 Good morning, welcome back. Hope you all had a nice time yesterday. I'm glad you're back today. So I'm Linda Essek for, I know a couple of you just came in this morning, I'm the head of the PAID program in Arts Entrepreneurship, which is housed in the School of Theater and Film. And since its inception in, let me get this right, 2006, 2007, one of the primary activities of PAID has been to incubate student-initiated arts-based ventures. And in that the six years of the incubator's existence, we have helped students develop 32 now, I think it's 32 arts-based ventures and projects. And roughly half of those are still either going or still in development but have not failed. And I'll tell you that that exceeds the average for small business startups, which is about 31%. So we're very proud of that. In order for students' projects to be incubated and incubation for us doesn't necessarily mean a space, it means some seed funding and mentorship and business services. Students have to first come to a workshop, they learn a little something about the application process and about arts entrepreneurship. They submit a letter of intent to apply to the incubator and that's screened by a committee of faculty and community members and entrepreneurs. And I wanna give a shout out of thanks to that committee. A couple of them are here, not everybody, but a few of them are. So thank you Diana Swaboda, why are you here? Raise your hand, Diana. Diana's on our PAID steering committee. Jake Pinholster, who was here last night, I don't know if he made it back today yet. Who else? Muriel Magenta from the School of Art and Adam Collis from the Film Area of the School of Theater and Film. And then from our community, we have Shelly Cohn, Arts Activist and supporter. Cindy Dash from Made Routique and Chandy Hands Bookstore and Roosevelt Road Community Development Corporation. Because of the last one, there's no wonder she's not here today because they have the feast on the street going today. And Kyle McIntosh who owns and operates the Mac 6 business incubator in Tempe which opened about a year ago. So students apply, submit this letter of intent and the screening committee looks at those and says, this is a thoughtful idea. Let's invite them to make a full proposal. And students who reach that finalist stage have to submit a pretty lengthy document that outlines what they wanna do and how they're gonna do it and what it's gonna take and who they are and what their schedule's gonna be. And then new this year, we're also asking those finalists to do a public pitch and that public pitch is now. That's why you're here. I used to hear the public pitches by these students. And we have three projects being pitched today. You can see them listed here. They're gonna tell you more about them. Two of these are finalists for the incubator for next year and one is this year's incubate and that's opera revolution, Joel Walcott's project. So we've asked our students to pitch using a fast pitch format. That means they have three minutes to tell their story. And the primary objective of this incubator, the primary objective is educational. The secondary objective is to get these new ventures launched. So in order to fulfill that educational objective, not only are they gonna pitch to you, but hopefully you'll give them some feedback on both their idea and on the quality of their pitch. So they're gonna have three minutes to pitch and then about five minutes for give and take to use Ann Marcusen's term. And then we'll go on to the next. So first up is Daniel Fine. Good morning. Thank you. Thank you for being here so early on a Saturday morning. So I'm Daniel Fine and I invite you to take a journey with me back to 1981. I was nine years old and it was the year that video killed the radio star. MTV was born and I still had to wait a year to get my hands on my beloved Commodore 64. That summer, I also acted in my first play and I gotta tell you, I was hooked. I wanted to be in everything I possibly could and I wanted to go see every play that my parents could afford to take me. But then after a while, I just didn't wanna see theater anymore. I would rather stay at home in my living room or immersed in my Atari 24 and beat my dad at palm. Yeah, palm, you know it. Flash forward 30 years and I look around and I still kinda see the same thing. I see theater presenters scratching their heads, you know, golly, how do we get 30 years ago and they wanna go to theater and now Susie doesn't wanna go to theater and how are we gonna get kids engaged in theater? Why, why, why, why, why, why? And there's also kids, I look around and I see kids who are just like me and they are more interested in staying home to play rather than go see a play. But inside a theater, we come together for a communal experience. We come to be engaged in stories and to learn about our histories and to dream big about our future. But these kids today would rather, kids today, they'd rather, we would rather stay at home and play video games and shoot things on our 52 inch TV. Because at home in our living rooms we can have a more immersive, engaged, interactive experience with story than we can sitting like you all are in a theater. And I'm not satisfied with that. So I bring you Wonder Dome. A small, portable, 360 degree immersive environment. It has the ability to scale up and scale down. We can see 300 or we can see 10 in a community center in your, in a community center in your local area. And basically what we're looking to do is to take a 360 degree immersive mediated environment and make it interactive. Tell stories that reach kids on the level of technology that they're used to today. And we're pretty much the first people to be thinking about technology in terms of interaction in a 360 degree environment. Where it's, we're using relatively low cost off the shelf components as a pet compared to what it used to be a million dollars to create a projection system in a dome setting. And when I say interact with story, I mean something like, you know, you've got kids who can splash in a puddle and it goes all over the dome and then get to interact with actors who are like, oh, you got me