I’m looking for a story to tell. Do you know one?

I was recently awarded a 5,000 Euro, no-interest loan from the Dekeyser & Friends Foundation. This loan is intended to help push EVET Arts Presents, my DreamPlan – a performing arts presenting and producing company – from the realm of idea to actuality. EVET’s inaugural project, funded in part by this loan from Dekeyser & Friends, will be a piece of physical theatre that tells a story of global human compassion.

Since we all have stories that we’ve heard and that have affected us when we heard them, I’m beginning the creative process by crowd-sourcing for that gem that needs to be told.

This is what I’m looking for:

• A true story
• That lends itself well to physical action on stage. Whether that physical action is depicting actual events or internal emotions, thoughts and fears is unimportant.
• I’m looking for an international story.
• I’m looking for a story of human struggle, compassion and determination.
• A story that can be told without too many ‘characters’
• A story that is pertinent to Mr & Mrs Average American Joe, either because it ties the world they live in to a world far away or because it speaks to a universal truth such as the love of a parent for their child.
• A story that involves song or dance would be especially appreciated
• A story set in a French or Spanish speaking country would also be ideal, but stories are, by no means, limited.

Please feel free to email me directly or respond to this post with your tales of wonder. Thank in advance. Mille fois.

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Ingrained Hate

I was driving through Davis Square with a friend last night. We were arguing and we were both upset. My friend pulled up to a light and proceeded, a little aggressively, to turn. There was a cab coming from the left who didn’t heed his signal, and, fueled by our argument, my friend pulled ahead anyway, challenging the cab. My friend layed on the horn and rolled down his window, leaning out and waving emphatically at his green light and telling the cab driver to “Back the – expletive - off.” The cabbie proceeded to yell back, and his words made me nauseous for the rest of the night.

“Go back to your fucking country!” he screamed.

My friend is Lebanese and speaks with an audible accent. He has lived in the United States for over ten years. He has attended neighborhood meetings and plays on a local soccer team. He was just promoted to a higher level manager position within his company. I would wager he’s a better citizen than the cab driver.

It makes me sick – physically, in my stomach – that there are people in the United States who think like this. I am lucky enough to live in an area where verbal manifestations of these thoughts are rare and diversity and acceptance abound.

Thank you Harvard. Thank you MIT. Thank you Longwood Medical Area.

It’s not just that people like the cab driver give Americans a bad name when we travel overseas, but that there is this self-perpetuating system of hate within our community. I find it unlikely that this cab driver will ever have an experience that is able to show him that different people within our community - Arabs, Blacks, Asians and Latinos – are people just like him. This is what the theatre company I am trying to found aims to address. I wonder if there is a way to reach someone so common as a Boston cab driver and change a worldview that has been ingrained into him.

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That Solid Decision… Isn’t So Solid Anymore.

There are as many variables as there are questions and as many questions as there are possible answers.

• Arts Presenting Professional #1: Ambivalent about graduate degree but conceeds its not necesary where hiring is concerned.
• Stanford MBA-candidate from film background: MBA wouldn’t target my needs in the entertainment industy, but an MAM (Masters in Arts Management) would cover relevent points. A masters degree in general will add value to a resume and fast-track a career.
• Kellog MBA-candidate with non-profit work experience: A masters degree is imparative to maintain relevance in the industry. The connections gained through a quality program like CMU would open doors to aspirations in my field.
• Business undergrad with entrepreneurial experience: A masters isn’t necessary. Hard work and hands-on learning is. It’s your drive that’s going to make or break you.
• Law school grad carrying a large amount of student debt: Skip grad school and dodge the loans. School is nice for the ego but doesn’t provide enough benefit to outweigh the costs.
• Arts Presenting Professional #2: A MAM is tailored to parts of the industry to which I don’t aspire to go and doesn’t impart practical skills in how to work with artists. A MAM is a waste of time.
• Arts Presenting Professional #3: This professional came up through the ranks with an undergraduate degree from a very prestigious university in the filed (Yale) but never got a masters and doesn’t give job candidates with masters degrees more consideration than others.

And what do I think…?

