc. At times, creating a performance can feel like a sociology experiment.

Last week, during our first full draft run of I Know You Are But What Am I, we’d agreed to try not having a formal greeting process as audience members arrived. So imagine no ticket taker, and no one to really acknowledge the arriving audience members as they came in the door.

The memory that comes to me is of a man arriving out of breath, slightly panicked, and looking desperately for someone. After a short time, I caved and introduced myself. He’d forgotten his ticket printout. He was apologetic and worried. He’d never been to something like this and didn’t know what to do. I assured him he’d done everything right so far, and then his face relaxed and his shoulders dropped. It was as if I’d dunked him in warm water.

I was reminded of how generous it is for someone to walk through that door. I was reminded of how much I want to reward them for coming, for taking that risk. I was reminded of just how much I appreciate that one person walks through the theater door and then another, and another, and so on.

Selfishly, I abandoned our agreement after that and then room changed for me. It seemed less like an audience or a group, and more like accumulation of persons. A weird perception trick, both singular and plural.

Emily:

I love people. Sometimes I hate them, sure – when they drive too slow or too fast, when they are in front of me in the grocery line, when they send me an email that is rude, when they say inflammatory things on the internet, when they vote anti-choice – you know, when they are inconsiderate. But for the most part, I love them. And when I’m not in a rush or unhappy or inconsiderate myself, I can see these annoyances as just part of humanity. A complicated, messy existence. We’re just all popping around doing our thing, banging into each other. Making mistakes, making people’s days, trying and failing to love and be love.

It’s why I like people watching. We get to be observers of this mixed-up world of people without any of the anxiety inherent in trying to deal with them. You get to see their humanity in its perfect complexity. You get to imagine stories about them, make judgments, and imagine what life would be like in their shoes or next to them.

There’s this part in I Know You Are But What Am I, where I get to sit and watch the audience. They are watching something behind my head – a video entitled “How to Make Flying Amazing.” The video is almost 10 minutes long, and I just sit there and watch them while they watch the screen. After Monday’s draft performance, it became my favorite part of the show. Watching them take in this video, each in their private way, reminded me of the ocean. Sitting there and watching the expressions change on their faces, I felt the individual responses – like the individual waves – becoming a tide of emotions washing over me. I was transported by them being transported. I felt love and loved. I can’t wait to do it again.

Learn more about I Know You Are But What Am I? on Haymakers blog.

A Reading Recommendation from PearlDamour

Check out this great article by Ron Berry posted on the National Performance Network. It talks about free theater and how it relates to building audiences. It’s awesome!

Going Free
by Ron Berry

For the past two and a half years, Fusebox Festival has been contemplating switching to a free festival model. There are obviously a host of issues and questions this decision brings up (both for our audiences and for the organization) as well as a host of emotions (from euphoria to sheer, face-melting terror). After researching various other free models around the country and talking to numerous colleagues and artists, we had our suspicions that we were onto something exciting but were still lacking some key evidence that could help cement board and donor buy-in.

Through the Mentorship and Leadership Initiative (MLI) process, we reached out to bestselling author Dan Heath to explore this potentially pivotal organizational change. Dan is a Senior Fellow at Duke University’s CASE center, which supports social entrepreneurs, and is the author of three best-selling books: Made to Stick (a book about ideas and why certain ideas stick and other don’t); Switch (a book about change and how it works — from changing your diet to large societal change); and his latest book Decisive (a book about decision-making). Dan also happens to be a longtime fan and supporter of the festival, so he had some significant context for our work, which we felt was important……..

That was just a taste, read more by following the link!

Traveling the Learning Curve

HELLO AUDIENCE.

Over the last several months we’ve traveled a long slow curve towards understanding who our MILTON audience might be and how we want to build a relationship with them (both before, during, and after the show). We’ve moved towards understanding in a couple ways:

1. workshopping material to audiences of our peers

2. wrestling with the relationship between long term community engagement and the show itself

3. visiting the Milton communities, maintaining  email contact, and starting to build partnerships for presenting the show in each town.

Here are some examples of what we’ve learned from each:
workshop
Workshop showings are, of course, always incredibly useful– especially when you get written feedback after.  These were particularly great as we seek to get at the tone of the show.  This piece is going to be a combination of speaking and singing, and also will have a combination of abstract imagistic text with more straightforward, linear text.  Are we creating something that is both mysterious, interesting, and also accessible?  Some useful feedback questions we asked were:  “what were the points of entry (“doorways”) for you in the piece?”  “were there times you felt shut out?”  “what did you crave more of?”.   We also are working with using objects from and photographs of each Milton, letting the audience handle these things and talk amongst themselves about them.  There was a lot of enthusiasm about that idea, and cravings to have it pushed farther– mostly as a way to feel and create the community within the audience that the piece seems to be talking about.