wet. And it's not just about the technology. You know, what we're looking to do is engage these kids and bring them into the theaters. And we humans have been telling stories for thousands of years. How we tell them now needs to change. Thank you. I'm wondering if you have any comments or questions for Dan, any, any feedback? I don't have feedback. I just want to ask you a question because I'm excited about Wonder Dome and I want to understand Wonder Dome better. So what I didn't get in the pitch was like actually how Wonder Dome works. So in my mind, Wonder Dome is a physical space that I enter that I probably am possibly using something like Google Glasses or something or maybe it's unmediated in that way, but it is immersive. So how is it different than things like the cave interactive virtual technology at Virginia Tech and all that stuff? What is it? Yeah, thank you. Good question. So it's basically an immersive environment where media is taking place on the surface of the dome. You don't have to wear anything. And your feet as well. Yeah, sounds like a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. So 360 immersive environment where you can interact with sensor technology with the story. So we'll track people's movements, but it's not just a story like a video game where it's a first player user experience. It's combining the ancient theatrical storytelling with performer who can also interact with that story and engage the audience to interact as the story envelopes and goes along. So the question is, if I understand correctly, are you trying to engage kids in a theatrical experience within the dome or use the dome to get kids and their families to come into a traditional theater space like we're in? I am interested in getting kids into the dome and telling them stories in new ways where they can interact and engage with it as it goes along. If a byproduct of that is that they then become interested in any live performance, be it dance or music or theater, then, so great, I'm glad to help contribute and spark that within them. But my goal is not to get them to say, oh, that was great, let's go back and sit in traditional theaters. I'm trying to break the traditional theater model. I think this is the hitch of what we're doing differently than other projects out there that are using interactive. There's one other project I'm aware of in New Mexico that is creating interactive technology in a dome, but it's, again, that user experience where I go in and it's more of a video game experience than an interaction with story. And what we're trying to do is combine the ancient forms of storytelling 2,000 years ago when people sat around campfires and told stories and they created media with their hands and the light from the shadow of the fire. We're doing the same thing, we're treating it in the same way, only now it's mediated. So I'm not looking at media any differently than a storytelling device to engage them within the story. So we will be telling stories that engage them with live performance. We're not at the point where we've developed the stories yet, we're still developing that and it's a good question, I don't know, we're tackling that very issue. Keep you posted. Well, it's only $10 admission, I think that's pretty reasonable. Right now our budget to get a small prototype which is about 18 foot diameter, 14 feet tall, seat about 20 people, to get all of that up and running and free labor, by the way, because we're all students. That initial prototype we budgeted at $50,000. That will also include room for touring to, for touring, because the idea is to take it down the road, since it's a small portable dome. Does not include labor. Yeah, our technology budgets more than 60% of that. Dan, thank you very much for sharing your story. Next up we have Allison Edwards of Collab Arts. Good morning, everyone. I'm Allison Edwards and I'm an undergraduate student in my junior year within Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts School of Dance. And within the School of Dance we have lovely resources such as the space to create and perform and choreograph all of the movement, venues to perform the movement, facilities with professors that have expertise outside of our discipline to support the creative process and of course peers who are willing to collaborate with us in our process. So as I'm in my junior year looking forward to the spring of 2014 when I graduate, I'm curious where I will find these resources outside of this institution. And I've been pondering that with a few of my friends and we've come up with Collab Arts. So Collab Arts' goal is to promote healthy and vibrant collaboration between arts disciplines. And with the other 881 students graduating from Herberger this semester, we hope to create an environment where we can pool resources and offer the arts community that is already outside of the institution a greater, vibrant place to collaborate. So to do so we were having a meeting at the end of the semester to begin creating a little bit of a following and some dialogue between artists that are in the institution as well as developing artists to begin the next stages of having an event. So next semester we're going to have an event in the fall to invite various art disciplines of visual artists and all the other disciplines that we can collaborate into one place to just show their art. To get the same place to network to bring their audiences that would be following them and maybe expand the audience's perspective to new art. And so offering the artists new exposure to different art forms and offering them a place to come that might not be as expensive as other venues, being a dancer. There are various opportunities outside of the institution to perform but it usually comes at a nice little fee. So we're hoping to do that at little financial strain on artists. And after that process, we're hoping to have four events in the next year and follow that model for the next three years. And our goal in five years is to have a collab art space. A home for the collaboration to take place to pool all of these artists within the greater Phoenix area to come into one place and create