There are immense confidence and leadership-building opportunities built into the grad school model, no matter which degree. A MAM, however, is probably more tailored to “traditional” non-profit leadership roles as #2 (above) stated. The connections gained through a MAM may or may not be relevant, but are less so now that I’ve made one strong connection and a number of auxiliary connections on my own. These connections can most-likely bring me into the field at no better (or little better) a pay rate than I’d get after graduating with a degree. The job descriptions I’m looking at as very appealing seldom include a related masters degree as prerequisite.

A masters in general provides a feeling of certainty that life will fall smoothly into place after graduation, as well as a two-year respite from financial hardships and taking jobs just to make money while I ride on the government’s dime. More than anything, however, a masters gives me a feeling of purpose and worth, and the idea that I’ve got a plan for my life, which I’ve felt has been absent in my life for the past few years.

The confidence and momentum gained in a graduate program would be VERY good for me, but might pidgeon hole me into types of arts management jobs I’m not seeking to do. My professional goal is to be the creative head of an organization, not a planning and managerial head. My goal is also to found my own organization, which doesn’t seem to fall into line with all that debt.

More to ponder…

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Social Outreach Theatre

A Google search for “social outreach theatre” yields first an organization called Loka Humana. Apparently run by a single female trained in physical theatre and currently living in New York, Loka Humana strives to “bring joy and laughter to disadvantaged children, big and small, around the world”.

As I sit on the couch, eyes darting up to catch bits of the 11th inning of the Red Sox game, I contemplate socially active theatre. By nature, all theatre is socially active, and is socially outreaching. The concept I’m searching for here, however, is more hands on. It’s engaging disadvantaged populations in foreign countries and at home, using theatre to make  a difference.

There’s something missing in this as a lifestyle, though. Foreign populations reap the benefits of American skill in these types of programs, but Americans – the population I’m more concerned about when it comes to cultural exchange – don’t experience anything out of the ordinary. When there is an opportunity for Americans to see a foreign culture, it’s either the performers who get the experience (and the performers are probably the most cultured already) or Americans are painted a charity story without any real connection to the recipients.

Giving back to under-served populations is important to me, as is experiencing other cultures first hand. But I want to bring a piece of these cultures to Americans who are receptive to them, and open those who are not sure if they are. This is where international arts presenting, a buzz-phrase I’ve been using liberally as of late, comes into play.

My goal with entering this field is to bring awareness of other cultures to Americans by way of innovative and engaging performances. This serves the American audiences, who are growing a world-wide cultural awareness, as well as the international performers, who are given the chance to teach Americans about their culture and earn a living from their art, which might not be feasible in their home countries.

But is finding these international artists and presenting them in the US enough “social outreach” for my aspirations? Are the artists that are talented enough to be presented already far enough above the poverty line that the act isn’t really making a big difference?

I wonder if it would be possible to combine the presentation of talented, middle-class, international artists with their training to go back into their own communities and do the social outreach. In that way Americans would get to see foreign culture via performance art and needy foreign populations would receive the benefits of social outreach theatre. We would be teaching the artists to fish for their people, rather than giving them the meal without a means to replicate it.

A new project has been born.

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Graduate School. Yes, Graduate School.

This past fall I applied to graduate school. This past winter I was accepted, and this past spring I paid my deposit to attend Carnegie Mellon – Heinz College’s program in Arts Management in Pittsburgh. But I wasn’t sure I was really going to go until this week. Now I’ve finally made my decision.

In the end the decision to attend came down to cost and confidence. This might sound funny seeing as two years at CMU is going to cost me between $60-80,000. But the other option, as I laid out for myself in my mind, was to get a job in the field and go to work while re-applying and trying to find a cheaper program for next year. I got a job offer in New York City working with an agency that does exactly what I want to do, but as they were only able to pay me a living stipend, I just couldn’t figure out how to work that financially. It’s actually going to be easier (and much more comfortable) to ride on the government’s money for two years and deal with paying it back later. The hope is that “later”, with a degree, it will be easier to find a higher paying job anyway. Fingers crossed.

The other part of the equation is confidence. I’ve gone back and forth on grad school for the past four months; so many times that I had gotten to the point where I wasn’t sure which was my initial instinct and which was my convincing myself of something else – going or not going.