It was also really important to have Ashley Sparks in the audience… Ashley is working with us on the durational community engagement, so she was watching from a “miltonian” perspective.  How will those audiences experience hearing about themselves, witnessing themselves?
wrestling
We know that in order to have an audience for the show in each town, community engagement throughout the next couple years is vital.  We have to build relationships in the Miltons so that people will come see the show, but also we have to build relationships because part of the project really is about that: relationships.  Us meeting new people, the project providing an opportunity for conversations and intimate encounters to happen between people who would not otherwise be in contact.

We now say that this is a 3 part project: a live performance, a durational community engagement effort, and an interactive website.   We are slowly sculpting the engagement plan to be something we can handle (it’s so easy to let it get way too big), and something that feels vital to us as artists and to the content of the piece.  The umbrella term for this work “intimate encounter.”  We are in the final stages of developing a new website that will really serve this goal of creating opportunity for engagement and encounter.

We will do another post about the website itself, and how it will be the “doorway” for Miltonians to go through.

visiting
It has been a struggle to schedule more visits, both because of scheduling on our end and money.  If only we had enough money to go as much as we want to!  We have been keeping in email contact with a few key allies in each town, and Ashley is jumping on the site-visit roster as well.  Generally we find that even if we wait several months between visits, people are happy to see us and ready to pick up where we left off.  So whether we’re visiting in person or just over the internet, we always want to keep in mind how the conversation or the activity is preparing the ground for the performance.  Are we activating the performance space? Engaging people in the questions the piece asks/raises? Facilitating a creative encounter that will get people’s art-minds going?  Whatever it is, we recognize that each meeting is a different chance to move into the content of the performance.
 Looking forward to the NOLA Summit, and seeing Haymaker’s show!

Katie / PearlDamour

Emily shares a TED Talk and some thoughts

I watched this TED Talk this afternoon and I thought it was an interesting counter (complement?) to the Martin Weigel piece on marketing. Rather than thinking about this TED Talk in terms of leadership, I kept translating it to marketing and the idea of developing a following or a fan-base. But also, it spoke to me of a different perspective on our ongoing conversations about how we talk about our art. This is a particular hang-up for me (especially when talking to non-artists). I never seem to say what I want to say about my work. Watching this video, I realized that I’m I always starting with the “What” — I’m a theater artist. I have a company. We make our own pieces. — rather than the “Why” — I am constantly exploring my condition and experience as a human/woman/citizen/artist. I do that through making performance experiences. This video made me want to start incorporating more “Why” into my conversations. How to do that without coming across as a pretentious windbag artist I don’t know…but I do love a challenge.
 – Emily

Visiting Milton, NC

On Saturday, Haymaker met up with PearlDamour in Milton, NC to get a first hand look of how Lisa & Katie are creating their new work.

Friday Night’s Triangle Theater Caring & Sharing Kegger

Friday night Haymaker threw a party to introduce our new friends, PearlDamour, to the Triangle (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill) theater community! There was beer & snacks, plus “theater spoken word karaoke”. It was silly and fun and a great time to hang out and come together as a theater community.

 

A Welcome Note from PEARLDAMOUR

Hello Audience!

PearlDamour here.  We met Haymaker when they volunteered (volunteered!) to be a part of our last project called How to Build a Forest when we toured it to Duke — they were a part of our “breathing composition”, composed by Brendan Connelly.  We loved hanging out with them in rehearsal – and in the bar of the Durham Hilton, where our team was staying, and where we first started dreaming up the idea for this exchange.

See, PearlDamour’s current project is called Milton — we are visiting 5 towns named Milton in order to make a performance, and one of “our” Miltons is North Carolina about an hour from Durham.   What began as a convo about, “Hey maybe we can crash on your couch during some of our trips” turned into this in-depth exchange, thanks to that Awesome Instigating Organization called the Network of Ensemble Theaters.

Over the next few days, PearlDamour and Haymaker will be back and forth between Milton and Durham while we think, read and chew on questions about audience (hello!), the unique needs of urban and rural art scenes, disciplinary perceptual habits (thank you, Shannon Jackson) and more.

What a way to get to know each other better.  Thanks NET.  More dispatches soon….

Lisa and Katie

This pic is not of Lisa and Katie, but sometimes this is what Lisa and Katie feel like when they first enter a “Milton”, wide-eyed, naive….take us to your people yip yip yip….

IMG_1167