together and to make the venture more sustainable and to have a home for that. And so in that, I'm asking the PAVE incubator to support us financially with that, as well as all of you. I've heard wonderful pitches from people of various expertise that I think would be lovely to have contributed to this project. And so in the next few events that we're having we'll be leading on in-kind donations quite a bit and also the financial support. So thank you for listening and considering us for the PAVE incubator. Question is in feedback for Allison. What kind of student involvement do you have at this point? So right now I have a few fellow collab arts members in the center here. That's a little different here. Yeah. Collaborators, there are four of us in our 14 right now. And then we have some fans and we also have our second tier we've developed as those friends are dance majors. We have our second tier of people outside of the arts or the dance discipline. So various film and event planning and other people. So we have a little bit of a following so far. In the mixed community, outside of the student networks that you already have, what's your plan to reach that wider? We've begun the process of meeting one-on-one. That's also part of our model. We are, we know that the internet and cyberspace is a lovely place to meet people, but we really want to make like individual impacts on connections with people. So we've met with the commission in Arizona and various artists within faculty. We've asked for recommendations from faculty to go and talk to people and being that we are involved in the community outside of ASU. We have connections within dance and we're trying to develop the connections within other mediums. So, cool. Meeting with people. What do you envision each of the events looking like? So we want to curate an event. We are looking at performance spaces right now that are pretty typical. So just a space where we can kind of have the audience travel through. Evening instead of just on a stage so that it can be open to various art forms. So an evening of kind of a path through various arts disciplines that we are inviting to be there. Is this a membership organization? What are the costs or the fees involved with that? Right now our model is to keep those fees and memberships down to minimum. But we realize once we have a physical space that that would probably be an element to keeping that alive. But right now we are looking at just having a network of people that we can put on the events and not charge them membership to. Explain to me the aspiration of actually having a physical space. So I think it kind of leans on the model of the institution that we have a space where we can all go and collaborate together. And so it's nice when you have events in different places but having a physical space that is the hub of such collaboration and interdisciplinary work would just bring it to the next level that we could just be together and not necessarily be like, okay we have a rehearsal at this time, so be there, but just show up and have people around. And constant interaction with other artists ready to develop something. I'm gonna ask a question. I'm gonna just follow up on that one. If you're gonna go down that path, what is the business model? Because they think spaces are really very difficult to sustain the ones that we have, our craft team. So it's like, I love DeJune Garland, the big, really high-five on the phone show. But if a certain sense of reality of sustaining a space can kill people, can kill a spirit of an organization. Yes, I think that is why we've, or that is why we have decided to have the events for three to four years to develop a following and a network of people that are invested in this and know that it is going to have people come in and to have the constant foot in the door and out the door that we need to have funding. And developing the funding model throughout those events is key in our aspirations because we do not know what that might be. So giving you a budget right now would be silly because we don't know if that's reality or not. So developing a funding model is in our plan. Great, thank you very much, Alison. I'm using the white one. But I'm gonna hand Joel Walcott the red one. He's gonna tell us about Opera Revolution. Good morning, everyone. Please forgive the laptop my printer wasn't working today. So how did these stories sound? A love Lord Hunter makes a deal with the devil for seven magic bullets. The first six will hit any target the hunter chooses. The last one will hit only where the devil desires. The Greek gods get bored in Olympus and decide to go to a party in hell. A charlatan psychic torments families with lies said to be from their departed loved ones while resorting to alcoholism to cope with the actual spirits tormenting her life. These are just a few of the stories that go unheard, unsung. And these are the stories that Opera Revolution wants to bring to you. Opera Revolution is a group of performers coming together to create affordable, high quality art. Our organization will tap into the same pool of professionals as internationally recognized organizations like the Phoenix Corral or Arizona Opera. Our audience will be presented with professional quality but affordable live opera in their community, community theaters, churches, parks, light rail, even breweries. There is a new generation of opera lovers who just don't know they love opera yet. All it takes is one culturally resonant performance to create a lifelong opera enthusiast. Currently, opera performances in the valley are very few and far between. And those that are here are prohibitively expensive to those with that not in the highest income bracket. Opera Revolution brings opera to the people. To provide this musical outlet, we need support. Not only financial support, but allies within the artistic community. Collaborators with whom we can create multifaceted works. Opera is not its own medium. It is a collaboration between all of the art forms, theater, music, art, architecture, fashion design, technology, all incorporated into a single performance. And I would like to take this opportunity