What I finally decided is that grad school is a scary thing. Laying down that much money on something that isn’t “essential” is a scary thing. Taking a risk to try to advance my future is a scary thing. And mostly because I’ve never seen someone close to me invest and have it turn out well. In fact, I’ve never had a role model in investing at all.

The place where I come from is blue collar working class. The adults I looked to growing up didn’t invest and they hadn’t been to grad school. Getting a college education wasn’t a choice; it was a necessity, so, going into a fair amount of debt for a college education was okay. It was an expected cost. But a graduate education seemed like a luxury to me. It seemed like an unnecessary amount of money to lay out for something that may or may not yield results. In short, it was a risk.

I’ve decided, with the help of a whole lot of patient friends, that I’m willing to take the risk of going to grad school and investing in my future. I’ve decided to have confidence in my ability to succeed and my ability to grow from blue collar world to white collar world. Or to grow, at least, from blue collar world to the world in which I want to live.

A huge thank you to everyone who’s tolerated my hemmings and hawings over the past four months as I’ve approached this decision. A huge thank you to everyone who’s given me stellar advice and lots of love. More of that will always be welcome.

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Management 101 – Notes from the Field

Things I’ve learned about team management that I attribute to reading Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s book, Confidence, while working abroad in Turkey. These are things I hope always to implement and never to forget:

1. Lead by example. If you want your team to work hard, show them the way by doing. There is nothing more irksome to a hard-working team than a manager who constantly preaches high standards and never upholds them him/herself.

2. Leave lots of room for personal creativity, responsibility and innovation. Doing the same thing over and over every day is boring, but sometimes necessary. Combat boredom and stagnation by opening to the floor to – and encouraging – lots of personal creativity at work. Give team members responsibilities, so they can take personal pride in their individual accomplishments.

2.a. On the subject of innovation, Always ask yourself and your team if there is a better way to do things. Being open to criticism and taking action when things need improvement shows that you have nothing to hide and that you trust the insights that only your team can have, because only your team is there on the floor.

3. Play to team members strengths. Everyone has something they’re especially good at. Find those strengths in the team and let them work them to their advantages. This minimizes arguments when someone is doing a bad job at something they don’t like and don’t feel comfortable doing. Don’t stop encouraging team members to improve upon their weaknesses, but make sure they’re always confident by highlighting what they’re good at.

4. Quality, Not Quantity. Making personal connections with those that you serve will yield a much higher conversion rate than blanketing the field with your industry’s information but not taking the time to connect and get feedback. Find out what your customer wants, what they love and what they hate, what they dream about and what they dread. Then tailor your marketing to those personal attributes.

5. If you’ve got to institute a new rule or other formality, think it through first. Don’t make lots of empty promises of what is going to happen in the workplace unless you know they’ll be carried out. Empty promises ruffle feathers when it’s not needed. If you feel you need to collect team members’ feelings about a decision before you make it (which seems like a pretty good idea) make sure they know that there are a number of possible outcomes. Expectations set the tone.

6. Insure that Work is always Play. When team members are genuinely happy at work, it shows in the product that’s produced.

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Giving In Order To (But Not Expecting To) Receive

You can tell a lot about a culture by its language. In Turkish, there exists a tense for what has or will supposedly happen; for what someone else says has happened, but you haven’t seen for yourself. There’s a serious lack of accountability in Turkey’s corporate world, and oftentimes even in personal relationships in the country. When a Turk opens their heart to you, they do it by offering up everything they have. Until that point, and I’m not sure how one gets to that point, they will promise and promise but rarely deliver.

I read an article yesterday that took a shot at answering the question, “How do I leverage my professional network without exploiting it?” (I’m paraphrasing.) Dan Schwabel’s Personal Branding Blog is to espouse the philosphy of giving in order to (but not expecting to) receive.

All the people in my life I would do anything for are people that have done everything in their power for me, and usually without having been asked. Some are close friends who have become close because we share this give and take. Some, however, are newer acquaintances who I quickly grew to admire, trust and love because of their selflessness.

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