to plug our next two shows. We have an opera scene show called Prima More, next weekend, April 19th and 20th, at Basering Methodist Church. And then our culminating piece for our very first season is a classical double bill that is going to be performed at the Tempe Art Center on May 22nd and 23rd. Thank you. So I'd like to introduce my business partner, Sarah Smith, who's also joined us today. Questions for Joel and just a reminder, this Project Opera Revolution is the paid incubator project for this year. So you're able to launch these first couple of performances, this pilot season, essentially. Yes. The incubator. Questions for Joel? The question's here. Could you talk a little bit, because he's already asked for it. Absolutely. But we have a question here in the back. I've been stumbling my way through this, this season, it's been fun. I have two questions. The first is, you told us that you have a couple of performances. Do you have a website we can go to to pull that information? We do have a website. It's unfortunately just a domain name right now. We are, I don't know. There is a bit of information on there. We've, marketing has been one of our struggles this season. And we just had our marketing person resign. So we are looking. Okay. Delightful, Daniel. The other question really was, is the intention to tell the story of the community? So will the opera be written to tell a story of that community specifically? Yes, in fact, one of our many goals is to create, actually create opera. This hasn't been done in such a long time. New opera being created about current topical issues. I am in the process of commissioning an opera from a composer at ASU about a topical story. We are currently looking for a story ideas and a librettist. So if there's any writers in the room that is interested in a project like that, come find me later. So yes, that is one of the projects that we're doing next season. To envision the opera's themselves. So even these ones that are coming up, are we performing in a traditional way? Should I picture, you know, ornate costumes, ornate sets? How are these different, and how do they talk to this younger generation of opera lovers who don't know they're opera lovers? One of the biggest failings in opera companies right now, why opera companies are failing as rapidly as they are, is they try to put on these lavish productions and get only a few people to come. The whole concept of the financial part of our business model is low overhead, making all of our performances innovative, using our spaces, if we're doing it in a church, we're gonna use the church as a character itself. We're going to use cell phones, we're gonna use regular clothes so that people look at it and don't think, that's from a time that I could not ever relate to. They look at it and say, that is real, that's a real event that I could see take place in my own existence. Maybe, exactly, right? Definitely, that would be an incredible storyteller. Yes, you guys, we should talk later, right? Yes. So, kind of following up, I feel like we're doing a chain of questions. I'm curious as to how the spaces that you've dedicated to your performances inform how you choose the operas that you're going to do at this point in time and how that space informs the actual process. So far, this is obviously not my ideal world, what you just said would be my ideal world. So far, because we have to start small, otherwise, if we get too big for ourselves then we're trying to do something too large, we're not going to be able to continue. So far, we've had to choose operas that are relatively small to match our relatively small potential of venues and also just to match our funds that we have so we don't go over our budget just from one performance. One of the tenants, again, the financial things that we do is we will never do a show that we don't have the money to give up upfront because that way, we will never ever lose money. In our first performance, I know, right? But in our first performance, our very first performance, very little advertising, it was terrifying, let me tell you, but we made $1,000 a profit or, yeah, $1,000 a profit in just our very first performance. So it's a terrifying and exciting business model. Joel, I think this is exciting. And I wonder if how you've considered, I could imagine it somewhere there is a conference going on like this that has a discussion of audience revolution. How do you see yourself in connection with an audience that expects that they'll be permitted to do a lot more things? You even mentioned in a pub or something, can I sit with a pitcher of beer, kind of chatting with my friends, can I be as rude as they were 300 years ago in opera? Yes, yes, that is the atmosphere that we're going for because that's how our society today lives. We don't sit in theaters very often and listen to long extravagant opera just for the sake of beautiful music. We want to experience something and have an event. One of my, one of my dream shows is to do La Voème, a story about five roommates and their lives in Paris in 18th century Paris in France. What I'd love to do is that in a bar and actually have the performers working in the bar, giving people drinks, just singing directly to them all around, using the entire space, again, using the venue itself as a character. I think this is pretty interesting to me. Thank you. And everything, all of them collectively, bring up the story, bring up of my mind the question of content and the question of story and how important it is. If you have a great story, it'll fly anywhere. And so the question becomes for me in particular, how do you, tell me about your process in determining the content of what you want to do. Well, with opera, it's, there are, there's 400 years of stories and the genre in general only performs about 50 to 100 of those operas every year. There are hundreds of small chamber operas, small things that never get the performance time because they're just not well known, but are incredibly powerful and beautiful and poignant works even for us today. So our search for repertoire is very, it's a mixture of get people there, give people something that they will know but also put it in a way or also kind of sneak in something that they don't recognize at the same time. I just, this is maybe more a bit of feedback because your passion is clear and as you're talking more, I'm getting a sense of the organization. The story you just told about La Boheme and the bar, I would suggest that when you're talking to people about this, that's your lead. It took most of this time together for you to get to that and that's the clearest sense that I've gotten of your aesthetic and your interest. And when you told that story, that was something I could see and went okay, opera, revolution, site-based, an element of environmental immersion. That really helps me put together your goals with this idea. So I just wanna support you finding the lead at the beginning of your time with people you're talking to. Thank you. Thank you, Michael, because that was gonna be my feedback too. So when you start, when you're telling a story in terms of your delivery and you're passionate about it, way better than reading. Yeah. That's the laptop. One last question for Joel, if we have one last question. So tell us the dates of your next performance and the location, just the next one. The next one is April 19th and 20th, so it's next, yeah, it's next Friday and Saturday at Day Spring Methodist Church, which is Elliott and McClintock for the Cross Streets there. Terrific. Thank you very much. Thank you. Seven o'clock, next Friday and Saturday. That's right, that's right, that's right, hold on. We're trying really hard to get there. Is our legal license a little bit more expensive than it was five months ago? Yeah. So this is also an opportunity for me to pitch the Pave program a little bit, which I actually wasn't prepared to do, so I am gonna totally ad-lib. But I did tell you a little bit yesterday about Pave and I'm gonna do that again because even though I talk about Pave a lot and been talking about it pretty frequently over the last six or seven years, rehearsing one story is not something you can ever do enough of, I think, so that you can just get up in front of a group of people and pitch your idea. So my idea and what I'm personally passionate about is empowering young audience, young artists, young artists, that young audience is for that matter, but empowering young artists to do their best work. And what Pave really strives to do is give them some support and some structures and some education to help them to do that. We do that through curriculum. Talked about this a little bit yesterday. A lot of my students are here. If you're in my class, raise your hand so I can see how many people are here who are students in arts entrepreneurship, THP 352, if you're not in it now, you can be there next fall. That's one course. Matt Lerman teaches a seminar course that follows up on that and we're gonna start offering graduate coursework next year in an MFA concentration in arts management and entrepreneurship. So curriculum. Research. This is a pretty new field, arts entrepreneurship, as a field of scholarship within a university. There are maybe a dozen programs that say we're an arts entrepreneurship program, but there are starting to be scholars, professors, graduate students. If you're a PhD student coming from another university or you're a graduate work, raise your hand. I know there's three of you who registered, okay? Two or three of you are here, which is awesome. So what kind of research are you gonna do and where are you gonna publish it? Well, you might wanna publish it in the journal that we created here at PAVE, Art of Eight, an open access online journal. Elsevier charges $2,900 a year to subscribe to one of their journals. We charge zero. What's the business model? We have support from the university. It's part of my job to publish this journal. So if you wanna talk about low overhead, where's Joel? That's low overhead. Yeah. Curriculum, research. Public programming, which you are all a part of this weekend, and then our incubator. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about our incubator. And I'll start with the very first year. I'm gonna embarrass somebody in the audience. The very first year we launched PAVE. We had a couple of students come to us. We said we wanna do this collaborative project between media and dance, and we wanna build this software product for an Android. And we said, that sounds really cool. And that's how Urban Stew was born, in part, how Urban Stew was born. And Jessica, can you raise your hand? So Jessica Rashko was working with the person who's now her husband on this software application, she's a choreographer and dancer, and he's a computer scientist, and they got together, and they got a little seed money from PAVE, and some support from their home units, and they created a software application, but more importantly, they created this artist collective around it called Urban Stew. And Urban Stew is still in existence, right? So that's five, six years going on. One of PAVE's two success stories. That first year also saw the birth of Progressive Theater Workshop. It saw the birth of the Phoenix Finge Festival, and it helped launch the career of a very interesting artist named Maria McCales, who's now in New York, still making interactive installation art pieces about environmental issues. And from there, there have been many others, and for some reason, I'm blanking on them, which is where the notes would be helpful, exactly. So those are the four areas of activity that PAVE does. Research, curriculum, public programming, and incubation. And we were very fortunate. We started with a large grant from the Kauffman Foundation, but now we're reliant on private support. So I know this is a primarily student audience, but I wanna say this, that just your being here is support for the PAVE program. It shows that PAVE is an important part of your education. It shows that PAVE is an important part of the arts community in Phoenix, and I hope you'll help spread the word. So thank you very much. We're gonna take a short break and come back at 10 o'clock with Michael Rowe, Heather's still coffee and Danish and fruit and whatnot in the lobby.